Our Story

Way back in the early 2000s, MyMerchStore founder Allie was a member of a number of car clubs, and the members wanted matching jumpers with the club logo on them. So Allie did the thing — emailed and called suppliers and decorators until she found someone willing to embroider a logo onto each one.

She took expressions of interest, got the minimum 20 orders required by the supplier, worked out prices, setup charges and shipping, and split the total 20 ways. Then came the orders — email, PM, a spreadsheet, cash and bank deposits, phone calls, the lot.

"The deadline for the group buy closed and a few people still hadn't paid," Allie says. "I rang around and got a lot of 'can you cover me till next pay, I'll get it to you next week.' I was young and trusting, so I let their orders stand. I held off placing the order as long as I could, but some people had paid weeks earlier and were waiting, so eventually I just had to place it."

Four to six weeks later — over three months for the people who'd paid early — a box of jumpers arrived. Then came the job of working out who'd paid, who hadn't, and tracking each person down to hand over their jumper and collect whatever cash was still owed.

"Of course you get to the very last few and they say it again — 'oh, can I pay you next pay.' No pay, no jumper," Allie laughs. "I still have that jumper, more than 20 years later. It's a house jumper now, worn thin — but it keeps me warm, and it still makes me smile every time I put it on."

That whole process was frustrating enough that Allie decided there had to be a better way. With some help from the "Bank of Mum & Dad", she bought her first embroidery machine and found a supplier willing to sell at a genuinely low minimum order — one MyMerchStore still orders from, to this day. She kept selling to her car clubs for years after that, on the forums, under the name BigL Designs. Eventually she put her web design background to use, and MyMerchStore was properly born in 2009 — specialising in Minimum Order Quantity 1 unit (MOQ1), order one if that's all you need, no more group buys, no more chasing anyone for money.

Life had other plans

For years before her diagnosis, Allie was going to the doctor with odd symptoms and being told it was all in her head. "Turns out it actually was — if only they'd looked," she says. In 2013 she was finally diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis, and needed to move away from full-time corporate work into something she could do from home. MyMerchStore, until then a side hustle, became the main game.

These days she helps run the Galston500, which is an annual fundraiser for MS research at The Westmead Institute for Medical Research. Alongside a whole crew of volunteers, she's helped raise over $88,230 since the event began in 2018.

"The Galston500 was never about my MS," Allie says. "It was about helping future generations avoid the long, confusing road I went through to get diagnosed."

Still growing

MyMerchStore has come a long way past embroidery. These days it covers heat transfer vinyl, direct to film, sublimation, laser engraving, die cut stickers and more — if you're picturing something not on that list, chances are it's still on the table.

The thing that hasn't changed, though, is what still gets Allie the biggest kick out of the job.

"It's spotting something I made out in the wild," she says. "A sticker on someone's car. A shirt on the news. A stranger walking past me wearing something I know came off my production line. Nobody tells you it's happening — you just see it, and think: I did that."

That's still why she does this.