AEW London 2023

[SuperBacon]

37 minutes ago, Infinity Land said:

Nothing for the rest of the world known so far but probably expecting the typical ways to watch AEW PPVs. 

On WatchWrestling.in? Sweet.

[Tim Healys Chutney Spoon]

11 hours ago, westlondonmist said:

ITV4 Title has a ring to it

Watch on catch up and call it, I dunno, ITVX Division title?

[69MeDon]

Decided to get new tickets in section 117, Row 9. How do I sell back my original, less good tickets? I can't seem to find an option on Ticketmaster.

Edit: sorry, don't worry, found it! If anyone on here wants a couple of tickets on the cheap, let me know. Section 510, Row 8, Seats 304 and 305. £15 each.

Edited July 26, 2023 by 69MeDon

[Supremo]

Meltzer reckons the biggest story coming out of this show will be how badly they drop the bag with merchandise. He reckons they'll struggle to meet demand and leave a lot of money on the table.

Blows my mind if this ends up being the case. This show hasn't been sprung on them. The moment they announced the date they should have put an order in for at least 60,000 Orange Cassidy T-shirts.

[Accident Prone]

1 hour ago, Supremo said:

Meltzer reckons the biggest story coming out of this show will be how badly they drop the bag with merchandise. He reckons they'll struggle to meet demand and leave a lot of money on the table.

Blows my mind if this ends up being the case. This show hasn't been sprung on them. The moment they announced the date they should have put an order in for at least 60,000 Orange Cassidy T-shirts.

It's not that they'll struggle to meet demand, it's that they don't care to meet the demand. They'd rather everyone just go online and order their shirts, but even then they don't really care if you do or don't.

It's not just leaving money on the table either, it's also disappointing the live fanbase, and probably most importantly, not representing yourself properly. Perception is 9/10ths of the law; if you act and look like the biggest deal in town, then people will recognise you as the biggest deal in town.

When WCW were trouncing WWF pre-1998, you wouldn't know it in the UK as shop shelves were filled to the brim with WWF merch, whereas WCW merch was squeezed in at the end. It's totally anecdotal of course, but I had more WWF merch than WCW merch as a kid growing up in the 90's (be it magazines, shirts, or toys), and when I started bagging pocket money I bought more WWF merch than WCW merch because it was more widely available in shops, and when it came to circling the Argos and Index catalogues for Christmas I would mainly slap that pen around the WWF lines because they were presented better than WCW. WWF effectively cornered the market here and presented themselves as the number fucking one, and you believed it. Look at them now, the bastards.

This is AEW's chance to make the letters "AEW" spring to mind with "WWF" whenever wrestling is brought up at the pub, to become really ingrained in the history and culture here, but to AEW it's just another show in another town (albeit a really, really big show that will shatter most WWF/WWE attendance records...). It's frustrating; they're ticking most of the boxes for this landmark event, but what's the point in running Wembley stadium if the entire country still doesn't know who you are when you fly back home?

Edited July 26, 2023 by Accident Prone

[SuperBacon]

8 minutes ago, Accident Prone said:

This is AEW's chance to make the letters "AEW" spring to mind with "WWF" whenever wrestling is brought up at the pub, to become really ingrained in the history and culture here,

Sorry, but this is unachievable based off one event. You could have Orange Cassidy present The One Show for a month, and WWE would STILL be the number one brand whenever wrestling is 'brought up at the pub' as it has over 30 odd years of exposure over here, and is the biggest brand in the world. 

I know lots of people that know I like wrestling and they often ask me about it, and they still always just bring up WWE and not AEW. It's just not there yet.

It just cannot compete on that level. I'm not saying it couldn't after it's own level of longevity and exposure, but that's just mad talk mate.

[Merzbow]

It's not like Pro Wrestling Tees doesn't do big bulk orders either, I've heard that's supposedly the problem with them being "print on demand" but they do fine stocking Hot Topic with masses of shirts in one go.

Edited July 26, 2023 by Merzbow

[BomberPat]

18 minutes ago, Accident Prone said:

When WCW were trouncing WWF pre-1998, you wouldn't know it in the UK as shop shelves were filled to the brim with WWF merch, whereas WCW merch was squeezed in at the end. It's totally anecdotal of course, but I had more WWF merch than WCW merch as a kid growing up in the 90's (be it magazines, shirts, or toys), and when I started bagging pocket money I bought more WWF merch than WCW merch because it was more widely available in shops, and when it came to circling the Argos and Index catalogues for Christmas I would mainly slap that pen around the WWF lines because they were presented better than WCW. WWF effectively cornered the market here and presented themselves as the number fucking one, and you believed it. Look at them now, the bastards.

It's worth mentioning that WCW was effectively never "trouncing" the WWF in the UK, so it's not surprising that they never had that level of merch visibility and so on - though there could well be questions of there being a chicken and egg situation, in terms of how visible the brand was and how relatively little it impacted the mainstream.

Eric Bischoff has talked before about how his biggest struggle when WCW were beating the WWF was in trying to get the kind of brand penetration that the WWF had; that even sports broadcasters on other Turner-owned networks would refer to a fight or something outlandish as "like something out of the WWF". Sting was getting sent to do media appearances, and finding when he got there that he was billed as a "WWF wrestler". Within their own media conglomerate, I think AEW at least have a little more brand synergy than that. 

Any company will always have to struggle against the brand dominance of the WWE, and AEW are never going to get to that point (I doubt anyone ever will). But they can be the Subway to their McDonalds - Tony Khan talks about being a "challenger brand" all the time - and that requires much better merchandising than they have, and it all comes down to the Elite jobs for the boys mentality. As far as I know, their T-shirt fulfilment all comes through ProWrestlingTees, who just aren't equipped to deal with a major touring operation - they're print-on-demand, which is great if you're an indie wrestler who doesn't want to fork out to get a thousand T-shirts printed and risk only selling four, or if AEW want to sell a shirt based on one match or a catchphrase that becomes a meme for a week, because it means not having a warehouse full of old stock. But everything I hear about their merch at live shows is that it's woefully inadequate. They can't rock up to a show the size of Wembley with a couple of boxes of generic Ts. 

 

EDIT: Merzbow posted while I was writing this, and it's a good point. I don't know what their deal with Hot Topic is (I know HT used to sell Bullet Club shirts, and now has a select few AEW bits), but if they're confident they can get a decent amount sold in their stores, then they should have the confidence and the infrastructure to supply in bulk for an actual AEW event. 

Edited July 26, 2023 by BomberPat

[Chunk]

17 minutes ago, Accident Prone said:

When WCW were trouncing WWF pre-1998, you wouldn't know it in the UK as shop shelves were filled to the brim with WWF merch, whereas WCW merch was squeezed in at the end. It's totally anecdotal of course, but I had more WWF merch than WCW merch as a kid growing up in the 90's (be it magazines, shirts, or toys), and when I started bagging pocket money I bought more WWF merch than WCW merch because it was more widely available in shops, and when it came to circling the Argos and Index catalogues for Christmas I would mainly slap that pen around the WWF lines because they were presented better than WCW. WWF effectively cornered the market here and presented themselves as the number fucking one, and you believed it. Look at them now, the bastards.

I'm not disagreeing with you and I know exactly what you mean. The remarkable thing is that 90% of WWE merch (t-shirt wise) was utter shit. Even as a young teen in an environment where WWF had some coolness about it, I wouldn't have been caught dead in practically any of the shirts they put out. AEW to their credit do actually have some stuff that I would wear.

[gmoney]

As an idea of how hard it is to change perception, I saw an ep of Pointless in about 2014 with a picture round on wrestlers. By far the highest scoring picture was of Big Daddy, followed by Hulk Hogan, then Andre the Giant. 

You can still get a laugh by dropping a Big Daddy or Giant Haystacks refernce in this country, even from people who would never expect to know who they are. They just do. It's in the British DNA. 

[Accident Prone]

22 minutes ago, SuperBacon said:

Sorry, but this is unachievable based off one event. You could have Orange Cassidy present The One Show for a month, and WWE would STILL be the number one brand whenever wrestling is 'brought up at the pub' as it has over 30 odd years of exposure over here, and is the biggest brand in the world. 

I know lots of people that know I like wrestling and they often ask me about it, and they still always just bring up WWE and not AEW. It's just not there yet.

It just cannot compete on that level. I'm not saying it couldn't after it's own level of longevity and exposure, but that's just mad talk mate.

I'm not saying they could replace WWF/WWE (nowhere in my post did I suggest that), but they could become a name that's brought up alongside them.

And even if there is no chance of that happening, you still miss every shot you don't take. AEW should be leaving the UK with every non-wrestling fan in the country thinking, "So wait...that wasn't WWF then? And they filled Wembley Stadium with 70 thousand people??"

17 minutes ago, BomberPat said:

Any company will always have to struggle against the brand dominance of the WWE, and AEW are never going to get to that point (I doubt anyone ever will). But they can be the Subway to their McDonalds - Tony Khan talks about being a "challenger brand" all the time - and that requires much better merchandising than they have, and it all comes down to the Elite jobs for the boys mentality. As far as I know, their T-shirt fulfilment all comes through ProWrestlingTees, who just aren't equipped to deal with a major touring operation - they're print-on-demand, which is great if you're an indie wrestler who doesn't want to fork out to get a thousand T-shirts printed and risk only selling four, or if AEW want to sell a shirt based on one match or a catchphrase that becomes a meme for a week, because it means not having a warehouse full of old stock. But everything I hear about their merch at live shows is that it's woefully inadequate. They can't rock up to a show the size of Wembley with a couple of boxes of generic Ts. 

And this is it, really. But they're not going to sack off the all the Jackson family members and mates because that'll really set them off, and sneaky whingy one-liners in BTE videos won't be the end of it this time.

Edited July 26, 2023 by Accident Prone

[Guest]

May as well gripe about this now, but AEW is such a rubbish name, both in full and abbreviated. The transition from the first to second word or initial is just verbally awkward, and a good enough reason to deter some from namechecking it when they could just say WWE/WWF instead. But hey, the Elite lads got to name the brand after themselves, and that's all that matters.

[BomberPat]

1 minute ago, Accident Prone said:

I'm not saying they could replace WWF/WWE (nowhere in my post did I suggest that), but they could become a name that's brought up alongside them.

And even if there is no chance of that happening, you still miss every shot you don't take. AEW should be leaving the UK with every non-wrestling fan in the country thinking, "So wait...that wasn't WWF then? And they filled Wembley Stadium with 70 thousand people??"

No argument there at all. Fighting against market domination is always going to be difficult, and I was only chatting to a wrestler the other week about the damage that one brand can do to another if all the audience knows is that it's "The Wrestling" and doesn't distinguish between the two. It's like your Gran calling every computer game a Nintendo, or having to explain what the difference is between Marvel and DC. 

They already seem to have a better live events marketing set-up than WCW ever did, between relationships with media partners, and stuff like getting the event plastered on buses. I'm assuming we get wrestlers doing the media rounds more and more in the next month (I know Paul Wight has been doing press today), and the push should be on the fact that they've managed to do all of this despite not having the brand recognition of WWE.

Early on, a lot of the buzz around AEW was that they were an exciting new brand that lots of people wanted to be part of - the bloom's off that rose, between time elapsed, a few wrestlers having notable public spats with them, and WWE for a time having started to look like the grass was greener on the other side, to the point that AEW's product went from the kind of place where wrestlers would be talking up the promotion and how much they wanted to be there to sub-WWE moaning about their booking and their contract. A huge event like this should be a time for the company to recapture that sense of an exciting brand on the rise. Merchandise is a small part of that, but an important one - they don't want part of the fan experience to be that they wanted to buy a shirt but couldn't, or were stuck in a queue forever and didn't get what they want. And surely what the company should want is 80,000+ people all leaving the venue with the company logo plastered all over them.

 

[air_raid]

45 minutes ago, BomberPat said:

Eric Bischoff has talked before about how his biggest struggle when WCW were beating the WWF

....

But they can be the Subway to their McDonalds

There's an excellent comparison here to when Bischoff set out to create Nitro and get their foothold, he deliberately sat down and decided that he couldn't be "better" at what the WWF did, so he just concentrated on how to be different. That's where AEW at their best feel like they've sat for me. And their worst has been when they've come across as Diet WWE. Like TNA before them, it's your differences that make you special, that catch fans who've already said "no" to WWE.

[Infinity Land]

The reputation they have in the US I think is kind of understandable. You can probably reel off a list of 30+ wrestlers/teams that deserve a presence at the merch table without getting into deep cut favourites. I'm not sure how you're meant to adequately stock that without going to an excess. There's a churn of t-shirt designs on an almost weekly basis they'd be left with a significant surplus. There's no Don West brown bag specials on a house show circuit to try and clear that.   

No excuses for Wembley. Not only for stocking up at the event, but I think there's been talk of some sort of fanfest.