lol so I ended up getting a shirt anyway, will post when it arrives =)
ive paid attention to a lot of merch drops in the past year and it seems every musician does it the same way. Fairly certain most of them are using asian manufacturers (usually direct to garment printing on the same kind of shirts u find on red bubble etc), they sell preorders with a cut-off date then make the bulk order based on those numbers. I don’t have a problem with this or anything, it makes sense for smaller musicians to do it this way since they get more profit while reducing their up front costs. Just means u usually deal with slow postage times, high postage costs and (usually) no returns policy if there’s a print error. If ur buying a merch drop from a small artist, ur probably doing it to support them (hardly anyone in this scene is making a living off gigs + Spotify rn), i just wanna be transparent about what u can expect from most of the merch drops in this space.
I also got one of the nightmarehouse shirts last year but totally missed all the other drops from other artists lol