Gatewear
San Francisco + Black Rock City, Nevada
I run the merchandise program for Gate, Perimeter & Exodus (GP&E), the volunteer department that manages ingress and vehicle access, perimeter security, and exodus at Burning Man. I have been running this continuously since 2015.
This is a mostly-volunteer role. But the operational complexity? Not volunteer-level.
Gatewear is a full ecommerce operation: a Shopify storefront, 6+ vendors, 18+ products a year, pre-event and post-event sales cycles, three weeks of on-playa distribution, worldwide shipping, and year-round fulfillment. I built the whole thing and I've been running it for a decade.
How it works
The store: I built and maintain gpegatewear.com on Shopify, managing product pages, collections spanning 15 years of annual logo designs, inventory, pricing, shipping zones, and order processing.
Vendors: I source and manage relationships with 6+ vendors across screen printing, embroidery, patches, stickers, and specialty items. I chose them for quality, price breaks at our volume, and the fact that, when possible, they're local small businesses here in the Bay Area. I've spent years building these relationships and I'm protective of them.
Pricing: Every item is priced as close to cost as possible. I do a full cost analysis each year factoring in taxes, setup fees (which vary by item and order), shipping, and Shopify's transaction fees. Nobody's making money here. The goal is to get cool stuff into volunteers' hands without anyone going broke.
Pre-event (February through August): I run a 6+ week pre-order sale, review every single order (checking shift requirements, playa names, order limits), tally everything up, build in buffer inventory, place orders with vendors, approve mockups, and coordinate pickup of 15 to 20 boxes of finished goods.
On playa (August through September): I transport everything from San Francisco to Black Rock City. Then I open and run the Gatewear office for two weeks, typically 9am to 5pm Monday through Saturday. I verify every volunteer's eligibility before handing anything over and track every pickup in real-time. In 2018, that was 138 hours and 2,540 individual items, working out to about one item every 4.25 minutes.
Post-event and year-round: I run a post-event sale, ship earned swag to volunteers who missed on-playa pickup, and handle worldwide fulfillment from my home. I store all inventory and shipping supplies here. I count everything at least once a year.
I also advise other Burning Man departments who want to start their own merchandise programs.
The numbers
- 2,200+ orders across 2019-2022, averaging 3.2 items per order
- 2,540 individual items distributed on playa in 2018
- 18+ products per year across 6+ vendors
- 15 years of annual logo designs (2010 through 2025)
- 138 hours of on-playa distribution (2018)
- Worldwide shipping
Why this one matters to me
I built this from nothing. There was no program, no infrastructure, no storefront, no vendor relationships. Now it's a decade-old operation that serves hundreds of volunteers every year, and it runs on exactly two people and a garage full of boxes. Every piece of the pipeline, from Shopify configuration to vendor negotiation to cost modeling to packing poly mailers at the kitchen table, is something I designed and still do. It's the project that best shows how I think about operations: build it right, keep it lean, and take care of the people it serves.