How Team Terrible Built a Merch Store Centered Around Their Hit Game

Most indie game developers only get one shot at a breakout hit.

When they do, the same cycle usually happens: the game blows up, downloads spike, and a wave of new fans shows up at once, generating a massive buzz for months on end.

However, for many of them, the moment passes with little to show for it beyond the number of downloads they achieve. 

Merch, if it happens at all, tends to arrive late and look like an afterthought, with a basic logo slapped on a shirt, or one or two stickers sold for a few weeks and then forgotten. 

The momentum that created the fanbase never translates into anything those fans can actually buy into.

Team Terrible did the opposite. 

The Scotland-based gaming developers took the success of their hit single-player horror game, The Baby in Yellow, and built a whole merch store around it, stocked with shirts, hats, stickers, and a flagship plush doll that's become a bestseller. 

Rather than treating the game's success as a moment to cash in on 1-2 generic items, the studio went all in around the game itself, keeping most of its merch catalog consistently branded with The Baby in Yellow's own world-i.e., its color palette, dark-comedy tone, and even its copywriting voice.

In this case study, we'll explore how Team Terrible used Fourthwall to leverage The Baby in Yellow's success into a merch store that extends far beyond the game itself.

Finding Success Out Of the Blue: Team Terrible's Origins

Long before The Baby in Yellow existed, Team Terrible co-founders Aaron Baumbach and Greg Lee had already spent more than a decade grinding out game jams together, with about 40 already under their belt. 

The ex-AAA developers known for working on major titles like Crackdown, Halo, Grand Theft Auto 5, and GTA 6 went into 2020's GMTK Game Jam with an out-of-control theme for their latest entry. 

"One of our friends had recently had a kid, and we thought it would be funny to do a game about a baby that was out-of-control since his life was also ruined," Baumbach said jokingly. 

Merging that idea with a book that one of their friends was currently reading, Robert W. Chambers' The King in Yellow, Baumbach and Lee created their Lovecraftian horror in just 48 hours.

However, there was just one issue.

"We actually failed to submit it on time," Baumbach said. 

Knowing they had something weird and original, Baumbach and Lee decided to pop it on Itch.io anyway, and within a week it was getting tens of thousands of downloads. 

Not only that, but they saw that a couple of prominent YouTubers had also downloaded their game and started streaming it on their channels, leading to a surge in new downloads that eventually prompted them to clone The Baby in Yellow for mobile.

With the project's rapid success and millions of downloads, Baumbach and Lee left their roles at Rockstar in 2021 to pursue running their own development company full-time.

Today, Team Terrible has grown into a 10-person team located in Dundee, Scotland, with The Baby in Yellow now reaching 400 million downloads across Android, iOS, and Steam.

Choosing a Platform That Fits Their Brand's Needs  

When it comes to branching off into merch, most brands go straight for basic, easy-to-make items like t-shirts, hats, and stickers. 

Team Terrible went into their merch journey with a specific product already in mind-a plush doll based on their titular character.

At the start, the company went with Makeship to create their plush toy, and for a moment everything seemed to be going great. 

"We actually initially did a Makeship run with a plushy, and that was very successful," said Baumbach. "We even sent it out to YouTubers, and they featured it in their videos."

However, the team quickly discovered that the platform required more work than they had hoped for.

"The problem with Makeship was that it wasn't evergreen, and you'd always have to run these campaigns," Baumbach stated. "We wanted something that, you know, we could put in the game, and it would always be available for people to buy."

Now on the hunt for a new platform to build their merch shop on, Baumbach and the team needed something that wasn't only easy to set up but provided them with enough stylistic control to make it look like their own. 

They eventually landed on Fourthwall. 

Sold on the platform's ease of use and its extended network of social integrations, which allow them to connect to their YouTube, TikTok, Discord, and X channels, the company could now promote their products easily within their content, with each post generating hundreds of thousands of views.

With their new store, Team Terrible was able to do more than just restock their signature item. Thanks to Fourthwall's extensive catalog, the company was able to expand its merch line.  

But in doing so, they wanted to avoid reducing The Baby in Yellow to just a generic logo T-shirt and instead showcase what makes the game memorable.

"We have like black, yellow, and the baby," Baumbach explained. "We have a sort of edginess, darkness to it because ultimately we're a horror, but we're like a comedy horror game." 

Losing that tone in the merch would have meant losing the exact thing that makes fans want to buy it. That's why every item in the collection reinforces the game's identity, from its artwork and colors to the playful, creepy tone fans already know and love.

To prevent that, Team Terrible enlisted the help of Agency of None, a graphic design studio in Dundee, to rework the raw product assets Fourthwall generated. 

"As great as they [product assets] are, they needed to have something special," Baumbach said of the base imagery. 

He described how the designer added a warm glow around the characters, bumped up contrast, and dropped everything onto black backgrounds to make the products pop against the game's signature dark aesthetic.

It's a treatment, Baumbach says, that has "really helped sell the brand."

In addition to their brand image, there was also an audience problem to solve. 

According to Baumbach, a good portion of The Baby in Yellow's players are preteens to young adults, with a large share of actual purchases coming from adults buying gifts-especially around the holidays. 

"It would be a poor move for us to offer adult sizes only for what is ostensibly a brand that is engaged with by 13- to 18-year-olds," Baumbach said.

Having a print-on-demand provider like Fourthwall that offers both youth and adult sizes allows Team Terrible to cater not only to their core demographic but also to the parents who might want to shop for the same designs their kids are asking for.

That kind of built-in flexibility is exactly why Fourthwall made sense for a studio their size.

You see, rather than sourcing from separate manufacturers, managing duplicate SKUs, or negotiating minimum order quantities across two different size ranges, Team Terrible can offer the same design in both youth and adult fits without adding a shred of extra overhead to their catalog. 

It's a small feature on paper, but for a 10-person studio whose focus is game development first and merch second, it's the difference between a store that actually reaches its full audience and one that quietly leaves half its potential customers (the gift-buying parents) with nothing to buy.

Creating a Collection Around Signature Characters

At the center of Team Terrible's merch is their “Baby in Yellow” plushie. However, it isn't just the store's top seller; it's the reason most other sales happen at all. 

"We find that the plushy often acts as the catalyst for purchase," Baumbach states, noting that when they see someone purchasing a plushy, more often than not, they're inclined to buy other items as well.

Around that flagship product sits a broader lineup of tees, hats, and accessories, all kept visually and tonally consistent with the plush so the collection feels like one brand rather than a grab bag of items stamped with the same logo.

Notably, Team Terrible has mostly stayed away from selling Team Terrible-branded merchandise at all. "When people are looking for merch, they're typically looking for merch related to the game," Baumbach said. "We have seen very little traction in people buying company-branded merch." 

Though the store does offer a Team Terrible t-shirt with the brand's logo on the front and back, it acts more as a staple item to promote the company than as a genuine driver of sales, since the store's real pull continues to come from The Baby in Yellow itself.

Lower-cost items like stickers and badges round out the catalog, giving fans a way to engage with the brand without buying apparel, and Baumbach sees more room to grow there-particularly with smaller collectibles. 

"It'd be fun to do a run of all the characters, just like a little set," he said, floating the idea of mini plush keychains as a more affordable entry point than the full-size doll.

How Fourthwall Made It Manageable for a 10-Person Team

None of this would have been sustainable without a platform that didn't demand a dedicated commerce hire. 

Team Terrible is, first and foremost, a game studio, and as Baumbach has stated, merch has never been a serious priority for the company.

"It's not a major revenue stream for us," Baumbach said. "The game is our major revenue stream...even sacrificing half a day a week is hugely costly." 

What sold them on Fourthwall wasn't just the storefront itself, but how little upkeep it required once it was set up.

Rich product description fields let the team carry the game's voice directly into the copy, not just the visuals. The collections tool let them split every design into youth and adult sizing without duplicating their catalog or managing two separate product lines. 

And the base marketing imagery Fourthwall generates gives their designer a starting point instead of a blank page.

"We run it through your tooling, and we get the output of the images... and then we pass that on to our graphics designer, who then smartens it up and styles it for our brand and pops it back," Baumbach said. 

The result, in his words: "We can look away and look back, and it's made money, and nothing's gone wrong."

The store also lives right next to the game rather than as a separate destination fans have to go hunting for. 

Team Terrible links directly from The Baby in Yellow into their Fourthwall shop, including a 3D in-game model of the plush that prompts players to buy the real thing the first time they pick it up, keeping the path from "play it" to "buy it" as short as possible.

Measuring Fourthwall's Impact

Team Terrible doesn't run its merch store like a data-driven business, and Baumbach is upfront about that. 

"It's not something we try and minmax," he said. "I don't have to minmax the analytics, and I know it's there." 

Even so, one pattern is impossible to miss: sales spike hardest not when the plush is advertised in-game, but when it shows up organically on social media. 

"We actually see [more traction] when our social media manager gets her plushy and films her playing with it-positioning it on a chair, putting it outside, putting it in the fridge," Baumbach said.

"We see pretty big spikes for the next couple of days after we push out those social posts."

He also pointed to search visibility as a quiet but critical factor in sales, particularly given how often knockoff listings try to ride the game's popularity. 

"If somebody sees or hears about your plushy, can they just type into Google your product name followed by the word 'plush' and there's your website?" he said. 

"There's statistics that people only ever engage with the top three Google search results. If you're below the top three, you may as well not even be there."

Why Their Model Is Replicable for Other Creator Stores

Nothing about Team Terrible's approach depends on The Baby in Yellow being a horror game specifically. 

The core idea of carrying a game's tone and visual identity through every product, instead of defaulting to generic branded goods, works for any title with a strong enough personality to build around.

What made it achievable for a 10-person studio wasn't a large budget or an in-house ecommerce team. It was a consistent voice across the collection, copy, and imagery that stayed inside the game's world, and a platform flexible enough to carry that identity to the storefront without constant maintenance. 

Baumbach's advice to other developers considering the same move comes down to respecting what makes their game distinct in the first place: 

"If you're interested in having a strong brand, I would say find somebody who does that... you just have to be aware of the tone, aware of the audience." 

For Team Terrible, that awareness (paired with a store built to hold onto it) turned a 48-hour game jam project into a merch line that feels less like a side business and more like a natural extension of the game itself.