It is a good idea to make cool merch and we will never have enough designs and products. All the processes look reasonable to me but one issue is, is it going to be a continuous project or a one-time thing? If doing this periodically, a project manager would be needed for monitoring the whole process.
As you mentioned, there are actually many designs and merch made by the community, and even by Yuga before. I think a major problem is, there’s no place to check past works because some may be “too decentralized” and not noticed by the larger community.
Here I need to mention my recent proposal: AIP-123: Apeverse - A Multi-language Web Hub for Ape Ecosystem and $APE Holders. There’s a merch part on the website and I plan to make the merch design a continuous thing while listing Ape-related derivative products from the community. I have resources of e-commerce and manufacturing in China and I think this could solve the logistics problem.
Back to your thread, I think it’s generally great and should be encouraged. I’m happy to see more brainstorming about the idea.