In this interview, SwagUp CMO Helen Rankin recounts how the company grew from a garage‑based, self‑funded startup in 2017 to a platform serving over 2,000 high‑growth clients such as Amazon, Hinge, Gemini and Home Depot. She explains the bootstrap marketing philosophy that began with a $217 paid‑search (SEM) test built on Wix and Typeform, emphasizing the importance of concentrating on a single data‑rich channel to discover brand voice and target customers. Through iterative landing‑page experiments she identified that customers valued curated, assembled swag boxes (SwagPacks) and that the market was broader than early‑stage startups. The insights drove a customer‑led product and design strategy, a strong brand stance of “making swag simple,” and informed granular keyword targeting down to zip‑code level. Recognizing the need for a solid technical foundation, SwagUp hired a CTO early, investing in tech before scaling sales. During the COVID‑19 shift to remote work, the company pivoted to support virtual events and remote‑team culture with curated swag, while also launching environmentally friendly offerings—recycled materials, carbon offsetting, and tree‑planting per order. Helen advises against spreading resources across many marketing tactics (e.g., early social‑media influencer pushes) and stresses continuous testing as a habit. Contact information and social links are provided at the end.
Chapters
So my name is Helen Rankin. I am the CMO at SwagUp. So you're probably wondering, well, what is SwagUp? SwagUp is a platform that allows high-growth companies to create, automate, and distribute swag globally in one integrated platform. So some clients would probably actually call us their chief swag officer, because we do a lot when it comes to offering their swag and their services. To date, we have a little over 2,000 clients, all ranging from Amazon, Hinge, and Gemini, and Home Depot. But it didn't always start off this glamorous. And this isn't exactly where we started. We started here in Aberdeen, New Jersey in 2017. We're working out of Michael Martocci, our founder's mother's home, and that was her converted garage. And we were self-funded, which we still are to this day. We had no brand, no customers, 3 employees and a really great idea. And that's really where we started. It wasn't this, you know, $100 million companies that are working with us. We didn't really have much, but we did know that the idea that we had, which was to offer high-quality swag, and we knew that in order to get started, we had to test. So that was our first step. Step into creating our Bootstrap campaign was to test out what works. And one of the things that a lot of founders and marketers, we see a lot of times kind of fall into the trap of, you know, they start a company and they're like, okay, I need to do a press release and I need to have this launch party and I need to do all these crazy things to get started. And the reality of it is you don't, you don't need to do every single marketing strategy that is out there. It's really about focusing on just one strategy that works. And for us, it was really important that we focused on one strategy that would give us the most data possible. From there, you'll be able to identify what you can actually build. So marketing doesn't have to be that complicated, really. We started with our first marketing campaign, which was, it's listed here, which was on SEM. We tried paid search. That was our first campaign that we ran, which cost us a total of $217. We built the website on Wix. We used Typeform, which had a free version that we used, and we put $200 towards an ad spend on Google. And that was it. There wasn't much else. These aren't tools that require a developer. They're not tools that require anything else. Really very low-touch code tools that you can use, that anyone can incorporate. And, you know, for us, it was really easy to use these because when you're first starting out in a startup, you're wearing a lot of hats. And had we started any other marketing campaigns, whether it was social or SEO, it would have incorporated a lot of bandwidth from all of us to actually get it going. So the SEM not only gave us the flexibility to get all the data, but also gave us freedom to kind of focus on some other initiatives as we started building the company. Our first step towards this was really less around the revenue and it was more about understanding what our voice was. We wanted to understand who our clients were and understand what our voice, and we wanted to identify our voice within our brand. As we go into the next slide, before you can even build out your marketing plan, you have to know who you are as a brand. It's super important as a company that you have a really strong stance in something. And when you're first starting out, sometimes you don't know what that stance is. So the SEM campaign allowed us to kind of play around with that. And what's great about it is that you can create a million, you know, different ancillary landing pages that don't compromise your main website. So if you have a very strong idea about something, you can keep that on your main website, but, and then still be able to create all these separate landing pages and test out different tonality, different imagery, different user flows. So our first campaign that we did in testing was in our sample packs. We realized that a lot of clients were not just coming to us for swag. They were coming to us for a little bit more than that. They wanted to know if we could assemble them. They wanted to know if we could curate the boxes. So we ended up making this landing page, and as you can see, our logo's completely different, our colors are different, because we tested a lot of this in these early phases, and Bootstrap was really figuring out what our voice was, what works, what doesn't work, and this was really the foundation of what our company is today. Had we not tested this, we probably wouldn't have survived, or not have survived, but we probably wouldn't have been doing the stuff that we do today. This really set the tone for what our company is and what is going to be the distinguishing factor between our brand and every other brand. So from there, we really did that by letting the customer kind of lead the way. So through the data that we got through all of our landing page campaigns, we were able to identify who our customer was. When we first started out, we thought we were gonna just target startups and, you know, these startups that were coming through, you know, once they raise money, they're gonna spend all this money on swag and that was our user, that was gonna be our clientele. But in reality, it was a lot broader than that. It was much broader than that. We ended up discovering that you don't get to choose your customer, they choose you. Your customer kind of chooses who you are, what your brand should be and what you should stand for. It was really important for us to adapt to those early adopters because those were the ones that were really going to be ambassadors for our company and spread, you know, give a good word of mouth for our brand. It was then that we discovered that, okay, we now have an idea of what our company is. We now have an idea of who our customer is and who it should be. And that was the moment for us as a company that we realized it's time to build. We had all the ingredients that we need to identify what our company should be. So while you might start off bootstrap, we all know that that's not going to take you to scale and that you need to figure out quickly how to get out of that bootstrap and to start building. If you don't have those two key ingredients of knowing who your brand voice is and knowing who your customers are, it's going to be really hard for you to do any type of marketing strategy or anything else that complements that. With our building, when we started to build out our infrastructure, we first started with— and if you can— yeah, there we go. When we first started to build out our infrastructure, it was really based off of our customers leading our marketing. They set what we stand for. It was really important for us to understand that we had to take a strong stance in something as a brand. When customers were coming to us, a lot of times they would tell us, "Hey, you know, we wanted to do swag for so long, but we couldn't because it was so hard. It was difficult to do. I didn't want to go to the post office. I don't want to assemble all these packs." So for us, it was really important that we set a strong stance towards making swag simple. And that was our first marketing campaign that we launched, was we make swag packs simple. And that really dominated and set us apart from everyone else. But we wouldn't have been able to identify that if it wasn't for our customers. They also led our design. We didn't look at any type of competitors or anything else. If you notice, I don't even mention competitors in this process. Because we didn't, we didn't focus on that. We were more focused around our customer and we wanted to identify, well, what are the brands that our customers use and what are the things that they love? We knew that our customers love Asana, they love using Slack, they might use Stripe, they might use all these other products, and those products that they use all had two things in common: they were user-friendly and the sites were super clean. So we use a lot of that inspiration into our site today that you see on this page that is super clean and user-friendly because we wanted to use elements that we knew our customers love. We also were able to identify our search terms. With paid search, it's really great because you're really able to get super, super granular on what are some search terms that work. That are tied to revenue. So we knew exactly what terms worked down to a zip code level, what was going to generate the most profit for the company. And if you're wanting to build out any type of SEO strategy, social media or content strategy, or even just content on your website, knowing what actually is going to convert into revenue is super powerful. So this allowed us to make, to really create our secret sauce in our marketing. And into our marketing initiatives to build and get us to our first million, to 20 million, and so forth. We also knew during this phase that in order to get out of bootstrap, you need to invest in tech. Tech is super important to invest in. We actually did this before even building out a full-on sales organization, and we did that purposely because we knew that We can have a million sales reps, we can have all the marketing that you want, but if the infrastructure of the company wasn't solid, it would be too fragile and it would break. And we didn't want to ruin our reputation as we continue to build. So one of the first chief hires that we did was actually our CTO. So we wanted to make sure that our foundation was strong. From there, we started to kind of build out our sales organization. We wanted to make sure that as we amp up on marketing, that we're able to actually have a sales team that can handle all the customers that are coming through and give them the service that we wanted. By letting our customers lead our marketing, we were able to build our marketing strategy and from there, our $217 marketing led us to our million-dollar business. So, you know, it doesn't take a lot to figure some of those things out, but, you know, we only started it with $217 and, you know, we were able to identify our users and what our customers needed. So from there, I'll open it up to some questions.
Awesome. Hi everybody, my name is Grayson. I'm part of the SwagUp team and I have a couple questions that were submitted prior to the meeting today. So the first one is about SwagPacks in particular. So Helen, if you could tell us a little bit more about the story behind SwagUp's focus on SwagPacks.
Yeah, so when we first started to, um, you know, test out our SEM campaigns, we had a customer that actually asked us for a box and it wasn't something that we were offering on our website. They called us and like, "Can you do a branded box?" From there, we're like, "Yes, of course, we can do that." Then he called us back and was like, "Well, can you assemble them?" Of course, Michael being the founder that he is, he told them yes and quickly started to call friends and family to come over to figure out how to assemble all of these packs together. That was really the start of a completely different company. Than what we started with.
So another one I have is, how long were you in testing mode that you referred to, and was it a first number of failures, or when you were in testing where you were able to find instant success?
I mean, I think you should always be testing. You should— it should always be something that you do constantly. Um, but for us to figure out like our brand, it was probably a good 6 to 8 months of us really testing out different landing pages, content, copy, you know, to be able to really refine and perfect it. But to this day, we still use some of those strategies to test out different methods.
Got it. So when you were first starting out, you mentioned not pursuing every single marketing strategy that you can think of. So what is one of the things that you consciously chose not to do at that time, and why was that reason?
Yeah, so in 2017, one of the trends at the time was actually social media and influencer marketing. And that was one of the campaigns that initially Michael actually wanted to start with. He's like, let's do social media. And from there I was like, I don't think it's a good idea because one, we don't have a brand, no one knows who we are. You know, and it might change once we start testing out some of these things. And I think he tested it for like 2 days and realized it was really hard. You know, some of those campaigns take a really long time to really build out and build out an audience. So we quickly pivoted and just started focusing on just SEM.
Awesome. So the last one I have is about About a year ago, obviously the landscape changed a lot with swag due to COVID. So what were some of those strategies and how they changed on the dime?
Yeah, so I would say that our, our business has pivoted. I mean, luckily we always kind of were working with companies that were remote, and so we kind of had a little bit of a taste of what that was like. But for us was really like being there for our customers that were going through that transition of moving their teams to remote, you know, and being able to provide swag to make them feel at home, make them still feel like they're part of the company, you know, and build on that company culture. I think that's super important, and swag's a really great way of doing that. And even just for virtual events too, we had a lot of marketers that were kind of afraid of not being able to have these in-person events, but they were actually able to use that budget from that they were going to use for traveling to actually doing a much higher curated swag items that they can send to clients that were actually much, had much more longevity than, you know, your simple swag that you have on the table in a conference, you know, at these conferences that they had.
Another question that just came in is, any swag ideas or focuses that appeal to being more environmentally friendly as we head in that direction?
Yes, and we actually offer a lot of them as well. I think that's super important to kind of keep that in mind. We do work with some suppliers that give back. You know, we also give back with every order. We give back to, to plant trees with every single order. We also pay to offset any carbon footprint, but we offer products that are recycled, that come from recycled material, or that are, you know, built locally with very low, like, carbon footprint. So there's definitely some push and initiatives for us and even from our clients to be able to offer that. Awesome.
Perfect. I think that's it. Um, just last thing is, is how can people connect with you and connect with SwagUp if they'd like to engage?
Yeah, so you can, um, go to swagup.com. You can also follow me on Twitter at @hieranken. Um, so really excited to be sharing this with you guys today, and thank you, SAS Star team, for having me. Yeah, thank you so much, Helen. Thank you, Grayson and Jake, as well. Great session, and we appreciate you joining. Thanks, everyone.
