Episode 235: How SwagCycle Keeps Obsolete Merch Out of Landfills

Welcome to Skucast, the podcast for entrepreneurs in the promotional products industry. Skucast shines a light on our industry's best work, features maverick personalities, and discusses what's really involved in running a modern promotional products business. Skucast is the official podcast of Common Skew. When Facebook rebranded to Meta, what happened to that old Facebook merchandise? And when your client rebrands, do you have a discard program that helps them find a way to sustainably discard, recycle, or reuse that merchandise? Ben Grossman was sitting in a meeting with a client talking through their rebranding process and began wondering what they would do with the old logo merch. And in that meeting, in that moment, the idea for Swagcycle was born. Swagcycle is a startup focused on responsibly managing the lifecycle of branded merch. When companies rebrand or get acquired, many of those companies, through their distributor partners, often dispose of their obsolete branded merchandise. Swagcycle leverages their proprietary network of partners to help companies repurpose, recycle, or reuse items in a responsible, ethical, and affordable way. They have deep relationships with a nationwide network of charitable partners, some of which we talk about today. And when a company needs to completely discard old merch, they work with best-in-class recycling partners to leave the smallest footprint possible. How effective are they? To date, SwagCycle has kept over 1.2 million items out of landfills and facilitated over $2.4 million worth in charitable donations. And they're just getting started. Swagcycle is a portfolio company of Grossman Marketing Group, a fourth-generation marketing services firm and a distributor with a deep history of corporate responsibility. Ben Grossman, our guest today, is the co-president of Grossman Marketing Group, leading the family business alongside his brother David. And Ben is the founder of this amazing service we'll talk about called Swagcycle. Today we chat about recycling, upcycling, what happens to merch when it goes to a landfill and how to avoid it. Ben shares his 6-step process for walking any client through a discard plan for obsolete merch. And we talk about how, as a distributor or supplier, you can partner with Ben to help your clients. And finally, we talk about how this business has not only given voice and action to a passion of Ben's, but how it has changed him. Oh, and when Facebook rebranded to Meta, they called SwagCycle. We talk about that too. But before our conversation with Ben, two quick mentions. You might have heard we launched preregistration for our incredibly popular event called SKUCON, held in Las Vegas on January 8th. Now, if you're new to the business or if you're new to SKUCON, SKUCON is the industry's one-day conference for innovators, explorers, and dreamers in the branded merch industry. It's a live all-day firestarter meant to kick off your year right, and it always sells out quickly. So I encourage you, hop on over to SKUCON.com to preregister register so that when tickets become available, you'll be able to secure yours for you and your team immediately. I'll be there. I hope to see you there. Also, one more event I want to tell you about, and this one is an event hosted by our friends over at BrandChain. It's a really unique event called BrandTogether. I invited Matt Bruno, BrandChain's Executive Vice President, to hop on the SkewCast to tell us about this special experience. Here's Matt. So Matt, tell us, what is BrandTogether?

Well, BrandTogether is a gathering of leaders in brand solutions. Really, it's chance to bring together our entire community where distributors can learn from one another and understand the unique solutions that are in our industry today, all while raising money for a good charity.

Who's the ideal audience for this?

Well, there's, I think there's really two that we like to look at, right? There's the distributor teams. You know, we have this great partnership with Margaritaville Orlando where we get to offer our attendees cottages, and the cottages have 2, 3, or 4 bedrooms in them with their own bathroom. And so we see distributor companies to bring down, you know, leadership, operations, customer service, sales. Then we're also seeing some buy-up from distributor individuals who want to share a cottage with, you know, peers that they haven't seen in a long time so they can get the experience together almost like their own team or their own, you know, peer group. It's cool.

And tell us about that, that format, the venue. It's like these little cottage cottages all together, built obviously for good collaboration and strong collaboration.

Yeah, so it's really a unique property. It's at Margaritaville in Orlando, Florida, and they have a traditional resort that has about 150-200 rooms in it where, you know, if you come to the event, you can get a singular room if that's what you'd like to do. But it also has this little village of cottages in it, and it's, you know, a street of these 2, 3, and 4-bedroom cottages. And the way we have it set up is, you know, again, as you mentioned, our distributor teams can get a cottage and Each one has their own bedroom, and they also share like a family room and a kitchen, and some of them might even have a pool or a game room. But also some of our supplier partners, only about, you know, it's a limited opportunity, so only about 20 or so can also have a cottage, and they're converting those cottages into, you know, showrooms/meeting rooms. So, you know, you kind of envision this community, really the essence of what branching is. That's our aspiration, where you can have distributor teams amongst their supplier partners trying to build better relationships.

Really feels like this event embodies the vision of BrandChain and where you want to go with things. And is that— obviously this is done very intentional in terms of the location and the interaction and things like that. How do you feel like it embodies your vision for BrandChain?

Yeah, I mean, you already— you just hit it on the head, really. I mean, you know, when we became BrandChain, if you will, you know, our mission statement is really to be serving the distributors who recommend, source, and execute brand solutions for clients and the suppliers they partner with, right? And the biggest word that we always share internally and with our leadership is community. And this property, as we just discussed, I mean, it literally is a community where we can put distributors in teams who can meet with their suppliers to partner with them to deliver it, right? So it's like it really embodies specific our aspirations as an association.

Yeah, what can attendees expect different from any other event that they might attend?

Yeah, so I mean, clearly the village, as we've talked about, is the most dynamic experience of this. We're gonna dedicate the morning to education and the afternoons to being in this village, and we're gonna provide them with a solutions map that takes them through the village And at every stop along the way, they get a chance to, you know, have like a passport book filled by the supplier. And when they turn that in, we're going to donate $25 per passport book to a local charity there in Orlando. And our hope is to, you know, get up to about $4,000 or $5,000 for those charities. And then, of course, you know, we want to incentivize the people that will be there as well. So we're going to give out, you know, random winner a large cash prize of some sort. So you can kind of think about the mornings are going to be this really cool education, and then the afternoons are going to be just community building, checking out new solutions together with your peers and being in a cool, unique setting.

Then do you have some speakers you want to announce?

Yeah, so we are excited to announce that Scott Stratton, who is the 6-time bestselling author on marketing and brand experience, is going to be our keynote and it's going to kick off the conference for us. And then we're also going to have some peer-based sessions. The rest of our education is going to be really peer-based and interviews and panels, and we're going to do some, some stuff on print on demand, e-commerce, logistics, customer experience, that type of stuff. And then, you know, as a sort of first touch here, we're also excited to announce that Jay and Jeff of Tacos with Jay and Jeff are going to come down and do a live session for our attendees as well as some interviews along the way, so it should be pretty fun.

That's a lot of fun. Finally, where can we go to register?

That simply is brandchaincommunity.org. You can get everything you need there, and, uh, yeah, we really hope to see, uh, everybody out there. I think it's going to be a really fun, exciting way to, to celebrate as a community.

Congrats to you and the board and everyone who has been laying out this vision for, for BrandChain, and it's good to see you again, my friend, and I wish you the best.

I appreciate it. It's always great to see you, Bobby. Thanks for all you do.

You bet. Today's episode is brought to you by Commenscue, the work-from-anywhere platform that powers your connected workflow, enabling you to process more orders and dramatically grow your sales. To learn more, visit commenscue.com. Now here's my chat with SwagCycle's Ben Grossman. Let's talk about SwagCycle and how it works, because I think it demonstrates a really ingenious idea and will help everyone understand its impact. How do you explain swag cycle to a friend?

Excellent. Bobby, first off, thank you for having me. I really appreciate the opportunity to chat with you and your listeners. I've certainly followed SKU Cast, and it's a really excellent show, and I'm excited to be with you today.

Thanks, man.

So swag cycle, just to put it sort of Simply, we're a platform that helps companies donate to charity or recycle and upcycle their obsolete branded merchandise. So, you know, merchandise generally becomes obsolete most often when companies rebrand or get acquired or change marketing messaging. And we're a service that keeps these items out of landfills and helps to make a difference in the community.

It's very cool. You know, there are 3 main entities involved, right? There's the donor, there's you, and the recipient. Can you kind of share how that works?

Absolutely. So when we hear from a prospective donor, these are most often end companies. Sometimes they are distributors and sometimes they're suppliers as well, but most often it's an end user that reaches out to SwagCycle and they say that they have goods that they want to get rid of. And the first questions we'll generally ask, we want to take an audit of what they have. So we'll ask what they have, what the items are, if they're water bottles or t-shirts or hoodies or notebooks or some other product, a rough sense of quantity that they have. And then the biggest question is, are they comfortable with the goods continuing to live on in the marketplace, going to a worthy charitable partner? If the answer is yes, then what we'll do is we'll take those details down about the goods that they have and we'll send messages off to our charitable partners. We have several hundred charitable partners around the United States as well as in other countries around the globe where we will share the details to assess interest from these charitable partners in whether or not they want these goods and how they will, and if so, how they'll use those goods. So just as an example, If, you know, we heard from a wonderful tech company out in California, they had nice Moleskine-style notebooks that they didn't want to throw away. They were comfortable with them going to a charitable partner. One of our partners is Dress for Success. They're most known for providing clothing, professional clothing to women who are reentering the workforce. Most often in inner cities. And we reached out to Dress for Success because these were professional-grade notebooks that could be potentially used in a job interview. And Dress for Success was thrilled to accept the donation, and the donor shipped those goods at their expense to Dress for Success. So we don't charge any fees for that donation facilitation. The only cost we, we need to cover is the shipping cost. And in that situation, the donor shipped it on their UPS number. So no dollars changed hands with SwagCycle. And what was nice about that is the goods made it to Dress for Success and they went to their women's professional programs and these women were able to make use of the goods in job training workshops and for specifically for job interviews. So it kept the goods out of a landfill and made a difference in the community.

That is so cool. Go ahead.

Yeah, another example, probably the one, one of the, one of the examples about which we're most proud is the YMCA in Greater Houston. Last summer, the, the war in Afghanistan, when the United States pulled their forces out, the refugee crisis from Afghanistan became a significant issue. And the YMCA in Houston was responsible at the time for resettling several hundred families from Afghanistan on special immigrant visas into the United States. It ended up becoming several thousand families. But when they reached out to us last summer, they, they were in need of goods, they were in need of clothing for the refugee youth as well as the adults. They specifically asked for long sleeve apparel for, for the women to be able to cover their arms with. They also were looking for backpacks and water bottles for the kids to potentially use for school-related activities. And then they also asked for just kind of fun products light-up, light-up items, fidget spinners, and other sort of, you know, interesting kind of trinkety-type items for local teenage youth mentors who were going to be coming into the YMCA and volunteering to mentor the youth from Afghanistan who were coming to the United States.

We—

this was the first time we'd ever done this where we sent a direct message to our SwagCycle database and explained the, the ask and told the companies on our database, hey, if you have any goods to donate, please let us know. This is the cause and this is how they'd be used. And we probably over the course of the last year have facilitated several dozen individual corporate donations going into the six figures in terms of donation value. These are as small as, you know, 24 hoodies from a company out in the Pacific Northwest to close to 50,000 items from a company on the East Coast, and then a lot in between. And, you know, just the feedback we've gotten from the YMCA has been so positive. And to see photos of them, you know, give the goods out in, you know, to the to the refugee families, and as well as to know that the fun items are going in these gift bags, which we've, you know, gotten photos of and posted on our blog. It's been incredibly heartwarming and, you know, probably some of the most meaningful work that I've personally touched in the last year or so. And then— amazing.

I have to ask you one question about this, since we all understand fulfillment and packaging and kitting and distribution and getting things from multiple destinations to multiple places. That has to be a logistical challenge for you. That's a big part of your business, right? And tell us how that part of it works by using that example. If you have that many donors going to this one location, is there a holding area? How does that process work?

So the YMCA, they— for this specific situation, uh, they do have a loading dock and a receiving area, but we— I think we, we overwhelmed them a little bit with the supplies that we donated. It It was a kind of came fast and furious. And, you know, we really tried to make sure to treat every donation like a client project where we make sure to get tracking information and just, you know, description of the items that are coming to them so we can give them ample warning of saying, hey, on next Tuesday, here's the FedEx tracking number and you should be receiving 6 boxes of hoodies and t-shirts from XY company. And it was certainly, from a project management perspective, quite a lot of work, but it pales in comparison to the work on the ground that the YMCA does and that, you know, and that frankly these donors did to gather up these goods and really work to make a difference in the community, which they did. And that's, I mean, that's one of the things about SwagCycle that we feel like as a differentiator that we're not just a black box, you know, we try to be transparent about how these goods are going to be used, what the organization is that will be receiving them. Yeah, are they, you know, do they have current IRS filings? We try to vet these organizations to the best of our ability. We only are as good, of course, as the information that's shared with us with, you know, from these charitable partners. But when an organization, when a donor comes to us and tells us they have goods to donate and then we find a match in our database, we'll go back to the donor and say, the YMCA in Houston would like these goods for, you know, to help to resettle refugees from Afghanistan, as an example. Do you approve of this use? And then once they approve, then we'll give them the shipping details and continue that process. And every one of these charitable donations that gets made, the project isn't complete until we get a charitable donation receipt back to the donor confirming that they did receive those goods.

And you had another example you were going to share and I interrupted you.

Yeah, absolutely. So I mentioned that probably the biggest reason that swag becomes obsolete is when a company rebrands and probably one of the most famous rebrands over the last year is Facebook changing their corporate name to Meta. So we heard from Facebook several months ago around their rebrand. They, and what the challenging ask was, was that they had some excess merchandise in the United States as well as excess merchandise over in Europe, in the UK. And they were hoping to facilitate donations of both of those goods. They had already gotten corporate approval that they could be donated to charity. And these were really high-quality items, nice sweatshirts and t-shirts and drinkware and notebooks and other products that have real value to the right cause. So some of the goods were in the United States in the Southeast, and then some of the goods, like I said, were in the UK. And we donated, we facilitated those donations to two of our charitable partners, one in the US, they're called Delivering Good, to one of their kind of subchapter partners down in Georgia. And, you know, we donated to them both because they could take the goods, but also because it was the, a short distance and, you know, lowest possible carbon emissions to ship those goods over to the recipient. And then in the UK to a charity called Giving World. And Giving World, we've partnered with a number of times over the last couple years, some around Ukrainian refugee relief, both goods being been given to families who have come from Ukraine and resettled over in the UK, as well as some goods that have actually been shipped closer to the front, you know, closer to where the war is being staged in areas like Poland. So Giving World's a great, a great partner of ours, and we're proud to be able to partner with with Facebook, Meta, and a couple of these charities, and then, you know, with, you know, with Meta's distributor partner to help keep these goods out of a landfill and get them to a worthy cause.

Yeah, that's so cool. Stepping back a minute, you mentioned something earlier that since we're talking with folks that are in the branding business, you know, years ago when a company would rebrand, they would often want that old logo to disappear. They would want the old branding to disappear no matter how, right? A very— there was a very consciousless sort of, I think, approach to, we just want this to go away. I think many would be conscientious about donating it somewhere, but you had a really good question to them, is, are you okay with this living on? And I think now the onus is upon us to help facilitate not just the transition to the rebrand and the new merchandise, but now to facilitate what happens with this old merchandise and to help them with a, with a plan, just like what you're doing.

You know, we try, we try to ask questions upfront. You know, it's really important. We try to counsel companies on best practices around sort of tips for an environmentally responsible rebranding effort. And, you know, it's sort of a 6-step process that we talk about, you know, step 1, you got to take an audit of what you have. So you know, actually what you have and where the goods are. Step 2, organizations, it's really important that they have kind of a almost like a divergence czar, like someone who's really tasked and responsible with keeping items out of landfills and trying to find a way to either donate these goods or recycle or upcycle those products.

Right.

You know, step 3 is confirming brand guidelines to confirm if those goods can live on in the marketplace. And if they cannot, then try to find creative ways to to divert these items from landfills through recycling efforts. If the goods can live on, like in the case of Facebook/Meta and a lot of those other organizations I cited that supported the YMCA effort, is landfill diversion through charitable efforts. And then step 6 is, you know, sharing the results. You know, it's really important. People want to work for and buy from socially responsible companies. And so if you take these steps to do this work, it's really important to actually share your results and take a little credit for what you're doing because it is extra work. You know, it's the path of least resistance is unfortunately to throw these obsolete goods in a, you know, in the trash, in a dumpster. It takes extra work to facilitate a charitable donation or explore recycling and upcycling avenues. And if you do that, you're making a difference both from an environmental perspective as well as the social perspective. And we're, you know, proud to serve as, as in a supportive role to suppliers, distributors, and, and companies alike.

Yeah, I love that. We're going to get to that in a minute. I want to talk a little bit about landfill for just a second. We'll make it brief. Did I hear you right? Because you're closer to this than I am, obviously. Did I hear you right that you believe that like 90, 80 to 90% of textiles end up that end up in a landfill can be avoided?

That's so, that's exactly right. So the leading organization in the United States that focuses on textile recycling, this organization called SMART, stands for Secondary Materials and Recycled Textiles. And according to them, what's, what's kind of amazing is about 6.3% of the waste stream in the United States is actually made up of clothing and other household textiles. And, you know, this actually, you know, that number, you know, then that's equivalent to almost 81 pounds per person. And, you know, that accounts, that's about 85% of all clothing and textiles actually end up just thrown away. And according to them, the vast majority could be recycled or upcycled. Close to 95% could be reused and recycled. So, you know, the way we've operated and some of our largest recycling projects have actually been textile in nature, you know, apparel. And I think we all know apparel is the largest product category in the promotional product space, and those are most often often the items that companies are most sensitive to having float around in the world once their brand has changed for a number of reasons which I can get into. So we've actually helped with a number of apparel recycling projects over the last several years. And what happens is most of these goods are cotton or a mix of cotton and polyester., the goods get shredded and get turned into things like painter's rags or shop rags or the kind of, um, rags that, um, you know, companies use to hand stain the hulls of boats or to hand treat new granite countertops. And then the fibers can also be shredded and used in carpet pad fill, insulation materials, mattress fill, and a whole host of other uses. So it's, it's a great way to, you know, keep those goods out of landfills and find another use for those, for those goods and those fibers.

What happens to textile merch when it hits that landfill? You, you and I were talking and you mentioned something that's above my head, but it's about what happens to our climate when these things do deteriorate over time.

Yeah, so this is mainly just sort of in landfills in general, you know, when goods end up in landfills as trash decomposes, it releases, you know, releases gas, and it's a combination of carbon dioxide as well as methane. And methane is, methane is far more harmful in the sense that it keeps heat in the atmosphere. And so, you know, when we get asked a lot, you know, is recycling good? Is recycling good for the environment? And one of the biggest reasons it is a net positive to recycle rather than just throw goods away is because it keeps items out of landfills and reduces that greenhouse gas emission from, you know, from the goods decomposing in landfill settings.

Yeah, you know, as a distributor working with clients now, this would be an important step to put in every selling process that we have a strategy for what happens if goods go unused too. I think it would be huge. Huge for folks to start talking. We'll get into that, how, how distributors can partner with you in a minute. But let's get back to your projects that you've handled. What's the largest size transaction you've helped facilitate so far?

The largest recycling project, uh, we just recently completed for a very large, um, food and beverage company. Uh, they had goods that, um, weren't appropriate for charitable, uh, reasons for just a number of internal reasons. And so this was actually a really interesting project that we did where it was several hundred thousand items, mixed materials, some were textile-based, some were plastic, some were metal, and some were, you know, other paper and other fibers. And we have a really fantastic recycling partner in the United States. That they take mixed material items and combine those items with other materials and, you know, and chemicals in an industrial recycling process to create asphalt mix. So you're taking goods that cannot go to charity, that an organization wants to divest of and discard, and you're keeping those items out of landfills and actually combining them with other materials to make new roads, which was— it's really ingenious, actually. And we have a number of other very large projects that are active right now. You know, these are several trailerload projects that we're working on. Our largest donations that we've facilitated, other than sort of the combined YMCA project and that Facebook/Meta project that I mentioned to you, We've actually worked closely with several suppliers, including Royal Apparel, which is an apparel company in, in New York State, and we facilitated two very large mask, cloth mask donations for them last year, which were fantastic because they were looking to divest of the goods they had a lot of supply, they came to us and we donated them, one to homeless shelter in a large church group in the New York area and then another to an organization called the Texas Diaper Bank. And, you know, again, keeping these items out of landfills and getting them in the hands of organizations who need them is, is the most meaningful work we do. And those were several hundred thousand unit projects as well. Wow.

Who pays a fee for your service? Clarify that for me. Because I'm— I want to make sure we clarify that for the audience. Who pays a fee? And what, you know, what does that look like?

So when, when we facilitate charitable donations, there are no fees that we charge other than shipping costs. So If we are responsible for picking goods up from point A and delivering them to point B, the charitable partner, and, you know, and we have costs involved in the LTL freight or FedEx or UPS, then we will bill the donor for those costs. We most of the time try to have them just cover the shipping so then no dollars change hands. Yeah, when we handle recycling and upcycling projects, really waste management services, we do charge for those, for those projects. So, you know, most recently that food and beverage company, we charged for that service, and the profits that we derive from the waste management really help to fund and underwrite our charitable projects that we work on.

So if a charity reaches out to you, then they just would be responsible for paying freight. If a a corporation reaches out to you and says we want to donate merchandise, they would obviously pay some fees for, for the handling of all of that. Is that right?

Is that right? Um, yeah, yeah, more or less. I mean, so charities most often reach out to us to seek to be a partner of SwagCycle and indicate what kinds of goods they would like to receive, and we add all that information into our database. Um, we don't charge them any cost for them to be on our platform. That's just a We want more charitable partners. We want to make more of a difference. But when we hear from a company and they say, hey, we have 1,000 water bottles to donate or 500 fleece vests or, you know, some other products, and we match those with a recipient, the only cost we charge is shipping costs to the donor. We try, like I said, to have them handle the shipment so that no dollars change hands. When it comes to charitable donation facilitation. We feel like that is a public service, that is a public good. We are making a difference in the community, and we're really proud of that. When a company comes to us and says, hey, we have 1,000 of this item or 500 of this item and we can't donate them to charity, we can't have those goods live on in the marketplace, then we will facilitate recycling or upcycling projects with our network of strategic partners around the globe. And for that, we do charge a fee and we do chart, you know, we do have a profit margin on waste management services. Companies are used to paying for waste management services and we view our waste management services, it's really a bespoke service, highly customized and highly tailored. To the brand and merchandise space. And when, you know, we determine where those goods are going to go, we have a cost, we have a sell price, and the profit that we derive goes to fund and underwrite the resources that we have to put into our charitable efforts because we don't charge for the charitable work. And we certainly do have staff resources and other tech resources allocated to that.

Is more upcycling in your future, or do you have an example of an upcycling story you can share?

One of our first projects that we, that we worked on was the— so the donor was a very large technology company, and they're a global company, and they came to us. They had close to 1,000 cotton t-shirts, and we actually had heard from a charity in Massachusetts, this organization called Greening Greenfield in Greenfield, Massachusetts, that they were operating through a, you know, through a 501(c)(3) partner of theirs. And they, they had a community program. It was a 4-H program where senior citizens were actually— they were looking for shirts that senior citizens, senior citizens could actually cut up and sew together and turn them into bags. And it was, it was a charitable project and a community engagement project. And it was one of our early projects. And it was great because it kept obsolete shirts out of a landfill. It went to a charitable cause, as well as just a community engagement cause to keep senior citizens engaged and active. That was just one example of an upcycling project involved with. We've also helped other organizations take vinyl banners and cut, cut them up and sew them together and turn them into small runs of DOP kits and toiletry kits and messenger bags. We have a number of other upcycling partners in our database, and we certainly are thrilled to partner with organizations to help be an upcycling resource to them.

Yeah, with SwagCycle, you're very careful to draw a line of distinction between Grossman Marketing, as I mentioned in the intro, and SwagCycle. Why? And can you speak to that commitment of keeping SwagCycle and Grossman separate?

So I wear two hats. I am co-president of Grossman Marketing Group. We're a fourth-generation, 112-year-old family business. I run the business with my older brother Dave, and we have a number of business lines. Our largest business unit is branded merchandise. We're a distributor. So we work with companies to help them achieve their marketing goals through really tasteful branded merchandise. Yeah. So that's how we knew about the challenge of obsolete swag because we had lived rebrands with our clients and seeing the challenge of what to do with obsolete swag. And that's, you know, we saw this challenge and we wanted to build a solution with Swagcycle. But Swagcycle and Grossman are two separate companies and we do that for a number of reasons. But one of them is because we have, when we set out, we thought one of the future paths of Swagcycle would be to serve as more of an enabling technology for the industry, for suppliers and distributors to divest of obsolete goods in a responsible way. Yeah, as well as distributors to offer this service as a tool in their toolbox to their clients and prospects. Most, we all know that when we respond to RFPs. Yeah. Statement about environmental commitment is pretty commonplace in these RFPs, you know, and obsolete swag. A lot of companies, they know this happens, but they don't know what to do with it. And so we hope that SwagCycle can serve as a resource, and we've partnered with many distributors around the country as well as some in other countries to take their clients obsolete merch and either get them to a really worthy charity or recycle them in a responsible way. When we partner with distributors, we're happy to, you know, stand in the background and just operate more as a supplier to them. If they want us to communicate directly with their clients, we're happy to do so. But, you know, we certainly don't want any concern from other distributors where, where they might worry that, you know, we're a competitor, we're not. SwagCycle, and, you know, we are fully focused on making the largest difference from an environmental perspective as well as social perspective around the globe. And, you know, we're thrilled to continue to, you know, build our distributor partners.

Yeah, we've got 5 minutes left and I have 2 questions about Ben. And how you got into all this and how did— when did this idea spark and like, is it something you were always thinking about or did you have an aha moment? What happened to create SwagCycle?

So I remember exactly where I was when the idea dawned on us. I was sitting in a meeting and just, we had recently been through a rebranding effort with a client and just this name SwagCycle dawned on us and on me and thought, hey, you know, why don't we build a minimum viable product? You know, this, I had recently been reading this book Lean Startup by Eric Ries and I drew some inspiration from that book and thought, okay, why don't we build a site? Why don't we get, do a little marketing? Why don't we do a little bit of search engine optimization? Why don't we write a little content and spread the word in the industry and see if either our clients or clients of other distributors this would resonate with. And it's, it honestly, it's taken off quicker than we expected it would, you know, and, and, you know, when, when we, when we started building, we didn't know if it would turn into just sort of a tool for the industry. Or if it would become more of a bespoke waste management service, or if it would just be more of a charitable engine. And it's sort of morphed into a little bit of all three. And, you know, we're seeing, we've seen some really significant growth over the last year. And, you know, our goal is, as we are sort of moving, looking forward, what are, what some of our priorities are, you know, one of them is just to continue to expand our charitable footprint. So that we can make more of a difference and find better outlets for some of the kind of oddball items that we get offered. Continue to build out our recycling capabilities. You know, we have the ability to recycle the majority of merch, but there's still certain challenge items out there that we don't have great avenues for. And so to continue to build those charitable and waste management capabilities. And then just build more partnerships with other distributors and suppliers. You know, there's, we all face the same challenges in the promotional products space. And, you know, we have built what we view as an enabling technology to help other companies responsibly donate or recycle and upcycle obsolete merchandise. And so we're, we're certainly willing to take our many, many, many thousands of hours of work and significant financial investment to try to help other organizations be more responsible stewards and responsible citizens and, you know, help the environment and help their clients make a difference as well.

I have so many more questions. We may have to have a part 2 sometime down the road when you're not a new father running 2 businesses and of those things. Let me ask you this final question. How has this experience changed you? I would imagine when you first start the idea, did this like add fuel to the fire in terms of your passion for what you're doing? Did it change your worldview in any ways? I'm curious. And also maybe a way of answering is that what did you think about this experience going in? And now, now what do you think now that it's sort of taken off like a rocket?

Thank you. That's a great question. So I've been deeply involved in been in the environmental space for the last 15 years or so. You know, I joined our family business in 2006 after graduating business school and early on, you know, tried to explore ways to run a more environmentally friendly business, offer more environmentally friendly products, and just volunteer with some environmental groups and started blogging about sustainability back in 2006, 2007. So it's cause near and dear to my heart. And then, you know, following in our family's footsteps of community activism and engagement and being involved in the communities in which we, you know, live both locally as well as nationally. So trying to kind of carry that torch of community engagement as well as deepening my interest in sustainability, this has just been a great way to marry those two kind of twin interests. And And, you know, it's been a really, it's, I mean, I've had a blast doing it. It's some of the work that I am most kind of gratified by and enjoy. And I'm just excited to see what the future holds. I think there can be some good growth with SwagCycle. And, you know, we're certainly committed on the, you know, at Gross Marketing as well as at SwagCycle to continuing to invest in the in this operation to see what the future holds. But we're excited at the growth we've seen. Every year we've seen growth both from a landfill divergence perspective as well as a charitable impact perspective. You know, we're sitting here and through the end of July 2022, we've kept more than 1.2 million items out of landfills. We've facilitated more more than $2.4 million of charitable donations. Um, so we're, we're excited to continue to grow and make the biggest difference we possibly can.

That's amazing, Ben. Congrats to you. I know, uh, that this has been a passion of yours, but for us in the industry to understand that there's such a service that exists and that, that you have helped us all rethink how to conscientiously sell to our clients in a way that also talks about a discard plan and everything. It's just, it's an amazing service. And, um, so I'm impressed with what you're doing. Thank you. We're very proud to, uh, share your story.

Thank you, Bob. We really appreciate it. If anyone's looking for us, our website swagcycle.net. And so swagcycle.net, you can fill out the form, contact us. My email is also ben@swagcycle.net. Happy to talk. And see how we can continue to support others.

Awesome.

Thank you, Ben.

Thank you. Thanks so much for tuning in to this episode of SkuCast. Be sure to keep up with our latest content by subscribing subscribing to SKU Cast on iTunes or to our blog at community.commsku.com. Until next time, friends, thanks so much for listening.