Episode 249: How Swag.com Soared from $300k to $40 Million in 7 Years (with CEO Jeremy Parker)

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.

About a month ago, I was delivering a talk at MarketingProfs B2B Forum, the largest gathering of B2B marketing professionals on the planet. And my talk was titled, How Did Branded Merch Become So Hot and How Can B2B Harness Its Power? My audience wasn't the industry, it was end buyers. But at the end of my talk, I met a very enthusiastic Taylor Johnson, Nicole Sear, marketing managers at swag.com, who insisted that I meet their CEO, Jeremy Parker, which I was happy to do, and which led to this discussion today. When the company now known as swag.com first started, it didn't start online. Jeremy Parker began in the business just like many of you did, hoofing it old school style, knocking on doors, cold calling customers, and landing business. But the serial entrepreneur was doing one more thing. Taking notes and thinking through how to do it differently through e-commerce. Today we talk about how Swag.com has soared from $300,000 in sales in that first year to nearly $40 million in a span of 7 years, and how an award-winning documentarian became the co-founder of Swag.com. Jeremy Parker is the CEO of Swag.com. He co-founded Swag.com with his business partner, Josh Orbach. Swag.com was acquired by Custom Ink in November 2021, and they work with over 5,000 companies, including Facebook, Google, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, Spotify, and TikTok. Today I talk with Jeremy about multiple topics, including their fast growth, the impact of 4imprint's legacy on the e-commerce business and how Swag.com differs from 4imprint, the future of e-commerce, its challenges and opportunities, and why he thinks the recession can be a blessing in disguise for his business and yours. Hi friends, I'm Bobby LeHew, Kominsky's Chief Content Officer. Before our episode, I want to mention that SKUCon, our in-person event held on Sunday, January 8th in Las Vegas, is sold out. But this year we are presenting SKUCon Virtual on Thursday, January 19th. Now SKUCon Virtual is a deep impact event built for teams in that it allows high-level learning in a concentrated window of time. I say it's built for teams because it allows you and your team to all have the same experience regardless of location. And it's an opportunity to rally around shared ideas and insights that will kickstart your year. You'll hear Michael Bungay Stanier talk about the 5 Question Leader, Nick Sassaris talk about the future world of Web3 and NFTs, and interviews and stories from the industry's most maverick thinkers. Hop on over to skucon.com/virtual to register today. That's sqcon.com/virtual. Also, we've launched a brand new newsletter called The Backpack. It's a monthly newsletter featuring trends in merch, top articles and podcast episodes, and global news impacting merch life. It's a roundup of our best content that we email to you in a digest form on the first Friday of each month. You can subscribe at community.comandsq.com/the-backpack. That's the-backpack or Just Google CommonSkew backpack. Today's episode is brought to you by CommonSkew, the work-from-anywhere platform that powers your connected workflow, enabling both distributors and suppliers to process more orders easily and dramatically grow your sales. To learn more, visit commonskew.com. Now here's my chat with Swag.com's Jeremy Parker.

Well, Jeremy, welcome to SkewCast. It's an honor to have you here.

Thanks so much for having me. Really appreciate it.

Your growth trajectory looks something like this. Tell me if this is correct. 2016, your first year, you had $365,000 in sales. 2017, year 2, you were at $1.1 million. 2018, year 3, you were at $3.1 million. 2019, year 4, $7 million. 2020, year 5, $15.5 million, and then 2021, year 6, $30 million, and you sell to Swag— you sw— you sell swag.com to Custom Ink. Um, as you look back on this growth, was there a particular year— I mean, first of all, that's phenomenal growth. That's tremendous growth, uh, coming into this business. And I know you had a little bit of a background with MP Sport, but as you look back, and I'm, and I'm repeating those numbers to you, and you look back on it, was there a make or break year besides the pandemic year? What goes through your mind when you see that lined up like that?

I think it was really in 2017, really, because the first year of our business in 2016, I was just like any other promotional distributor. I was really kind of just being a traveling salesman, you know, showing up to companies unannounced, knocking on doors, speaking to hundreds of potential buyers. I didn't know so much, you know, as you mentioned, you may reference the MV Sport. I had some experience, but it was 10 years ago. And frankly, when we started the business, I didn't know. I knew I wanted to sell to businesses and business buyers, but I didn't know who in the company I wanted to sell to. You know, there's obviously a lot of potential buyers within the organization. There's office manager that's buying for company culture. There's the HR manager buying for onboarding new hires, sales team buying to close leads, marketing team buying to reward your best customers. There's all these different divisions. And frankly, when we started, we didn't really know who to go after. So that first year was all about learning. It was just really about learning the experience and who we should go after. Ultimately, we initially, you know, frankly thought we would go after the marketing teams because the marketing teams have the biggest budgets. That was our initial kind of thought process. But after speaking to so many marketing people the first year and speaking to the office managers, we realized that everyone goes after the marketing team. Everyone has that same thought, but no one really goes after the office manager. The office manager has a much lower budget. But they're really like the gateway into the company. It's like the Trojan horse into the company. You get the office manager 1,000 t-shirts, they're giving it to all internal employees. All those internal employees have the swag.com logo on the inner label. It basically does the introduction to us to all these other departments. So we built the first year in 2016, the tech platform without launching it. So I would say January 2017, when we launched the first version of our site, it was like, was this first year worth it? Like, did we learn enough? Did we build the right product? It was such— so much of an unknown. And from the very beginning, We wanted to build this automated e-commerce experience that makes the experience of purchasing swag effortless, fun, and easy. And we didn't know if we got it. So that was— I remember January 2017 when we launched, we're like, are we going to get any sales? And it trickled in very, very slowly that first year.

That leap in year 3 to year 4 where you went from doubled your sales from 3 to 7, was that a part of that? You realized you penetrated through this Trojan horse strategy and you finally saw the payoff coming in.

100%. Yeah. At some point, it was actually exactly at that moment, like around $3 million when we had a real business, we had leads coming in the door and it was kind of amazing. I remember there was a few weeks where we're like, we did over $150,000 and it was all inbound and we're no longer doing outbound sales. We don't have any sales. Even to this day, we just hired our first outbound salesperson and they started making phone calls yesterday. No joke. I mean, we're doing, you know, a lot of revenue now. We have no sales. So when we were doing $3 million, we're like, this is a real business. People are discovering us, they're finding what they're looking for, they're uploading their design, they're mocking it up. We're not really having to get involved at all. They're really checking out themselves. And it became like, well, now that we have this, how do we get people to share us to their coworkers, get their friends to know about us? And it kept kind of, you know, growing organically to that $7 million mark.

What are you tracking today for year-end revenue for swag.com?

We should do over $40 million this year. Obviously going from $30 million, we wanted to grow 100% and we were on track to. Our first 2 quarters, we were doubling the first 2 quarters of last year, but our business is very tech-focused. Tech companies who have been the most hit by this recession. So we're still going to be up. We're going to be up obviously going from a little over $40, $45 in that range from $30. So it's still very solid growth. In a recession. So we feel very proud of that. But our feeling is, let's get the business in a really, really good place. Let's get our margins right. Let's get the processes right. Let's figure out all the challenges and issues that we have. And frankly, when you're growing so fast and you're growing 100%, you don't really solve all those issues, right? Because you're just trying to keep the wheels going. And now when there's recession, in our mind, it's in many ways for us a blessing. It's really a blessing because it allows you kind of to step back and say, Well, you're not going to do as much revenue. No one's— people are not buying as much. People are cutting back. People are letting go. But because we have this period of time, let's focus on how do we make the same EBITDA, you know, that we would have if we grew double time. And we're really getting very, very strong in all the aspects of the business so that, you know, when the recession subsides and things do come back, it's going to be an amazing position.

Yeah, there's this misnomer out there about online selling that basically in the, in the merch business is much, much slimmer margins. Is that true or false?

I don't know margins of other companies in our space. I can't say, but we have extremely healthy margins.

That's what I thought. I've actually heard that. Yeah, I've actually heard that.

How many employees do you have now?

Uh, we have all in close to 130 and 30— we have 33 tech people. So we're— we sell promotional products. We're very, you know, making sure the product quality is really there, but at the same time, we're very much a tech company. You know, we're— any kind of challenge that we see customers dealing with, we're trying to solve on a technical way, on a user experience way to make their lives easier. Because our feeling is with the same 130-person team, we could be doing 5 times the revenue. Like, we're not capped at revenue whatsoever. We could do— we're infinitely scalable at this point.

And those employees fall under Swag.com specifically, right?

Specifically Swag.com. Yeah. Custom Ink, I believe, has close to 2,000 employees. Swag.com specifically has about 130, um, and we're obviously, we're sister brands, we're underneath the Custom Ink umbrella, but we operate completely independent. We have, you know, a different customer base, different product features, different, you know, use cases. So we're really going after strictly the B2B, uh, buyer.

Yeah. Um, let's go back a bit to your, to your origin story because Swag.com, it's a fascinating story. The owner of Swag.com, which talk about a Talk about an amazing name. Wanted $1.1 million for the name. You basically bought a license to use the name for 2 years with an option to buy, but you ended up buying the domain within 6 months. Do you disclose how much you bought swag.com for?

Yeah, we ultimately bought swag.com for $200,000. So when we started the business, one of the main ideas is— and the name is very important— it's not what made us successful in no way. Obviously there's a lot that goes into building a successful business, but Of course, in our, in our mind, it's not put this way. When you're going on Facebook and you're browsing Facebook and you see a pair of shoes, you're a consumer, you might just purchase that pair of shoes. But no one just ultimately sees an ad for a swag or promotional product company and purchases, right? You're buying for your company. You're not spending $3,000 to $5,000 on a whim. You have to have a use case for it. The challenge is there's only specific periods of time throughout the year that people buy. You know, traditionally it's holiday season, it's this season or that season. You have to get in front of the person at the exact time that they have some use case for it. So my idea was from the very beginning is if I get in front of somebody in January, I want them to remember our name in November when they need to buy or when they're having these offline conversations with their coworkers or boss about swag. I want to trigger, oh, swag.com, let me type it directly into the browser. So we actually have over 50% of our conversions typing directly into the browser of swag.com. People don't need to click on our ads because the name is so memorable. So it's kind of like when you see those numbers, it sounds like, you know, you don't Google a Google ad or you don't, you know, say what's the best place to buy everything and an Amazon ad comes up. You type amazon.com into the browser. We're getting the same type of traffic as these mainstream companies. And it's really because of the brand name and the, you know, people hear it and they remember it.

It makes sense. When you launched in 2016, you didn't have a website for swag.com. As you mentioned, you were just hustling the business the old school way. And in year 2, you built your first version of the site. Selling swag pre-swag.com, what was it you were trying to fix and disrupt about the promotional products business the most?

I wasn't trying to disrupt anything the first year. It was about learning. All I cared about the first year was learning who the right buyer was. Was it the marketing team? Was it the office manager? Was the HR team the right buyer? How did they currently buy swag and how would I ultimately build a platform that would be better? The first year we were no different. We were just two young guys knocking on doors. Making sales and trying to do it the old school way, back and forth emails, phone calls, all the stuff. But really we were taking crazy notes because the whole plan was let's learn and then let's refine the experience and figure out where the pain points are, where the challenges are, not only for us as the distributor, but also as the customer. And how can we solve all those problems? And let's build tech to solve all those problems. So when we launched the platform, we already knew that we felt— we didn't know it was going to work, but we felt like we had something here that would really solve a real need. And the real need was this: the industry was shifting. You know, my background in MV Sport, 10+ years ago, I fell in love with the promotional product space when I was 22 years old. When I was going to those trade shows, I was the youngest person in the room by far. And every person I was selling to, much older, and they did things the old school way. And a big part of our industry still does it this way with catalogs and back and forth emails and phone calls to close sales. And I realized over the last 10 years, the buyer changed. The buyer is now a millennial, they're Gen Z. They don't want to look through thousands of catalogs. They want to find something very easy, see a curated list of offerings and know this is what's good. They want to appeal to a brand that appeals to them. You know, they don't want to see a schlocky website that looks like it was built 20 years ago. They want to feel something that connects to them and says, "Trust us, we value you, we know what you want." They want products that nobody else has. They want, you know, real consumer brands that Baboon to the Moon and Yeti and Moleskine and brands that they've heard of that they would want that elevate themselves. And they just want to feel safe. That's really it. So we try to build all of that into the, into the whole platform. It's not one thing that made it work. It's like a combination of everything together that made them feel safe and easy. And then obviously since then we've been expanding, you know, what we offer and who the customer is. But from the very beginning and even to this day, we listen to the customer immensely. Like that's a big part of our DNA. That the customer success team and the sales team that's dealing with our customers, they take crazy notes and they're constantly coming to our product team and saying, here are the things that customers want, here are the things that they're asking for. And we really listen to the customer and build exactly what they're looking for.

You are running multiple businesses like e-commerce, fulfillment, distribution, assembly, sourcing. I mean, there's so many parts to this and this technology that you've built.

How did you—

going back to your origin story and then as you and Josh, your business partner, Josh Orbach, grew in your entrepreneurship and as leaders, how do you split your responsibilities now?

So Josh and I, we were friends from college, and I— my background is I was a film documentary filmmaker. So think of like the most creative, have no clue what they want to do in their future, not really a plan of like how is this actually going to turn into money. And Josh was— he was in the finance department. He went to the business school at Boston University, and he ultimately became an accountant and like doing auditing after college, like Deloitte, right? Like Just think of like that mentality and the numbers and then me being this entrepreneur, super entrepreneur, didn't even know what entrepreneur was, but I just had that innate thing. I made a documentary in college called 1% that ultimately won the Vail Film Festival. So, I was this 18-year-old award-winning documentary filmmaker, which sounds cool but doesn't really get you anything in terms of a career. And I graduated college and I had no business experience whatsoever and I just said, well, let me just take my— I guess not my skill set, but to take the things I was interested in, being creative and starting something out of nothing. And, you know, just because film's the same thing as a business, like you're just building something out of nothing, you're trying to move people or get people to react in a certain way. And I just started businesses, and some failed and some succeeded. And I just learned a lot over 10 years of just starting and failing and starting and succeeding. And, and I had a company before that sold to a publicly traded company when I was 25 years old, and that was good. And then after that, I started a company that end up failing. So like I had this immense knowledge of like the ups and downs of the entrepreneurial life. And when I turned 30, I reached out to Josh and I said, let's start the business together. You take care of the backend, let me take care of the frontend. So like everything that the customer sees, the brand, the user experience, the product selections, how the site functions and works, all the features that customers are engaging with, that's all me. Josh has nothing to do with it, literally doesn't. What Josh has dealing with the suppliers and the manufacturers and the screen printers and the shippings and, and the customs and duties and all the back end. So we really go at it and we're, we're not like stepping on each other's toes or arguing about things. Like, he trusts me to do what I'm doing and I trust him to do what he's doing. And it really forms this amazing partnership.

Fantastic. Your background to me is fascinating because documentary, document, documentarian is, as you know better than I do, all about perspective and the fact that when you go to the website, you see this interesting perspective perspective and story, and explains a lot about your creative elements that you've built into swag.com. It is clearly not for Imprint. It is just a completely different, uh, experience. And, uh, do you come from a creative family?

How did—

where did you get the documentary background?

My brother— well, yeah, I guess I do. My brother is— we have a very interesting family. My brother's applied math major from Columbia, the smartest person I know, Harvard Business School, all that. But he— we made the documentary, the film together. So he has that, that part of his math brain, and then the other part is his creative brain. Uh, my mom's an artist and a painter and a photographer, and my dad's a businessman. So I guess the blending of my mom and my dad, uh, both me and my brother became like kind of the same, like really business but also being super creative.

You also came on the scene with this skills and talent and passion when all the market matured to a point where you had millennials and Gen— they put a lot— Gen Z, they put a lot of emphasis on creative design, far more than maybe you, you first encountered. Honored when you came in the industry, so it's a huge asset on your part. Um, let's talk a little bit about e-commerce and the future of e-commerce, because you are in a great position to talk with us about how you feel about the future of e-commerce, and it's what you think about all the time. And we can't talk about e-commerce without bringing up 4imprint. I mean, they're on track to hit $1.1 billion this year. They've had a sizable market share historically with e-commerce sales. Ironically, they are set to become one of the industry's first billion-dollar companies on the agency distributor side. So they still command less than 5% market share, though. When 4imprint came on the scene, many thought it was the end of the traditional sales model. And since you are building something apparently more countercultural to even 4imprint's model, it's kind of easier. There's a more beautiful aspect, there's a fun aspect to it. What's your opinion of their company, their growth, and their model?

I think what they're doing is great for their buyer, for their type of buyer. You know, they've— they must have an amazing marketing. Um, I mean, they're coming up first in every SEO. I mean, they're very powerful and they're very good at what they do. Our belief at Swag and why we started the business is that the buyer is getting younger and younger and younger. And yeah, they are an e-commerce company, but they're not really. I mean, yes, they do transactions online, but they're not, they're not like the modern-day e-commerce as what you see where you upload the logos and you mock it up. I haven't looked at 4imprint for a while, but I know when we started, like, you send in your logo after the order's placed. There's not even like a mockup ability to see where the logo looks like in the traditional sense. I think they've, they've have a really strong hold on promotional products for potentially a little bit older buyer that doesn't want to necessarily deal with people and go back and forth on the phone or catalog, but still want to do it themselves. Our kind of perspective is those buyers are aging out and there's the younger generation that's taking over the purchasing power of the companies. And we need to build a really great e-commerce experience for that younger generation buyer. So I think there's a place for both of us. And, you know, they're clearly doing something really right because they're going to cross a billion. And that's amazing. I think that's a great sign for the overall industry as e-commerce is taking a bigger piece of the play. And as you said, foreign print's only 5%. It's— we're still a ways away from e-commerce becoming the norm in our industry. And I think there's a lot of room to grow.

You have obviously proven this otherwise, but it seems like when e-commerce came on the scene, it took longer to gain traction. I mean, we literally thought this was the beginning of the end for, for the industry. Do you foresee that still coming, or do you still see this as because of the complexity, because of logos and colors and all these things, do you still see that as somewhat an upward, like a, like a bit of a battle? How do you—

I don't think it's necessarily a battle, but I think it will take time. You know, there's, there's so many different buyers of swag in all aspects, you know, whether you're buying for a school or a charity or you're a 30 to 40-year-old or a 50-year-old or a 60-year-old buying for different reasons, or you're a millennial. There's so many different— there's not like one specific demo. You say this is the exact age that buys swag, this is the exact type of person that buys swag. So I just believe there's always going to be buyers that want to buy in different ways. And frankly, we have buyers that come to us that don't want to check out on the site. Like, we have sales reps, inbound sales reps, who have to build the carts for some customers and then tell them, hey, log in and check out. And they'll never, like, people just sometimes don't want to do things even though we made it easy. They don't want to do it. So I think there's always a place for a lot of different types of businesses in our industry. And that's what frankly gets me really excited about it. There's just so much opportunity for everybody.

I love what you said just there because we tend to, um, unfortunately be reductive about the industry like that. It's this one type or this one big thing. And there is so much room for that potential. And speaking of, when you look at the total addressable market potential for e-commerce, I mean, how do you see it? Do you see that through the lens of like total branded merchant Do you see it as market share of the current e-commerce slice of the pie? How do you and your leadership team look at the market and go, this is a much bigger market than we ever imagined? How do you think about it?

I don't, I don't confine ourselves just to the e-commerce portion because I think the e-commerce portion, as we've seen, has been increasing. How fast does it increase? That's— no one knows exactly how much of the market it will take, if it will take the whole market. I don't believe that. I think there's always going to be pieces for different types of distributors. I look at the whole industry as a whole. You know, what is it? It's quite— what, $23 billion? And that's just people going through the traditional ASI, PPAI. There's probably a lot of people go directly to the suppliers. So what, $35, $40 billion? And then you add on the gifting industry, which is not even just sending swag, it's non-branded items. We're trying to think of it for everything, just like overall encompassing swag, promotional products, and gifting. And how can we play a real part and give customers a great experience across the board? And that's why I'm so excited to keep innovating. It's just one of these things of there's just so much opportunity ahead of us and that other people are, we, we believe are, are not just not doing it in the right way and maybe we have the opportunity to do that.

Yeah.

You said something really insightful there too about how you are building your company, that it's not exclusively e-commerce purchasing. So you must be building an agency model with inside of your e-commerce business as well.

It seems like it's definitely, it's definitely part of it. It's up until about 2 years ago, we had zero salespeople. We have our first outbound salespeople, as I mentioned earlier on the call, but we had zero even inbound salespeople. Our entire site was completely self-service. Like we didn't talk to anybody and we have a big portion of our orders that are self-service, which is exciting for us. It kind of makes it feel like we built something that solves people's needs without having to speak to anybody. But the bigger we've gotten, the bigger the customers we've gotten. We have customers that spend a half a million dollar order with us. They're not just going to check out through an e-commerce experience without speaking to somebody. So the bigger we've gotten, we've had to add this quote-unquote agency feel. But really we treat it like, you know, inbound account executives closing deals. So people reach out to us, they tell us about their projects or timelines, and we help them, we guide them, and we either build the carts for them or we just kind of show them how they could build it for themselves. That's really the thing. But our kind of vision is that even if we are the agency for the initial order, The second order should be so much more streamlined that they will always, whether they're buying half a million, $1 million, $50,000 order, ultimately they will become a self-serve customer because the platform is self-serve. We just need to guide them through it, through the process. Yeah.

What do you see as the biggest opportunity in the next 3 to 5, let's just say next 3 years, and what do you see as the biggest challenge for e-commerce in particular?

Um, biggest opportunity I think is, well, we have this amazing swag distribution platform that we started to build in 2019. So right before the pandemic, it wasn't reactionary to, wow, the world the world's remote. It was— now frankly, I went into an office of one of our customers and I saw 7 or 8 office managers on the floor packing things up together, and I realized this just seems wildly inefficient. Like, what if we could allow people to buy swag, we do the warehousing, we kit it up together, we give them this online swag closet and allow them to individually distribute to remote addresses? I see that getting more and more popular as the world stays remote. So I think that— but I think the next step of what we're building is is how to automate that distribution. Like today, people buy 1,000 t-shirts, 1,000 notebooks, they could kit up together and make distributions. We've launched an API, a Zapier integration, we now are launching a Shopify integration next week to allow company stores. It's all going to be about how do you allow people to send swag from the platforms that they use. Like forget having to constantly go back to swag.com and upload a CSV file. What if in HubSpot they could press a button and it pings our system and we send swag? What if somebody spends $1,000 on Shopify and it automatically pings our system and sends them, hey, thanks so much for being a great customer, customer for whatever reason that they want to buy swag, somebody's birthday, send swag, somebody's 5-year anniversary, send something else. They could set it and forget it. And I feel like that's the next phase of swag in general is allowing people to automate that distribution. And then when things are running low, automate triggers that reorder swag so people can just set up for the first time and then forget about it and their whole process is moving in the backend. So that's where we're really going for it. In terms of challenges, I think we're all, you know, experiencing a recession, a lot of people, a lot of young people in the industry don't really know what that means. Like, how long is it going to last? What does that mean for me? I think ultimately, like every single challenging period, just like the pandemic and the previous recession in the past, this is the time where the better companies survive and get bigger. We are really just trying to be heads down and optimizing and streamlining all of our processes, not just thinking about building more features in the platform. Yes, we're doing that, but getting our sales initiatives in order, getting our outbound team in order, getting our operations to be streamlined, getting our prices down across the board and getting our margins up and figuring out all these different things so that we are really in a really strong place. So I believe it's going to be a bad next year. That's my gut feeling. It's my— I think 2024 is going to be a really— 2023 is going to be a really tough year, but 2024, it's really going to come and. And hopefully, you know, companies all survive and can really be in a position to thrive at that point.

Yeah. Speaking of challenging economic times, I think one of the things that's happened in the business is that the client's attitude toward merch has changed. How have you seen it changed? I think I've seen it change and escalate. I mean, like, I've seen it just become far more respectable as a medium probably over the past couple of years.

Do you see that too? 100%. I think when we started the business, a big part of the reason one of the ideas is that when we went to trade shows, a lot of the stuff that we received was garbage. You know, frankly, we would end up throwing in the trash. It would tarnish the company. It would be bad for the environment. So a big part of us starting and one of the main ideas, actually the first idea when we built Swag was it has to be curated. We're not offering 1,000 mugs and 1,000 pens. It has to be the top 20, the top 20 notebooks, top 20 mugs, hats, etc. It makes it easier not only for the customer to find what they're looking for and know that it's quality, but we know that if we sell it, we're proud to sell it. So that's the first thing. It's all about quality. The second thing we are focused on is brands and products that other distributors just can't offer. You know, when people go to swag.com, it doesn't feel like the traditional promotional product site. You know, when I designed it, my two big inspirations for design was nothing to do with the promo space. It was Kith and Supreme and Barneys. I used to say to early investors and people I met, what do you want to build? I said, I want to build the promotional, like the promotional product company that is as close to Kith as possible, something that feels exclusive and different and people are proud of the brand, like really connect to it. So that's the second thing. And then what I push a lot, a lot of people in the beginning, we're all about put the logo on the t-shirt, etc., and that's fine and everyone's going to do that. But you don't have to be a walking billboard. You know, like when I pitch, when I was doing the early sales to customers, I said, think of a product that you want to give to recipients that they'll actually want to keep, that they don't have to be seen, that could be something small, like even a pair of knitted socks. It's something that they're going to feel connection to. And ultimately they'll become an evangelist for your brand and they'll start shouting your brand from the rooftops. So it's all about the person receiving it, not about who sees what that person's wearing. You know, one of these early companies that we did, Facebook, was a big company of ours. We made a Nomo London backpack for them. Nomo London, $200 backpack, leather, beautiful, like such a not a promotional, quote unquote, promotional product. The logo was nowhere to be seen on the bag. It was when you open it up and you go inside the bag, it was a black on black Facebook icon logo. That's it. It's the person who gets the bag. It's for them to see it every day. Every day they open up, they see Facebook and they feel appreciation. No one has to see it. And that's for us. You could be as creative or not creative as you want, but you should have the ability to choose. You should have ability to, you know, really connect with your recipients. I think that's the most important thing.

I love that. Beautiful, beautiful bag. It sounds like one unique value prop of yours, speaking of all of this, is getting access to brands that no one else can get. I mean, you sell Fellow Coffee products, you sell Baboon to the Moon. I don't know anyone else that's really setting this part as a distributor, so to speak. Is that a big part of your differentiation moving forward?

100%. It's, it's always been on the mindset, but we had to create a really strong brand ourselves to be trusted by these other brands. You know, these, these D2C companies, these consumer brands, they clearly care about their own brand, right? So we had to really take ownership of our own swag.com and say, let's build a really strong brand. Let's care as much as the companies that we want to be associated with care so that ultimately they're going to feel good about having the products on our site. We also launched this thing called Swag Limited Edition, which it's not like, like you think of the traditional distributors or suppliers as like 24-hour sale to get rid of stuff that they have in stock. It has nothing to do with it. We offer products that are so unique and different and high-end and premium, or just like, like a Baboon to the Moon limited edition color that they are willing to give us 100 of that we could feature on our site that's limited to like 24 hours, 52 hours, like a very limited period. And that's a strategy of not only branding ourselves as being different to our customers because they see that and say, wow, this is really cool, but also it allows us to get products in the door that might have never thought to do promotional products. We say, don't have to be on our site full-time. You don't want to be in the swag industry? I get it. Be a limited edition product. You'll be elevated. You'll be on the site for 48 hours. Worst comes to worst, it's going to be removed from the site after 48 hours. It kind of allows them to dip their toe into it. And get comfortable with us. And what's happened is every single time we launch a limited edition product, they want to be on our site. The product does well enough for them to feel confident. And then they're saying, wow, this is cool. Actually, here's 5 other products. You can actually have it on the site full time.

That's cool. I see. So the brand acquisition strategy is a little bit of, hey, let's, let's taste a little bit with the, with the, with this limited supply drop, which straight out of the Supreme playbook, right? Limited drop. And then we're going to— and then they sort of come in the front door or the side door that way, so to speak.

And that's exactly right. Fascinating.

So you did— you released limited edition swag drops in May, and you have your swag distribution platform. What innovations are you most proud of launching recently, or are there any you can talk about that are sort of in the hopper right now?

Yeah, we have a lot, a lot of stuff in the works. So we launched something a month and a half ago called Super Speed. So on our site, there's specific production timelines. Typically, you know, the typical production timeline for promotional products is 2 weeks. That's the normal. We found that a lot of people want things a lot faster. So we partnered up with 3 of the best suppliers that we have really great relationships with. And we said to them, if somebody orders one of these, let's say 50 products, I think we have 62 products in this Super Speed offering on our site, we could produce it in 5 business days or less. Really much, much faster. We skipped the line. They put us into the top and we could get things done super, super fast. That was the first thing. And we've done amazingly well with Super Speed. The second part of that was is what if you could build boxes with just SuperSpeed products? Because we have this whole ability to find products on our site, upload your logo, mock it up, it's in the cart, and then kit boxes based on what you have in your cart. But what if you could kit boxes based on just SuperSpeed products? We built this whole technology that you could create the box and distribute within 10 business days. The typical production time for boxes is 30 days. So if you have a holiday season, you want to get something to somebody in the office, They could do it much, much faster now going and using a catalog of the SuperSpeed. That's been a wildly successful thing. We're launching something next week called Swag— well, we Swag Distribution, but it's called Advanced Distribution. We found a lot of our customers buy, let's say, 100 t-shirts, have it in inventory, and how our site works right now, you have to first wait for the 100 t-shirts to get into stock and then you can make a distribution. The problem with that is that the customer has to be waiting for like some sort of notification saying your products are ready. Then they have to go to our site, they have to upload their CSV file. What if there's errors in the addresses? To fix it. It delays the whole process. So what we're doing now is you place the order and it prompts you to upload your CSV file right then and there. We save it in the system so that once your products are in stock, it automatically drops those addresses and it makes the distribution right away. So it saves people a lot of time. So everything that we're trying to do is what were the problems of last year? And as you can imagine, the problems last year is a lot of people wanted quick turnaround time and we couldn't hit dates. How do we solve that? So we kind of figured out all these different nuance and different ideas of just making the entire experience way more streamlined, way faster. And that's what we're pushing towards. We launched Zapier, we launched our API, we're launching our Shopify integration for company stores. People can launch these public-facing stores that will be connected to us. And we're launching something that's very different than the whole swag space. I believe our launch date is December 15th. We may punt it to January, but it's called Goody Giveaway. And what it's going to allow people to do is we have a lot of times customers come to us and say, I have 4 days, can you get anything in time for my recipients? And you can't. There's no time to print it and then distribute it. So what we want to do is allow companies to give out a goodie, like a link I could send to you and say, hey, thanks for being a great employee, a great customer. Here's $50 worth of credit. Select from a catalog of goodies, non-branded items, candies, cupcakes, etc. We're going to warehouse all that stuff. They make their selection, we bundle up in real time and send it out. So if they can't— don't have the time to swag, they also now will have the time to do something else to get at least a holiday gift. We capture their email address, we capture them as a customer, we don't lose out on that business. And then when they have more time, they become a swag.com-specific customer.

Because of speed and complexity, do you find yourself building a more vertical company? Do you find yourself investing more in the tech and the production equipment and all of the things that are allowing you to do this, like the box? Or do you, do you still have sort of an outwards mentality, or is it not split that way?

It's mostly outsourced. We're really investing in the tech. So tech, yeah, we— that's in our mind what we specialize in. It's our platform, it's our brands, our user experiences, our ideas. We want to invest everything, everything that we make goes into the tech. It's to make the platform better, etc. But the other things, the machinery, the production, the suppliers, we don't even get involved in any of that really. It's mostly we outsource and we find the best ones and we form really great relationships. So we're not working with 100 suppliers, we're working with the best suppliers and we have the best deals with the suppliers because of the volume that we're sending them. And obviously now that we're under Custom Ink, Custom Ink adds a lot of value to us in terms of they make— they do a lot of their own production in terms of apparel and printing. Obviously they bear shipping rates than us. They've just— every aspect of the business they have, they've been doing over 22 years, they've refined the experience. And now we kind of can leverage a lot of those learnings and frankly relationships that they have.

Yeah. That was my next question. You were acquired about a year ago by Custom Ink, and you just mentioned a few of the things. And I was always going to ask, what are the assets they brought to the table other than possibly funding or things like that? But they all had a lot of these mechanics figured out. Was there— what surprised you about it that you were like, this is pleasant surprise that we are connected with Custom Ink and they have this, whatever?

You know, it's interesting. Um, it was a year discussion before we agreed, uh, to be acquired. So we met Mark Katz, the CEO of Custom Ink. I think the previous November, and we sold 2021 November. So it was a long courting process of a lot of discussions. Josh and I, we weren't looking to sell. We didn't think about selling. We were growing 100%. We had a lot of big ideas that we were building towards. It wasn't like a thing to sell. But frankly, the more we got to know Mark and his team, we like them. We like them a lot. And we saw that they had very similar vision for the industry. And, you know, they're obviously the leader in consumer and apparel and, you know, charities, organizations. And we believe we're not there yet, but we believe we will become the leader in the B2B e-commerce. And if you combine both forces and really it's in the back end, it's the same, right? We're dealing with the same suppliers, the same machinery, the same manufacturing, the same shipping, same logistics. If you could synergize all of the back end and make the entire experience effortless, ultimately, and you're going after two different customers, we could really build the biggest powerhouse in this industry. So that was the idea, was, you know, we— if we could combine forces, we could become much bigger than individual. That's really— that was really the idea.

For the moment though, it sounds like you're operating— is your technology still operating on its own for the most part as the engine at Swag.com, and then Custom Inks engine is over here? I mean, I'm asking it right now.

Right now it's totally separate, and And it might be that way, it might not be that way, but like in terms of way better shipping rates already, way better supplier prices already, you know, just the knowledge of how to do our warehousing has gotten a lot better. Everything, every aspect of our business is just getting better because they've done it and they figured it out. Their marketing team is helping our marketing team in terms of how to acquire more customers. You know, they've learned a lot of the things that work for them. Let's test those things for us and see if it works for us. Right? Like, there's just a lot of learnings that we could do across the board with SEO, with content marketing, with across the board, everything. So it just, it just kind of allows us to step up and kind of potentially skip many, many years of trial and error that every entrepreneur has to go through. Um, we feel like we kind of have a cheat code in some ways.

Yeah. Yeah.

Um, let's talk a little bit about you, Jeremy. This is the part that you probably don't want to talk about, but I want to talk about you and just your background. Your branding is brilliant. What brands— you mentioned Supreme and Kith.

Who is a company—

who else do you follow for inspiration? Where do you get inspiration?

So those are two big ones for swag specifically, not the colors, because they don't look like— the colors of swag are very different than Kith and Supreme, and those are more darker colors versus more poppy and colorful. But the essence of it, the high-quality photography, the positioning of products, just giving people feel like this warm warmth and this feeling of playfulness and quality. That was really— it was like when I designed the Swag brand with our designer and I thought of like how the layout and the colors, it had to feel quality and fun. Those were like the two big things, quality and fun. The other two brands I really have been following since I can remember is Lego and crayons, different kind of brands that kind of play to that playfulness and that younger self. And like my daughter, she loves Legos. Like we have So many Legos in the house because just the brand feels like anything is possible, anything could be built, and it really kind of connects that. And I wanted that same feeling for our customers. Like when they, when they see all the products on our site, anything's possible. They could create whatever they want. And I also, when they buy something from our site, I want them to feel proud of what they're buying. You know, our tagline is "We made this." It's not because swag.com made this t-shirt. It's that when you put it, if you work at Facebook and you put a t-shirt from Facebook you should feel pride and you helped build Facebook. You put a t-shirt on Twitter, you should feel pride that you helped build Twitter. It's all about this unlimited possibility, and that's what I really want to go for with the brand.

I love that, the Lego crayon. You can feel that energy in, in swag.com. What do you enjoy doing when you're not working?

Um, I love being outdoors, you know, in the ocean. I live on the beach, so being by the ocean, hiking, playing with my, with my kids, hanging out with my wife, you know, just family time and just normal stuff, working out, fitness, all the good stuff.

One question from our community that I'm always asked to ask is what recent book, resources, podcasts, articles that have really impacted your personal business growth?

Yeah, I have two books that play the big, big, big part of swag and just myself on a personal level. I used to work with a guy by the name of Jesse Itzler. I don't know if you're familiar with Jesse. Jesse is an amazing entrepreneur, but he's so much more than that. He started Marquis Jet, private jet company, sold to Warren Buffett. He started Zico coconut water, sold to Coca-Cola. He's one of the owners of the Atlanta Hawks. I worked with him for about 3 years in the office next to him. He is also an ultra marathon runner, so he ran 100 miles in one day. He's called the 100 Mile Man. And he has this book called Living with a SEAL where he hired a world-famous Navy SEAL, famous guy, David Goggins, if you're familiar, who moved into his house for 30 days and basically would tell him whatever he had to do and Jesse would do it. He wrote a book on it. And it basically was just— got me excited that like this seems like a fantasy land, right? It doesn't seem real, but I knew this person in real life and he was really like this person. And I just saw that anything is possible. Really, like, when you hit like 40% and most people quit when they hit like a maximum level, you're just at 40%. You have 60% to go. And I think it changed my mindset of really anything is possible. Like when we started the business, did I ever think that we would be doing $40, $50 million a year in sales? No, you don't think that. It seems like impossible, right? And I believe this is just the start. I believe we're going to be doing hundreds of millions of sales. Like, so how do you get into that mentality? And you really have to kind of unlock something in yourself. That says anything is possible. Really, anything is possible. And the second book on the similar vein is Shoe Dog, the Nike book. And I remember reading that book. I was on my way to Chicago in 2017, and we were part of this tech incubator called Techstars. And it just felt like this person who I was reading sounded like me. He sounded like just like an everyday kid who had an idea and was going to hustle and do whatever possible to make it work. And then you think of this person I'm reading is still alive and he created Nike, the most amazing, unbelievable brand in the world that everyone knows. And it felt like, why not? Why can't it be me? Like, why can't it be anyone? Like, anyone could do this type of thing. And I think just having that mentality of belief in yourself that there's unlimited potential, I think just, you know, it's kind of an unlock. It's like a major, you know, personal unlock.

You can feel that. Speaking of personal, last question for Jeremy. Who personally has mentored, influenced you the most? It may have been one of those who you already mentioned. What was your biggest lesson from them?

I would say my dad, if I had to say. My dad's an entrepreneur, so I grew up around entrepreneurs and seeing what it takes to build a business. So I would say just learning from my dad and seeing how he interacts with people and how people respond to him and how he's able to make things happen. Frankly, I mean, I remember stories even from when I was like 9 years old. We were in a hotel in Colorado and and my dad was trying to get an upgrade. So, he was talking to the person behind the desk and the person was like, "No, there's no way, not possible." I remember this vividly and my dad looks at me and he goes, "You hear that person say no, they really mean yes, they just don't know it yet." And, he ended up convincing and we got the upgrade and it was just one of these lessons that it's like if you treat people nicely, if you do things in the right way, good things will happen. And so, I've always taken those life lessons and leaned on him as a mentor and as an inspiration for me. As I'm building my business.

Yeah. Speaking of— last, I do have one more last question, Jeremy. You and Josh have such an amazing story, and you're listening, you're talking to an audience of, of entrepreneurs in the business that are starting. Go back to year one and talk to Jeremy the distributor in year one. What would you, would you say to him as a final word? How would you encourage him or her as they look at either a tough economic year next year, or just like you said about possibilities?? How would you encourage them over a cup of coffee?

Yeah, I would say this, and I think it's been one of the reasons why, thank God, I've been successful, is this fear. And there's a famous quote, I forgot who said it, "Fear kills more dreams than failure ever could." And a lot of young entrepreneurs, and I know people because I speak to entrepreneurs all the time, I'm always team entrepreneur and I always want to help people, you know, build something because I think being an entrepreneur is the most amazing thing you could be. You know, you're You're designing your life, you're designing the future. It's really an unbelievable thing. And I think when I was much younger, I allowed fear to control me and prevented me from doing the things that I wanted to do. And I think as long as you could kind of get out of your own way and know that you do not have the answers, no one does, but you're going to learn and you're going to take a step forward and you're going to learn from it and you're going to pivot and you're going to change. As long as you have that mentality, that you're not going to fail even when you put yourself out there as long as you learn from it and get better. And that's why whenever we launch something on swag.com, we've launched a lot of things and some things have failed and some things have worked, but we've always learned from the failures and we made it better and we pivoted and we changed it and we always got it to a place where ultimately it did work. So, as long as you have the mentality that you're going to figure it out, so don't just— don't prevent yourself, don't shoot yourself in the foot before you get started. I would say the second big thing that I've learned personally firsthand. I was building a social networking app when I was 25 years old, and I was riding high. I just sold my company to this publicly traded company. I thought I was invincible, and I built this social networking app called Vouch. You vouch for your favorite things, and it was basically the idea to democratize Oprah's favorite things for everybody, like building like the next version of Facebook. You vouch for your favorite movie and your favorite book, and your followers can follow you and like, see what you like and interested in, etc. And it never materially took off. We had hundreds of thousands of users, but it never really took to that next level that you need for a social networking looking at to make sense. The problem is, and one of the biggest reasons why it didn't work out, is because we didn't launch for the first year. We were so, so obsessed with the details of this site and what happens when somebody makes a swipe and this button appears or that button appears, what's the notification going to look like and what color. And I would lose sleep over every stupid detail. And what I realized after we launched is that all the things that I lost sleep over, nobody cared about. None of the customers cared about. The stuff that they wanted were stuff that I didn't even think about. Like, it was just like this whole different nuance. I've realized, get out of your own way and just start. Like, doesn't mean you have to build something. Like, for Swag, we started making sales from day one. We made $365,000 with a landing page that said coming soon. Just start. You can learn and make money and make sales at the same time. You don't have to wait until everything's perfect. So I would say that. Get out of your own way. Don't let fear control you, and you'll make it work.

I love it. Jeremy, thank you for spending your time with us today. I'm really excited about talking with you and sharing your wisdom with community, especially being so open about your journey. We appreciate it and wish you the best, my friend.

Thank you so much. Great to be here.

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