Fast Company’s "Cheap Conference Swag" Article Struck a Nerve but Missed Its Mark

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. SkewCast is the official podcast of Common Skew.

Last week, Fast Company published an article titled, "Can We Finally Kill Off Cheap Disposable Conference Swag?" We wrote a rebuttal titled, "Fast Company's Cheap Conference Swag Article Struck a Nerve, But Missed Its Mark." And the response from the industry was overwhelming. Many of you shared it with your teams, You emailed us and told us how encouraging the response was. And as we do from time to time, we thought we'd share that article with you here on the SkewCast. Hi friends, I'm Bobby LeHew, the Chief Content Officer at Common Skew. Mark Graham, co-founder and Chief Brand Officer at Common Skew, wrote the article along with me, and I asked Mark to hop on the SkewCast for just a few minutes and talk about why we wrote the article. But before we get to the article, I want to make a quick mention. Today we open registration for SKUCON. SKUCON 2023 is the industry's most radical and inspirational experience. It's built for distributors and suppliers in the promotional products industry who want to connect, learn, and re-energize alongside other progressive, like-minded pros. It's not just another business conference. SKUCON sits at the cutting edge of merch life, featuring talks by tomorrow's leaders, stories from pros in the trenches, and radical thinkers who will push you and your team to dream and grow. SKUCon will be held on Sunday, January 8th at the Keep Memory Alive Center in Las Vegas. But this year we also have a bit of a surprise for those that can't make it to the in-person event in Las Vegas. You can still join us virtually on January 19th. That means if you go to SKUCon in person and are only able to take a few colleagues, now you can invite the entire team to join in on the experience. Join us to hear Michael Bungay Stanier, whose book The Coaching Habit has sold over a million copies, Allie Delgado, CEO of Merchology, Nick Cessaris with PolyantX, who will talk about Web3, Travis Veit and Caleb Gilbertson, the founders of Imprint Engine, Jeff Becker with Codis Design, and more. You can check out the full lineup and register you and your team at skucon.com. Now here's my quick chat with Mark, and then on to the article, Fast Company's Cheap Conference Swag article struck a nerve but missed its mark. So Mark, why did you think it was important that we respond to this article?

Bobby, I think it was important that we respond to this article because I think the Fast Company article was a broad mischaracterization of the promotional products industry. And here's what I mean by this. I think there's a lot of people that would read the Fast Company article and nod their heads and say, you know what, a lot of the industry is filled with trinkets and trash and cheap disposable conference swag, to use the author's term. And to be honest, I think Mark Graham of many years ago would've felt the same way. As you know, and you and I were both distributors before our time at Common Skew, And while we were really proud of the work that each of our distributor companies did on behalf of our clients, I don't think that we would've ever thought we produced cheap and disposable swag. In fact, just the opposite. So I think back in those days, we probably had a very narrow view because the view was just on what our distributor firms produced. And I think what's been so powerful about this move into common SKU and the view that we have and the relationships that we have with so many different distributors, big distributors, small distributors, medium-sized distributors, agency distributors, transaction distributors, program distributors, right? The list goes on and on. That me personally, my view of the industry has never been more broad and more open than ever. And when I read the article, I felt that the author was writing about an industry of many years ago as opposed to an industry of today that's evolved and where there are so many different players, so many different distributors that are out there that are producing different campaigns for different buyers. And I think that's the thing that's really, really important, that if you're producing a great campaign for your buyer and the buyer values what you're producing for them, then that's not landfill if it's getting used. And I think that that's the thing that has been a real wake-up call for me over the last couple of years, and it felt it felt personal to me. And I felt that it was important for us to write our perspective in almost the article that the author was not able to write herself because she doesn't have the same depth of experience in the industry.

Right.

So how about you, Bobby?

I felt like there has been a tremendous shift that has occurred in the industry. When you see traditional suppliers, for example, who are making big headway into this topic where large percentages of their product are now very sustainably focused, I just felt like we needed to spend some time. I don't want to, I don't want to be too Pollyanna about this, but spend some time celebrating the progress that we're making because it's so easy to pick on an aggregate, on a group. It's so easy to say the airline industry is crap, the automobile industry is crap. There's just too many easy things you can lob at them. And when you dig down in the particulars, you're seeing some pretty exciting things going on. So I felt like we needed to speak out in a way to coalesce our own thoughts around look the progress that has happened. And two things, I remember when we were interviewing Seth, you know, he talked about this also being a buyer battle too. Like it's not just a seller battle, it's a buyer battle. So it's about us educating the audience as well. So I felt like that was a really important perspective that we should bring in to the conversation. But mainly, I think the biggest analogy I keep drawing is that there are Tesla-type companies in the industry who do nothing but sell sustainable products. And then there are the GMC, Ford companies that are trying to literally convert their entire factory and a large percentage of their inventory, and they're heading toward the right direction. And I'm sort of haunted in a good way by Katie Konovitz's comment about how we're all in the sustainability, and they're very good progressive leaders in this. We're all on our own journey. We're all evolving into this. So I felt like it was just a moment to step back and say, look at where certain people in this industry are now, where they have evolved to. And we've got a lot of work to do. Nobody would deny it, but it just needed to pause for a minute and acknowledge the hard work that people have made in progress in this area.

Absolutely. Um, So Bobby, are there any audience reactions that stood out to you when we shared this to the community?

Yeah. I was actually overwhelmed by the number of responses to this because we received many private messages that were talking about their struggle because they did not identify with this promotional products industry that she was, um, slighting in the article. They didn't at all. They are very conscientious distributors and professionals. And like Seth said in the interview, you know, that is what a professional does, is guide their clients. So we— I was sort of overwhelmed by the, the volume as well as the stories that we got, one after another after another, whether someone would— had dissuaded a client, whether someone had used inexpensive branded merchandise to bring big ROI to a client and it worked and it was valuable and kept it. Just the stories came in that were fantastic. How about you, Mark?

Well, I, I wanted to, um, bring up a podcast conversation that we had with Joshua Wolf, um, probably about a year ago. Um, Joshua, great member of the community, uh, distributor based out of, uh, Brooklyn. And we were having a conversation about sustainability and And he was making this comment that I think is a good reminder, that he was saying so many people are quick to condemn the cheap tote bag or the cheap water bottle because it's inexpensive or it's not cool or whatever the case may be. And then he was contrasting that with its counterpart at retail, right? So more expensive, more fashion-forward tote bag or water bottle. And his point was the seemingly cheap and inexpensive tote bag and water bottle that gets used and coveted by the end client is actually exponentially more eco-friendly than the fancy water bottle that never gets used.

Right.

And that's not a mind-blowing comment. I think that obviously makes a lot of sense. But I think for me, what it really drove home is that what works for one particular client doesn't necessarily work for another kind of client. And the whole point of this is making sure that you can design a product campaign that delights the end customer and is highly relevant for that particular use case. And if that's the case, the product gets used and used and used and used, which is the very definition of sustainability. So I think that's the key. And that's, I think, the other nuance about this article is that there was almost, it almost came across as a bit elitist to suggest that the cheap trinkets and trash were these landfill monsters. And to be clear, there is a problem to some extent. But to paint it with a broad brush, to me, I felt was not correct. And I think we wanted to highlight a number of stories where that's not necessarily the case. And I love that interview with Josh because I think it really drove home that it really has to do with how it is that you connect with that particular end client. And that has to do with program design and intentionality for a wide range of customers. So that way it's not this elitist conversation about retail piece that is a $30 drinkware at the expense of one that's $1.99. And I think at the end of the day, it just has like, who is this going towards? And I think that's classic marketing. So I wanted to bring that point up because that bothered me about the article.

The one thing that I think is critical for us to remember is that if you've ever struggled to accomplish a big endeavor, Mark, you ran a marathon, You condition and you run, and when you hit these big mile markers, they fuel your progress forward. What we wanted to do with the article was note the progress we made because we still have a lot of work to do, and that too can fuel our progress forward. To me, it can be inspirational for us to pause and go look at what these amazing companies have done in this industry on this topic. And just like you hitting that 12-mile mark on your first time, that was— you're heading toward 26.2. That's a big breakthrough, and it's just going to lead to even greater and better development. That's the cool thing about our industry is that we're— people say we're really resilient, but we're also incredibly adaptable. Yep. Yep.

Absolutely.

Well, thank you, my friend. Here now is the article. Here's the thing about that piece on swag by Elizabeth Segran in Fast Company. It missed the mark. Where Fast Company is right: No one wants the return of useless, low-quality conference swag that ends up in the trash. No one. Not recipients, not buyers, and surprise, not even sellers. Where Fast Company is wrong: Conflating useless swag with a branded merchandise industry that has evolved. Liz Segran with Fast Company just published an article, "Can We Finally Kill Off Cheap Disposable Conference Swag?" She writes, "Conferences are back, but do the cheap water bottles and stress balls need to come back with them?" Liz initially wrote an article in Fast Company in 2018 titled "It's Time to Stop Spending Billions on Cheap Conference Swag." This article started a relationship between Liz and us, and we invited her here on the SkuCast and later at one of our events, SkuCon, to discuss the topic. We agreed with some of Liz's points then and respectfully disagreed with others. But we particularly disagree with her now only because there's more to the story. Here's why. The pandemic did change the promotional products industry. Conferences disappeared, and with them, a purge happened in the industry. Cheap, thoughtless, and unintentional selling washed away an entire sector of the industry. Buyers also became pickier. They had tighter budgets. Campaigns that demonstrated clear ROI became the standard. In fact, you could say what emerged from the pandemic is the tale of two industries. At one time, the promotional products industry was filled with a host of businesses who made and sold swag with no or very little thought to the impact on our planet. Words like sustainable and eco-friendly were not yet common coin in mainstream business. Back then, both sellers and buyers bought and sold with little regard for downstream effects, and thus the "trinkets and trash" business earned its name. But today, a different industry exists. As the world became more conscientious about impact, sustainability affected every sector, including the promotional products industry. A new crop of entrepreneurs, makers, agencies, and leaders emerged. The "trinkets and trash" industry grew up. Outgrowing even the swag moniker, a namesake that would evolve into something much more highly coveted: the branded merch industry. Semantics aside, that's the tale of another, different industry altogether. The new branded merch industry. Liz's article cites one of these new classes of entrepreneurs, our friend Simon Pollet, at his great business in Belgium called Merchery, which sells sustainable swag. You can listen to a previous SkewCast chat we had with Simon. But Simon is not the sole voice in this fight. Simon represents a swath of conscientious promotional products companies that now put the planet first. At our first-ever Product Summit Sustainability, a conference focused solely on sustainable promotional product solutions, participants and attendees came from all over the world and represented some of the most conscientious sellers of promotional products, including Eco Promotional Products, Fareware, and Eco Imprints, who spoke on how to sell sustainably and avoid brand fill. These companies existed before the pandemic and were created as a model, as the anti-drinkets-and-trash industry, staking a claim on the ground of sustainability to sell smarter solutions. It was our friend Jamie Mayer, co-founder of Swerve Point, who first coined the term brand fill, notable because this term came from within the industry, created by an industry practitioner who wanted to fight senseless spending by buyers with a more strategic selling method that was smarter for the planet and more impactful for brands. And for an outside perspective, probably the gold standard of perspective, the B Corp list in this new promotional products industry is growing rapidly. Promotional products agencies like Twelve NYC and Harper Scott make sustainability actually beautiful, combining incredible design with sustainable sourcing all while absolutely nailing brand objectives through strategic intent. And on the manufacturing side, examples abound. Raining Rose, PCNA's ProudPath, Gemline, SanMar, Cutter and Buck, Alpha Broader, HPG, and many, many more. Though many of these companies preexisted in the trinkets and trash days, they revolutionized their own companies, a much heavier lift. Completely upending their sourcing and product selection to make sustainability a priority. And this is worth mentioning. For the promotional products industry, sustainability is more than the types of materials we use. Creating a more sustainable industry means impacting the lives of others, which includes our local communities and manufacturing communities overseas, all throughout the supply chain. For a sterling example, of how merch companies positively impact people's lives. Here's an excerpt from our SkewCast recording with Cotopaxi's CEO, Davis Smith, and his talk on supply chain philanthropy. I think one very instructional part of the way you've built your business is around product design and supply chain philanthropy. And one part of Cotopaxi's mission is this. Can you explain what that phrase means, supply chain philanthropy, and how it helps throughout the supply chain?

Yeah, you know, yeah, this is a great question, Bobby. So I think one of the ways, the most obvious way that people think about businesses doing good is giving away profits. It's giving away their money to go help in the world in some way, and that's certainly an important part of it. But for us, it just felt, it would feel disingenuous if we were saying we're going to go help fight poverty if within our own supply chain, the people touching our own product were living in poverty. We needed to make sure that wasn't the case. And so we've invested a lot into our supply chain, making sure that we're using partners that are aligned with our values. We use a number of fair trade factories. We've gone into factories and we don't have anything prescriptive. It's not like we come in and say, okay, you have to do this, you have to do that. We come in and listen and we ask questions and we find opportunities to have an impact in each community. So, you know, one of our factories, we, we invested in building a community garden where the factory workers could take fruits and vegetables back home to their families every night. You know, we have another factory where we started, we empowered the sewers to go design their own bags using remnant materials. Instead of telling them what to sew, they could be creative themselves. And so, you know, every factory has unique challenges and unique opportunities, and so we try to understand those and It's really amazing the impact that you can have on so many people just by working in your supply chain to be more ethical instead of just driving down price to the half penny, which people do. We're not as concerned about that. It's like, let's pay fair wages. Let's pay the factory fair prices for what we're going to make. And if we do this right, we believe that, you know, customers will support us.

And not only do astounding makers and agencies exist within this new industry, there are now swag companies who specialize and rescuing obsolete merch from landfills, like our friend Ben Grossman and his ingenious company Swagcycle. Which means that when a promotional product salesperson approaches a buyer, not only do they have a solution that will help them achieve their brand objectives, but now they even have a discard solution to upsell or recycle what doesn't get used. How's that for full-service sustainable solutions? And we could go on and on and on with examples from the companies who have since entered the industry, like Mere, TenTree, and more. The list we cite here is small only because we don't have the space or time to list the hundreds of companies like our friends at Whitestone and thousands of conscientious, sustainably focused salespeople who thrive in this industry, who daily steer clients away from thoughtless merch towards sustainable solutions or even solutions with no product at all. Yes, it happens. The branded merch industry is no longer the industry of yesterday. And it is no longer a small handful of companies who tilt towards sustainable solutions as some arm-twisting capitulation to demand. It's a full-on race to save the planet. Sustainable initiatives are no longer driven from outside in. The most radical solutions for sustainability now come from inside the promotional products industry. To think, if Ford and Chevy decided to completely reform their companies and work towards solely sustainable solutions, they would achieve an impact on the planet no Teslas could ever reach. That's the kind of revolution happening within the merch space. Why is this even happening? Because promotional products companies are founded by the same people who care as deeply about the planet as anybody else. People who understand that filling the earth with cheap brand fill not only destroys our beautiful planet, but pollutes the brands who participate in it. A great disservice and poor reflection of the real work we do every day. So let's agree with Liz and call conference swag that ends up in a hotel room trash can exactly what it is: buying and selling with no conscience and little to no strategic intent. But let's also acknowledge that this problem is not just a supply problem coming from the promotional products industry. It's both a supply and demand problem. Liz's article noted that, quote, Based on Givsley's data, 40-60% of people would indeed prefer a material object to something more ephemeral, like a donation. Which is why branded merch companies exist. The very generations— Gen Z and Millennials— that usher in more conscientious and sustainable buying also love their brands, and they love strategically designed and thoughtfully produced merch. And their obsession for branded merch has skyrocketed. Sites like Hypebeast constantly highlight the roaring trends of merch through the lens of fashion and design as it relates to brands people love. For a primer on the sensation happening in the world of merch and brands, check out our interview on the SkewCast we did with journalist Adam Bluestein, How Supreme Style Merch Drops Took Over Corporate America. The shocking truth: swag companies who sell with no intent do so because they serve an audience of buyers who buy with no intent. But don't ask us, ask Seth Godin. Recently, we interviewed Seth about his stellar new book, The Carbon Almanac. Partway through the interview, we asked Seth about a small post he wrote that illustrated how very simple purchasing decisions destroys our planet. It's worth every second of your 2 minutes, and note The Fast Company mention, that was not planned. Pure serendipity. Here's Seth. You recently posted about a simple bottle design at a Hilton you stayed at that demonstrated how poor design likely ends up creating landfill. Many of us are now awakening to the fact that the materials we use are not the only way we can make an impact, but rather impact starts at design and intent. Can you share more thoughts on that? Right.

So let's go back to systems. Hotels are only a couple hundred years old. And the expectation in the last only 30 years is that when you went to a hotel, there would be an individual sealed bottle of shampoo for you. Well, that decision by one designer at one hotel chain led to, I don't know, 100 million, a billion bottles being created. They could have made a different decision, which is the standard's going to be there's going to be a pump on the wall. And you're going to press a button and some shampoo is going to come out and we're going to refill it every year. Right? That was a choice that led to a system. And so, my blog post was about a particular series of choices that well-meaning, hardworking people at Hilton and Cisco made that led to a bottle that was hard to open, hard to read, hard to use, and ended up in large quantities in the trash. And this industry that you're in, that Marc is in, has some stars in it, but it also has a whole bunch of people who are victims of the system who are making really cheap, crappy stuff that's produced offshore in large quantity because your clients want the cheapest thing they can put their logo on that lasts for 4 minutes and gets thrown in the garbage. Even if we don't care about the climate impact, as a marketer, that's lazy work. And just letting the client have what they want, which is a checkbox isn't you being a professional. There are other items. I still have them that, you know, you got a tote bag 18 years ago at a Fast Company conference. It's one of your treasured possessions. And it replaces hundreds of bags that you could have used and disposed of. Did it cost Alan and Bill an extra $2 to make that bag? Yeah, it did. But I'm glad they did. Someone advised them. Don't make crap. Make something that's gonna stick around because it's your brand that's on it.

Cheap conference swag isn't the enemy here. Thoughtless, unintentional buying and selling is. A cheap water bottle that is loved and kept and used hundreds of times over its lifetime keeps thousands of bottles out of landfills. And yes, eliminate plastic altogether, but sometimes a cheap plastic bottle that gets loved by constant use is only a small step. But an important step in the right direction. And because of the tremendous strides taken by the companies mentioned here and many more, from the supply side, we are eliminating thoughtless merch like stress balls at conferences from the solution equation. Our friends over at Brand Fuel believe so strongly in it that they forbid the selling of stress balls through their merch company. None. Cheap conference swag that nobody uses and everyone tosses in the trash is not what this new industry is about. In fact, if a branded merch solution, cheap or expensive, that we sell ends up in the trash, we didn't do our damn job. The job we were paid to do and do every day: create merch that people love and keep. And let's admit it, this conflict for us as an industry is an internal conflict we live with, like the conflict you as a consumer live with when you choose that cheap shirt through your favorite fast fashion retailer. Retailer because of the price or the fit, or when you choose to drive that fuel-powered car because you love the look. It's a conflict that rages in all of us. We are, each of us, progressing on our path toward eradicating waste in our lives and replacing conscienceless consumption with positive alternatives that do no harm. What we, the promotional products industry, wish everyone buyers, journalists, and consumers would see. The sustainability conversation is no longer us versus them. We agree that thoughtless swag destroys the planet. We're so passionate about it that we are leading the transformation ourselves. It's why at Commsky, we highlight these companies and the projects we love, and why we do things like invite Liz to our conferences as a speaker to share her passion and belief about sustainability so we can bring all opinions to the public arena to help change our hearts and minds so that we can grow better together. The pandemic, for all its heartache, helped purge a huge sector of flagrant, useless selling and buying of swag, creating a divide between the industry that was then and the industry that is now. That's where Liz is right. She's right to point out that as events and conferences pick up again, we need to be conscientious about selling and buying branded merchandise. But where Liz is wrong is that this industry has a past but also a future. Shaming an entire industry for the blight they create on our planet is sometimes necessary, but also easy. Pick on any major industry—airline or automotive, for example—and if you aim criticism at such a large target as an entire industry, your criticism will hit its mark. But dig a little deeper, and you'll discover that within that seemingly careless and thoughtless industry emerges a truer picture —an entirely different story. A new industry is emerging, full of people, makers, and agencies who care deeply enough to know that this turn towards sustainability will have an impact on senseless spending. But also, an industry that is willing to take the risks, maybe even the loss, on a matter of principle for the sake of our planet. It's a tale of two industries. And this new one is one we're damn proud to be part of.

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