Swag.com co-founder Jeremy Parker has transformed the promotional products industry. We explore his entrepreneurial journey, Swag.com’s growth strategies, and insights on market research and product curation. Jeremy shares how he adapted his marketing approaches and used customer feedback. We also discuss his new venture, Swag.Space, and how Swag.com grew to $40 million in sales. Jeremy also shares his views on the future of branded merchandise in corporate culture and marketing.

Episode Transcript

Adrian Tennant: Coming up in this episode of IN CLEAR FOCUS

Jeremy Parker: When you’re starting a business, you can’t be everything to everybody. You’ve got to figure out the exact right customer to be focused on. As an entrepreneur, you’re never batting a thousand. There’s some times you succeed, some times you fail. And from all my failures before, you know, you kind of learn what not to do. 

Adrian Tennant: You’re listening to IN CLEAR FOCUS, fresh perspectives on marketing and advertising produced weekly by Bigeye, a strategy-led full-service creative agency growing brands for clients globally. Hello, I’m your host, Adrian Tennant, Chief Strategy Officer. Thank you for joining us. The ability to disrupt traditional industries through innovative branding and technology is a powerful skill. As marketers and brand managers seek new ways to engage customers and differentiate their offerings, there’s much to learn from entrepreneurs who’ve successfully transformed established business models. Our guest today exemplifies this blend of marketing innovation and entrepreneurial spirit. Jeremy Parker is the co-founder of Swag.com, a company that has revolutionized the promotional products industry by applying cutting-edge e-commerce strategies to a traditionally offline business. Under Jeremy’s leadership, Swag.com grew from a startup with around $300,000 in first-year sales to generating nearly $40 million in revenue in just seven years, with clients including Facebook, Google, and Amazon. As you’ll hear, Jeremy’s success story offers valuable insights on leveraging technology to transform traditional business models, the importance of product curation in brand building, and innovative approaches to customer acquisition. To discuss his entrepreneurial journey, the growth strategies behind Swag.com, and his vision for the future of marketing and e-commerce, I’m delighted that Jeremy is joining us today from Miami Beach, Florida. Jeremy, welcome to IN CLEAR FOCUS.

Jeremy Parker: Thank you so much for having me. It’s great to be here.

Adrian Tennant: Well, Jeremy, your background is pretty diverse – from award-winning documentary filmmaking to serial entrepreneurship. How did your early experiences in filmmaking influence your approach to building businesses?

Jeremy Parker: That’s a good question. So my entire childhood, I wanted to be a documentary filmmaker. That was my true passion. And when I went to Boston University, I was in this communications program. I was a filmmaker. And we won this Vail Film Festival. And I had this realization. It was like one of these weird moments in life where we were on the top of the mountain. We just won this big film festival. The next morning, there was this quote-unquote celebrity brunch. And I walk into this big tent, and half the room were these major actors and producers and half the room are more struggling artists. And I asked myself two questions. It was like I could still remember to this day. I was about 18 years old at the time. “Do I love what I’m doing? Am I that good at it?” And both answers were “No.” And it was like this realization that even though I wanted to be a filmmaker my whole life, maybe this wasn’t the career path that I wanted. And I went back to college, I had a year still to go of my degree. And I finished and I had no experience besides being a filmmaker. So I thought, maybe I could start a business. Not that I knew I wanted to be an entrepreneur, but I figured that creating a film is very similar to actually building a startup. I thought that because it’s like branding. It’s telling a story. I’ve been trained to be a storyteller my entire life through filmmaking. With starting a business, you have to figure out the brand and get market awareness and positioning. And also there’s different aspects of business. You have to be a salesperson, right? You’re not just selling your idea to investors, you’re selling it to employees, you’re selling it to customers, you’re selling it to everybody. So I thought my skillset of being a salesperson or a storyteller could transition well into being an entrepreneur. So that was kind of how I got into the mindset of being an entrepreneur. I didn’t really know what the word entrepreneur was. I didn’t know what starting a business would entail, but I figured that I could just start and I could figure it out as I go.

Adrian Tennant: I gave an overview in the intro, but could you describe what Swag.com is and the types of customers you serve?

Jeremy Parker: Sure. So swag.com has become the best place for companies to buy quality promotional products that they actually want to keep. So imagine you’re Facebook and you have an event or a trade show, or you want to send some gifts to your internal employees, you would go on to swag.com. We have over 7,500 really high-quality products ranging from the standard t-shirts, notebooks, pens, mugs, umbrellas, all that kind of stuff that you could upload your logo, mock things up in seconds, and then order. And we handle all of the production, all the manufacturing. Facebook could decide if they want to have that swag sent to their office, right? So they could give it away. Or do they want to have that swag held in inventory? We built this inventory portal where Facebook and all the other companies that we work with can warehouse their swag and then upload a CSV file and send that swag to thousands of different addresses at once to reward people. We built a lot of technology. So basically, it takes all of the manual process of traditional swag buying, and we’ve automated it, streamlined it, and made the experience better. At this point, we work with nearly 20,000 businesses ranging from, you know, small companies like coffee shops to Facebook, Google, Amazon, Netflix, TikTok, all the big companies you can imagine. And we built a really simple experience where you don’t have to be a huge company or a small company to use us. It really works for every type of company. And we have different kinds of features that may work more for the enterprise. And we have other features that may work more for the consumer type of company, but it’s like the full gamut. And we launched this in 2016, and we became the fastest-growing company in the space. And in 2021, we were doing a little bit north of 30 million of sales that year. We were acquired by this company called Custom Ink, who is the largest player in the industry. And now for the last three years, we’ve been a division under Custom Ink.

Adrian Tennant: When you started Swag.com, you didn’t immediately launch with a website. Instead, I understand you spent the first year learning about the industry and your potential customers. How did this market research phase ultimately influence the business?

Jeremy Parker: Oh, it’s tremendous. As an entrepreneur, you’re never batting a thousand, right? There’s some times you succeed, some times you fail. And from all my failures before, you know, you kind of learn what not to do. And I’ll tell you like one quick story before I dive into what I did. Right before I started Swag.com, I had this mobile app called Vouch. It was a social networking app. about what your favorite things are. And I honestly believe it’s still a great idea to this day, but I wasn’t the right person to build it. And the reason why I wasn’t the right person to build it at the time is I spent a year, I don’t know if it’s ego or whatever it is, I thought I had the right answers, right? And I spent a year building out the solution that I thought was the right solution. So I lost sleep over every little detail of what color the buttons were, what happens when you move your thumb this way or that way, and all these different things. And after spending a year building out this mobile app, we launched it, and I realized all the things I lost sleep over, no one else cared about. It was like these 50 other things that people really wanted, and I realized I spent a year building the wrong thing. So when I started swag.com, I knew I didn’t want to fall on that mistake. And that’s a common error that a lot of entrepreneurs do. They build things in silos and they’ll get out of their own way. And I said, from day one, we’re just going to start talking to customers, learning from them, and hopefully making some sales along the way. But the main goal was to learn. And I’ll tell you the biggest thing we learned in our first year that I honestly think allowed us to succeed, frankly. When I started Swag.com, like every entrepreneur, you have to have a hypothesis. You have to have an idea of what you think is right. And it might be wrong, right? You might have to be okay learning that it’s wrong. But the initial idea for Swag was going exclusively after marketing teams. Because when I was thinking of who the buyer is for corporate swag, there’s all these different buyers. And I thought the marketing team made the most sense because you can have a team of 100 employees, but they could buy thousands of products for their best customers or leads. It didn’t really matter how big the company was, it mattered how big their marketing budget was. And they could spend outside spend. And if you could show a return on investment of the giving of swag, then it will incentivize them to buy more and more and more. The problem is every single time I spoke to these marketing teams within companies and I would reach out to them cold on LinkedIn, I realized everyone’s going after the marketing manager. It’s like, “How am I going to cut through the noise and win this?” And I realized it’s just overwhelming. It’s not possible. Like I’m just, “I have Swag.com domain. It’s a landing page – coming soon. How am I going to cut through the noise?” And I realized in those early conversations, this was like hundreds of conversations I had in the early days, is that maybe I should be focusing on the office manager. So the office manager has a much smaller budget. Imagine it’s a hundred-person company. They’re only responsible for buying for those a hundred people. If it’s a 10-person company, they’re only responsible for buying for those 10 people. It’s not the biggest budget. It’s a relatively small budget. But if you could get in the company through the office manager, they’re going to be buying t-shirts that say Swag.com in their label, and they’re going to be giving it to the marketing team or the sales team or this office or that office. They’re basically doing the marketing for you. So it was our way of getting in the doors, like a Trojan horse strategy to get in the company. And then from there we were able to expand. And I wouldn’t have known that. And I probably would have built the wrong solution because I would have had the wrong buyer in mind. And maybe I would have built a lot of features that were great for marketing teams, but weren’t great for the office manager. And I realized that, no, we’ve got to focus exclusively on the office manager in the beginning and build the right experience for them. And now, you know, we’re nine years in the business, and we have over a hundred employees. And we’re now obviously working with the office manager, the marketing team, the sales team, with everybody. But when you’re starting a business, you can’t be everything to everybody. You have to figure out the exact right customer to be focused on. And that key insight happened from those early conversations.

Adrian Tennant: Swag.com has experienced phenomenal growth from $365,000 in sales to nearly $40 million in just seven years. What marketing strategies were most effective in driving this rapid growth, do you think?

Jeremy Parker: My opinion with marketing strategies is that there’s always one right strategy for the right time in the business. So it’s not just like, “This is what you should do, and it’s going to work.” Every part of the business, there’s a different marketing strategy that makes more sense than the other. For example, when we were starting, we had no money. So I couldn’t just spend Google ads. I didn’t have money to spend Google ads. I didn’t have a brand name to do partnerships. We didn’t have anything. So I had to require on what I had. I had my voice. I had my ability to go and knock on doors. I had my ability to reach out to people cold. So I was a traveling salesman in the early days. That was the right marketing strategy in the beginning. And it was right for me to learn what the right customer was, what the right product to build is, but also to get those rolls of logos, that social proof that when people come to my site, they say, “Oh, Swag.com works with Facebook, Google, Amazon,” whoever, that will give confidence. So in the beginning, I was a logo hunter, but I was also looking for that social proof. So that was knocking on doors. Once we got enough customers and we learned enough and we built the first version of the site, now I had some money. So now I thought, “Let me bring in more revenue and also more users to give me more breadth of who’s going to use it and the feedback.” So I started to do Google ads. So our second year, it was all about Google ads and we spent a lot of money on Google ads. It wasn’t the most cost-effective, right? Because the platform wasn’t amazing, but it allowed us to get a lot more eyeballs on the platform and to learn a lot more in those early days. But then after the second year, we realized that we don’t have unlimited money to just spend on Google ads. “Let’s start to turn and go completely SEO, let’s go free marketing.” So in our third year, it was all about SEO and writing content, tons of content. Every week we would come out with five blog posts. And it wouldn’t be just Amazon was looking for swag, so let’s write a swag article. It was about “how do we get in front of the right buyer within the company?” And it didn’t matter if the topic was swag, it just had to be relevant to the actual buyer within the company. So it could be like, “How to stretch in the middle of your day,” or whatever it is, like “The best workouts for, you know, sitting at work,” nothing to do with swag. But we knew that office managers might want to read that. And if they read that, then they would come to our website and then we could retarget them and get them. So it was trying to think creatively. Then the fourth one was, “Well, now we’re in our fourth year and we’re doing in our fourth year, we did seven million of revenue. We’re starting to build a brand name. Let’s start reaching out to like-minded companies that offer a similar service, but in a different space. So imagine it was a company that sold snack food for the office. They weren’t selling swag, but they had the same buyer. Let’s partner with them.” And we did a lot of different partnerships. “Let’s focus on a company that maybe just does gifting.” We didn’t do gifting. We were more about bulk ordering and trade shows at that time. “Let’s partner with them.” So we had this brand recognition that we could do partnerships and that allowed us to step up and grow. Now at this part of the business, we’re doing everything right. ‘Cause you get to a level of what you’re doing, you know, you’re $50 million of sales and things are growing and then you start to do a lot of things at the same time. But I really want to stress to your audience, really try to figure out what is the right strategy at the right time. Because things might be working one day and it might not work the next day. And you have to be okay pivoting or okay realizing that maybe what got you here is not going to take you to the next level. So for me, it was always about figuring out what that right number one focus was at the right time.

Adrian Tennant: Fantastic advice. Now, I know you pride yourself on the quality and curation of your product offerings. How has your focus on premium brands and limited selections differentiated Swag.com from traditional promotional product companies?

Jeremy Parker: Sure. So yeah, that was our core ethos from the very beginning is having only quality products. If you go to some of our competitors and you look up mugs, you want to shop for mugs, it’s unlimited. There’s thousands upon thousands of pages of mugs. It’s impossible. So what is that? Number one, there’s no way that all those thousands of mugs on their site are good quality. I know this for a fact because we did test orders with our competitors and we realized that a lot of the stuff they sell is just not good. It ends up in the trash, which frankly is really bad for companies. If Facebook buys a thousand mugs that ends up in the trash, number one, they’re costing their company money. It’s not good. It’s not good for their environment. It ends up in the trash. Number three, it actually diminishes their brand because now their brand is associated with something as poor. So from the very beginning, it was only offering products that I would be proud to show off and to keep. So we did a lot of testing in the early days and still to this day of vetting and testing and making sure instead of offering a thousand mugs, we should offer the top 20 mugs. We should really be curated with the selection, which does a couple of things. Number one, people get caught in this paralyzation of choice. There’s too many options. They get paralyzed. They might not even be able to make a decision because I don’t even know what’s good. Now it takes that away and it says, “Here’s the top 25,” really make it easy for them to buy. So that was the first thing. Then after we had kind of the brand awareness of being known as the quality source, well, then it’s like the natural progression. “Well, if we’re doing the quality stuff, why don’t we really go and get the premium stuff, stuff that brands that have not maybe been in an industry before, really high-quality things that we can offer that no one else will even have?” So we’ve got a lot of brands on our site that other promo distributors don’t offer. And because of our brand and because of our platform, because of how we position ourselves, these really high-quality, premium brands actually want to work with us. Imagine it was a really high-quality brand. Do you think they would be wanting to be offered in JCPenney or a lower? They don’t. High-quality brands want to be near and associated with other high-quality brands. So we built this kind of safe haven for brands to try to break into the promo industry because they looked at us as not a traditional promo distributor or traditional site that sells swag. We elevated it. From the very beginning, when I was talking to my early investors, I said this as a joke, but it’s somewhat true. We wanted to be kind of like the Neiman Marcus of promo, like really think about how to elevate because we are a gifting platform, right? Traditionally people thought of as like tchotchkes and throwaway stuff, but it’s not. It’s often used as a gift, as a thank-you for something. So if you’re thinking of it in that way, in a different perspective, the quality of it is really the most important thing. So it’s not just the quality of products, it’s the quality of the print, it’s the quality of the experience, it’s the quality of the customer service. Like we’re not just a tchotchke business, we’re really trying to make this an elevated experience for people.

Adrian Tennant: Let’s take a short break. We’ll be right back after this message.

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Adrian Tennant: Welcome back. I’m talking with Jeremy Parker, a serial entrepreneur and the co-founder of leading promotional products company Swag.com. When we were preparing for this podcast, you mentioned to me that about 90 percent of Swag.com’s features were developed based on direct customer feedback. So I’m curious, Jeremy, how do you structure your process for gathering and implementing customer insights?

Jeremy Parker: It’s a great question. Early days, you know, as an entrepreneur, you start as the founder, obviously, but then you’re the CEO and you ultimately become the head of marketing, and head of sales, and head intern. You do all the jobs. So in the early days, it was a lot of myself talking directly to customers and learning directly from them. You know, as the business gets bigger and you have thousands of customers and you have hundreds of employees, it requires customer service people to be doing that. So every new hire that comes onto Swag.com, I am in charge of onboarding them. So they have their own process with their own team, but before they’re officially kind of stamped in and saying, “Now you’re off to the races.” I have a good hour session where I show them the platform and I train them up from my perspective, right? Everyone pitches things differently, but I want them to see why I designed the platform the way I did and why I think it’s beneficial. But I also want them to get the mindset of this is whatever you see today, even if it seems big and we seem to be doing great. It’s always just the beginning. There’s always more room for growth. There’s more ideas out there that we don’t even know about, that we can’t even conceptualize yet because we haven’t thought of it yet, or a customer hasn’t had that direct challenge yet. So it’s up to them to be on the front lines and to learn directly from customers what the features to build are. So literally an everyday thing, I have customer service reps on our team who send me ideas. “Hey, I spoke to a customer; they wanted this or that. I don’t know if it’s a good idea, I just wanted to put it on your radar.” So I still gather all these ideas, but now it’s coming from my team that’s actually on the front lines. And then as we get all these ideas, we have a spreadsheet of like tons of different ideas and we mark it off, at least how I do it. Every time there’s an idea that’s similar or the same as an idea that’s been asked, I just give a little checkbox or checkbox. And then you kind of look on a weekly basis. “This is a feature that is not just a one-off feature. This is a feature that seems to be a feature that a lot of people need. Maybe we should prioritize this.” And then I’ll go about designing it. Because most of the times customers don’t know exactly how it should work. They know what the problem is. They don’t know how the solution is. So I don’t ask for them to give me the solution. I ask for them to give me the problem. And it’s up to us to figure out the right solution to solve that problem. And then there’s obviously ideas that we just come up with, that we throw against the wall, that may work, may not work. I don’t know, even though we’re batting at this point in terms of averages, but I know there’s some ideas that we’ve come up with that have been great and some ideas that we spent a lot of time on and it never worked. But as long as you go into the mentality that 80 percent of the things I build, I know there’s a home for it because there’s been enough people that have recommended it, have asked for it. And it doesn’t mean that what we build is the right, exact right solution. It’s not going to solve all the problems, but it gets us closer. And what we find is you launch something, people, they look at it and say, Oh, this is great. It’s not great. I’ll make it better. And you iterate on it and you pivot and you change things. But at least you’re starting from a place of knowing that this is something that people actually need.

Adrian Tennant: Swag.com was acquired by Custom Ink in 2021, and you’re now working on a new venture called Swag Space under the Custom Ink umbrella. Jeremy, can you tell us more about this project and how it fits into your vision for the future of the promotional products industry?

Jeremy Parker: Yes, so Swag Space is an idea I’ve had since the very beginning of starting Swag.com. And I’ll give you an idea of what it is. In the first year of Swag.com, I was a manual sales rep, right? That was like my idea. I was knocking on doors, I was talking to customers, I was learning, and I was handling all the orders in a very manual way. I didn’t have any technology to streamline things. So imagine I was talking to Facebook, for example, and Facebook wanted five products. So I would have to first find those five products, create a deck for them. All that stuff takes time. I didn’t send it to Facebook. Facebook says, “Oh, I don’t like two of the products. Give me two more products.” I’d have to source, find two more products. Then they said, “Oh, I want the logo on the front.” So I had to price it out based on the logo in the front. All of this is manual. Then they said, “Actually, it’s too expensive. Can you make the logo instead of the three-color logo?” I want to make it a one-color logo. You got to go back to the drawing board. It’s a lot of back-and-forth emails. It’s very fragmented. All of these things take time. And then once the customer actually wants to order, I have to manually create an invoice. I have to collect sales tax. I have to remit sales tax. I have to do all these things. Then I get the order in. Then I have to place the order with the blank supplier, ship the blanks to a screen printer, and manage that process. Let’s say they also wanted a notebook. The notebook is not the same supplier of the blank, so I had to buy a notebook at a different supplier. Let’s say they wanted to consolidate everything into a kit, like a kitted box. I’d have to get like a 3PL to ship all those things together, consolidate it, and manage all this process. Now Facebook wanted to send those boxes to 1,000 different addresses. They would have to first send me a CSV file. I would have to go through this thousands of lists, make sure all the addresses are correct, then upload it. And it was a nightmare, but that’s what the process is. And that’s what the process is for 99 percent of our industry who don’t have an amazing tech solution. So when I was building swag.com from the very beginning, I thought, “There’s 23,000 promo distributors in the industry. The average promo distributor does between a hundred thousand and a million dollars a year in sales. They do everything the fragmented way, the way I just described to you. It’s very broken. It’s very manual. They spend about 80% of their time on fulfilling orders and about 20% of their time on selling. How can you flip the script? How can you give them their time back? How can you say, instead of spending 20% of your time on selling, spend 100% of your time on selling and allow us to do all of that back-and-forth technological streamlined nature of the work?” From the very beginning of building Swag, I was like, “This will be an amazing idea if we could white label the technology. But you can’t do that until you build the right solution.” So over the years, we’ve been building Swag.com to become the de facto best platform in the industry. And after we got acquired by Custom Ink in 2021, I was the CEO of Swag.com for the first two years. And then I went to the boss and I said, “I have this idea, I would love to take the technology that we spend, the millions and millions of dollar technology that we built, white label it, and give it for free to the other 20,000 promo distributors.” So now Jenny Promo, who’s doing half a million dollars of sales a year, and her entire life is dedicated to the fragmentation of the industry, now in seconds, she could upload her logo, her brand colors, and spin up a white labeled version of her site. No mention of swag.com, no mention of customing, no mention of Swag Space. Fully white label, it says Jenny Promo. It’s her site, it’s her URL, it’s her logo, it’s her everything. When her clients go through this checkout and order, it hits my back end and I become the de facto supplier. So I am allowing them to make way more sales on the front end through technology, but I’m also removing all of the work on the back end in terms of kidding boxes and warehousing distribution because we are this de facto supplier for them. And the idea is really big because we can help these 20,000 promo distributors and we can help out all the promo adjacency, the screen printers who might want to sell hard goods like notebooks and pens, the party planners, their clients want swag and their clients go to other people to buy swag. Why don’t the clients buy from the event planner? Graphic designers, if I’m a graphic designer and I create a logo for somebody, that client takes that logo and goes to a swag.com or a custom make or to whoever. Why don’t they order the swag through the designer? And the designer makes a big chunk of that portion of the money. So we want to enable and power, whether you’re in the industry today or you should be in the industry tomorrow, because of your adjacency and that your customer base is going to want this solution, we want to power everyone. So that’s kind of the big idea. The industry is about $25 billion today. I think the industries get significantly bigger if you allow people a much easier time of selling to a lot of different industries. So that’s my hope for it. And my idea is to really build this up for custom ink and then pass it off eventually so that somebody else can run the business. I see this as a feature and I want to help custom ink represent and be the center and the leader of this industry.

Adrian Tennant: I think that’s great. Every industry has its jargon. You used an acronym in the middle of that, which was 3PL. Can you just explain for us what 3PL is?

Jeremy Parker: Sure. 3PL is, think of it as like logistics and warehousing. If you’re a company like Facebook and you have thousands of boxes in stock and you want to warehouse it, you’re either going to get your own warehouse, which is very expensive, or you use like an outsourced warehouse. Like it’s called a 3PL. So we have different 3PLs all over the country. They’re not owned by Custom Ink or Swag.com. We outsource them. We use them. These warehousing do a lot of different businesses, but we built like a network of these 3PLs so that every single time Facebook buys a thousand boxes, we send it to the nearest 3PL or warehouse. If you think of it that way near Facebook’s at Facebook could easily get that whether they want to pull a hundred boxes to their office or upload a file and send those a thousand boxes to a thousand different addresses. It’s a much easier way to get spun up and have global logistics and infrastructure without having to build it out yourself.

Adrian Tennant: Makes total sense. Now, for listeners who are considering new ways to introduce promotional products into their external or internal marketing strategies, what advice would you give them?

Jeremy Parker: I honestly think you should check out Swag.Space. I really think we solve so many of these needs. It’s almost 10 years of doing work on this to streamline everything. It’s a very complicated industry. As I said, there’s so many products in the industry. There’s so many moving parts. Every product requires quality control, different print methods. There’s warehousing. It’s overwhelming. And I know this for a fact because I have designer friends who all the time say it would be amazing if I could sell swag. I just don’t even know how to do it because it’s complicated. It’s just so complicated. I didn’t even want to start it. And we’ve just removed the complication. Think of it that way. So many screen printer friends of mine who selling t-shirts and companies are coming to them and they’re the ones doing the own printing of t-shirts. And I said, “Why don’t you offer notebooks and pens and mugs and umbrellas? I’m sure your clients who are buying a hundred t-shirts from you, they probably want to buy a hundred notebooks, a hundred wearables.” It’s too complicated. There’s so many vendors. There’s so many printing methods. You know, everything’s just too complicated and we streamlined it. So I say, if you want to get an industry, I really believe you should check out Swag.Space. It’s a hundred percent free to use. We don’t charge anything for the platform. How we make our money is because of our buying power. And we’re doing hundreds of millions of dollars now between us and Custom Ink. We have really great pricing with our vendors. And every time we make a sale, we take a small piece of the sale and allow you to keep the majority of it. So there’s no upfront costs. There’s no work you have to do. All you have to do is create a site. Get in front of your customers. Maybe your customers require you to build the carts for them. We built tools where you could build a cart for your client, share the link to your client. All your client has to do is check out. Once they check out, we handle the rest.

Adrian Tennant: Great. Jeremy, how do you foresee the role of branded merchandise evolving in corporate culture and marketing strategies?

Jeremy Parker: Yeah, it’s such an interesting question because swag has been around for hundreds of years. I mean, honestly, it’s been around since George Washington had presidential pins. So it’s a relatively inexpensive marketing strategy when done right. Obviously, it can be really inexpensive, but then it’s many times done wrong because the product ends up in the trash and it hurts your brand more than it helps. But there’s a balance of quality and also price sensitivity. So really, I believe it’s going to be there for the long haul. It is affected by the economy in situations. So when the economy is really tight, like it is now, the swag industry is something that people think, “I’m not going to spend maybe three times a year. Maybe I’ll consolidate and only buy it for Q4 or for holiday season.” So I think it being an industry, in general, that kind of goes with the times. Strong economy, really strong. Down economy, a little bit weaker. But it’s never going to be an industry, in my opinion, that goes away because it’s such an important feature. And not only for marketing, but internal. When you wear a t-shirt for your own business, you feel more connected to the brand. Our tagline at Swag.com is, “We Made This.” And not because we wanted to have on every single label, Swag.com, we made this, which is part of it. I wanted to let everyone know that Swag.com was the one who printed this. But I wanted the people who put the shirts on to also feel like we made this business. If you’re wearing a Facebook shirt and you’re an employee of Facebook, you made Facebook. If you’re wearing a Netflix shirt, you made Netflix. So you feel more connected to the mission and to the goals and it builds community. And also say is like – even just think about like sports teams. Like when you’re walking down the street and if you’re into a sports team and you see somebody else wearing that same sports team, it’s like the unifying connector of like what brings you together. It could start a conversation. Otherwise, you just walk and you think you have nothing in common with the person. It’s a way to kind of bring people together and maybe they didn’t even know that they were connected. So swag to me is such a powerful thing, if done right. And I think there’s a lot of room for growth, but I truly do believe it kind of goes with the economy. It’s one of those kind of industries.

Adrian Tennant: Great conversation. Jeremy, if listeners would like to learn more about you, Swag.com or Swag.Space, what’s the best way to do so?

Jeremy Parker: You can reach out to me, my email is jeremy@swag.com. And obviously check us out, swag.com, S-W-A-G.com. Or check us out if you’re looking to start a swag business or you wanna start selling swag to your audience, you’re a promo adjacent, as I described, a designer, an event planner, a screen printer, somebody who’s just getting out of college or who’s in college who wants to start a business. It’s like a business in the box. Check us out at swag.space and reach out to us. Love to hear from you.

Adrian Tennant: Jeremy, thank you very much for being our guest this week on IN CLEAR FOCUS. 

Jeremy Parker: Thank you for having me. 

Adrian Tennant: Thanks again to my guest this week, Jeremy Parker of Swag.com. As always, you’ll find a complete transcript of our conversation with timestamps and links to the resources we discussed on the IN CLEAR FOCUS page at bigeyeagency.com. Just select Insights from the menu. Thank you for listening to IN CLEAR FOCUS, produced by Big Eye. I’ve been your host, Adrian Tennant. Until next week, goodbye.

TIMESTAMPS

00:00: Introduction

01:30: Meet Jeremy Parker: Entrepreneurial Journey

04:24: What is Swag.com?

06:14: The Importance of Market Research

10:06: Effective Marketing Strategies for Growth

13:35: Focus on Quality and Curation

16:43: Gathering Customer Insights

21:24: Introducing Swag.Space

26:34: Understanding 3PL

27:40: Advice for Using Promotional Products

29:20: The Future of Branded Merchandise

31:32: How to Connect with Jeremy Parker

32:01: Conclusion and Thanks