As the promo products industry continues to rebound throughout the year, you’ll likely find yourself searching for ways to help your clients repurpose leftover 2020 merchandise. Whether it was for meetings that didn’t happen or marketing messages no longer appropriate, you’ve probably offered to patch, sticker, or print over merchandise until your options have nearly run out.
As exhausting as this might be for many a promo products pro, look at it this way: you could have Major League Baseball as a client. With a truncated season played to mostly empty stands caused by COVID-19, MLB has a whopping 4 Million bobbleheads that weren’t given away in 2020. And for players now playing on a different team as the 2021 season opens, there’s really no sticker or patch that can fix that problem. That would be a hard client to try and find a silver lining (or a patch or sticker for).
That said, if you’re thinking about how to keep promo products out of the landfill, there’s actually an answer specifically designed for handling unwanted promotional merchandise, and it’s a service dedicated to the sustainable management of the end of the lifecycle. We first introduced SwagCycle to our promo products friends this last year, but thought it might be time to check back in and see how they’ve fared despite the pandemic.
Ben Grossman, founder of SwagCycle, was happy to catch up. Ben shared that he and his team at SwagCycle had found some success, despite the challenges, working over 20 projects through the end of 2020. SwagCycle was successful in keeping over 60,000 promo products items out of landfills. Equally as impressive, they facilitated nearly $170,000 in merchandise donations. Grossman said they helped a travel provider donate 1,000 obsolete BPA-free water bottles to the United Way for families in transition and they facilitated donating individually wrapped toothbrushes out of an obsolete pharmaceutical company patient kit to a non-profit providing dental services to needy children. SwagCycle even helped its parent company, Grossman Marketing Group, facilitate a donation of more than 6,000 cotton masks to the Greater Boston Food Bank. I don’t know about you, but those are the kind of heart-warming and business savvy stories I like to hear.
It’s been a long haul to get suppliers in our industry committed to sustainability, but it does seem that some change in attitude is on the horizon. The good news in making a true commitment is that 95 percent of wearables initially destined for disposal can instead be reused or recycled. For example, they can be made into industrial rags or reduced to fiber for creation of new products like yarn, paper, insulation, and carpet padding. Grossman told me they recently helped a home healthcare organization in Nebraska responsibly recycle old garments from their field staff, after they rebranded. “Their cotton shirts became painters’ rags” he told me, “and their polyester/blended apparel was shredded and recycled back into yarn.” Those are big wins — for the promo products industry overall — and for humanity in general.
Ben shared some additional details that I thought interesting. He said that right after COVID hit, inbound traffic to the SwagCycle website slowed dramatically. Over the summer, however, demand for services around upcycling and recycling promo products items exploded and inbound traffic and inquiries took off. “Major drivers were rebrands, cancelled conferences, and companies consolidating offices and wanting to find a home for their swag. Luckily, our early investment in SEO often made SwagCycle their first result on Google!”
When Ben Grossman and I first talked, he told me about their goal, which is to transform the branded merchandise industry by helping companies think about product stewardship, from the brainstorming phase all the way to the rebranding stage. This also means doing everything they can to help clients upcycle, recycle, and keep promo products out of the landfill. “This is something I’ve worked on for many years in a volunteer capacity for the Product Stewardship Institute. Our first-in-the-industry offering has been very well-received, by companies, charities and even promotional products competitors (of the Grossman Group), and we feel like we have a tailwind as we continue in 2021.”
I think that what we’re seeing with SwagCycle is a tailwind generated by a company focused on doing the right thing for suppliers, distributors, end-users, and most importantly, the planet. And that, my friends, is a most deserved tailwind after all.
Jeff Jacobs has been an expert in building brands and brand stewardship for 40 years, working in commercial television, Hollywood film and home video, publishing, and promotional brand merchandise. He’s a staunch advocate of consumer product safety and has a deep passion and belief regarding the issues surrounding compliance and corporate social responsibility. He retired as executive director of Quality Certification Alliance, the only non-profit dedicated to helping suppliers provide safe and compliant promotional products. Before that, he was director of brand merchandise for Michelin. Connect with Jeff on Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, or read his latest musings on food, travel and social media on his personal blog jeffreypjacobs.com. Email jacobs.jeffreyp@gmail.com.