Influencer Swag is a worldwide hit with Notion!

Meet Notion

For productivity gurus and minimalists, Notion is a familiar name. The company made a splash on the productivity scene in 2017 with a question — what if there were a single tool that could do practically everything people needed to work together?

The answer: Notion, an “all-in-one workspace for notes, projects, wikis, and databases.” Notion caught on, and the team noticed a trend. “It was pretty organic. People all over the world were building Facebook groups, starting meetups, teaching classes, writing manuals and guides, producing videos and webinars about Notion and it was like the same people doing this over and over in different geos,” says Ben Lang, Marketing at Notion.

The Notion Ambassador Program was created to empower and support power users doing cool things in the ecosystem. “It's a small, small group that we invest a lot in," says Ben. 

But they soon came across a problem. He explains, “As part of the program, we wanted a way to send out swag to these ambassadors to use at their meetups and give out to their local communities. Originally I was doing that myself.”

"We started by just kind of printing it off of Moo and Stickermule and some other companies, and I would go to the post office, and I filled out so many forms because we were sending mostly international. So I was sending these to Korea, and Japan, and Paris, and Berlin, and filling out these crazy long customs forms. I would just spend so much time at the post office doing that.”

“Basically I had this massive backlog of swag I had to send out, and I don't think I realized just how long I had to spend at the post office to do this. [It was] just not enjoyable.”
 — Ben Lang, Marketing at Notion

It wasn’t scalable, and Ben started to look for a solution. “The top priority for me was to reduce the amount of time I was spending at the post office, like how I could be more productive?”

Sending swag the easy way

You might say taking the all-in-one approach is a familiar philosophy for the Notion team. Ben says, “I didn't want a one-part here, one-part there [solution]. It wouldn't really help us. [I was looking for] shipping and warehousing and kind of like the all-in-one solution for everything swag-related. [With SwagUp] we can just do everything together and so that, that seemed a lot more compelling than any other solution.”

So, back to the post office situation. How did it play out? “We were sending out so much international stuff, and also in big quantities, it just made it impossible to continue doing. At a certain point we [also] wanted to use swag for a couple of campaign launches, and getting more organized and knowing like what we had left, making packs of swag — I think that would have been impossible for us to do on our own. We just don't have the bandwidth for that,” says Ben. 

“[With SwagUp,] it went from spending like a couple of hours a week to just five minutes with the same type of impact. Really delighting people through those kinds of things is super impactful, especially when it's scalable and easy for us.”

Ben adds, “We worked with Michael in the beginning, [and] whenever we started working together, he was like, super, super responsive and very, very, easy to work with. So it was pretty easy to set up.”

The verdict?

As anyone who’s ever been responsible for swag before knows, it gets messy. “[Before SwagUp] we probably did like 4 or 5 different types of swag, and we tried to keep it pretty simple; I'd imagine if we did a lot more it'd be much more difficult. [Now it’s] definitely a lot more convenient to just have one place where we can just do that,” says Ben.

“In terms of the time we save and the ease of use, and how effective it is, it's a no brainer investment. Anytime someone asks me about swag, I just tell them to go to SwagUp”
— Ben Lang,  Marketing at Notion

“It's not exactly the easiest thing to quantify given it was just like messy before, but in terms of the time we save and the ease of use, and how effective it is, it's a no brainer investment. Notion is a unique community all around the world. Anything we can do to support that, to help the community grow, and to help people feel a part of that is great.”

We asked Ben if there was anything that surprised him. “The customer support is really incredible. Just like how fast and responsive SwagUp is. There were a couple times where our ambassadors had events and we wanted to send them swag. And we’d only placed the order like 3 or 4 days before.”

“I would just message through Intercom like, Hey, we need this swag in two days, and every time that happened, it would work out. It's definitely always felt like a service. Like people I could just trust with this, which is not a given when you're in such a complicated logistical business.”

And the Notion team is killing it with their swag (take it from us - we see a lot of swag).

“We send out holiday cards, like handwritten holiday cards, to people that we really appreciate. We have a Slack group and they'll post like, “Hey, I got some swag!” and “I'm so happy I got my swag.” They love the branded boxes and bags... then they just go out and share it with people which is neat.” Your turn! Ready to see how an all-in-one swag solution can work for you? Talk to a Swag Expert today.