SwagUp - Create, Automate, Distribute High Quality Swag

Employee Engagement

Getting Remote Employees Swag In a Breeze

See how getting remote employees swag can be a breeze! No pun intended! Breeze was looking for a company to do just that and then they stumbled upon SwagUp.

Meet Breeze

For Breeze, it’s all about simplicity. The company was launched six years ago to help small to mid-size churches manage their data in a very simple and affordable way.

“The thing we always talk about is our people, our price and the product,” says Elizabeth Reed, Operations Coordinator at Breeze, “That’s what we really pride ourselves in, and that’s sincerely what most of our employees enjoy the most.”

And the Breeze team means it. When people call asking for help, they aren’t bombarded with instructions to click various buttons.

“Our team is not like click this and click that, it’s let’s figure out the best way to set this up and let’s walk through this together,” says Elizabeth.

Growing team culture at scale

As the team at Breeze grew, they had a new challenge on their hands: how do you manage swag for a team of remote employees?

“Everyone’s remote [and] with us being all remote, and a lot of companies requiring you to order in bulk, I had to keep all of the stuff at my house somewhere in my home that my kids would not mess up so that was becoming difficult to manage,” says Elizabeth.

Making sure you have swag in stock is a challenge even for non-remote teams, and a messy challenge at that. “[It’s difficult] just having to make sure I had everything in stock and manually having to look at my closet and see, how many mediums do I have left? Oh gosh, I have to order more,” says Elizabeth.

But learning about the various requirements for ordering in bulk with different companies was just the tip of the iceberg.

“It’s a whole process of making sure this is the date, this many days before that date I need to go to the post office, and a week before that I need to get it wrapped and prepped. Plus go to the store if I don’t have enough wrapping paper or crinkle paper.”

Elizabeth knew there had to be a better way.

“Having to find a cute box, wrap it, package it, hand-write the note, go to the post office, get it shipped off before an employee’s birth date or start date as we were growing took a significant amount of time out of my weekly schedule.”
—Elizabeth Reed, Operations Coordinator at Breeze

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At first, she looked for companies that could help her brand boxes and items in bulk.

“I was weighing the cost involved with having to bulk order all of this stuff and then keep it at my house, like warehouse it. The costs were just going to not be reasonable.”

So she changed her approach. “I thought, I wonder if there’s a company out there that has all the branded stuff in stock and you just tell them ‘this this and order it’ and they ship it for you. A company that keeps all the merchandise, or the swag, so to speak and ships it for me. Those were the two things I was looking for.”

While looking to Pinterest for inspiration on a new employee box, Elizabeth stumbled upon a picture of a SwagUp pack.

From there she landed on our website and was reminded of Breeze. “I love how clean and simple the website is, it reminded me of our product, not overly complicated, super simplistic. Being able to pre-select items and have an idea, a preliminary quote, it was huge.”

Simplifying swag — less hassle, more human

SwagUp isn’t the only swag company out there. But for Elizabeth, her experience with other marketing companies advertising swag products had ended up in disappointment.

“It was very automated, very overly professional, and we are a very grassroots type company, so I’m okay with emojis and winking in an email, I don’t need a business card,” says Elizabeth.

Besides, Elizabeth was on a deadline.

“A lot of these companies wanted me to send them their ideas and then get back to me with an invoice, with a quote, I was like, I don’t have time to wait. I need to know now if it is going to be $50 or under.”

Elizabeth also didn’t find a company that felt like a fit for Breeze. “Their website looked like they best served large corporations, and my fear was that when they did get back with pricing it was just going to be way too expensive for what we were doing. We’re a small company, I just need 40 boxes, not a thousand.”

With SwagUp, Elizabeth could move fast.

Using our pack builder, Elizabeth had the flexibility to easily build out a few options fitting her budget. “I was able to create a PowerPoint, basically present to the leader, like this is option one, this is what it would have. We traded off between crinkle paper vs wrapping, a tumbler vs a hoodie, and we were able to figure out what we want best for the price that we are going to pay. And the fact that we were able to keep it under $50 a box, I mean my operations team was just swooning because they’re like, that’s just awesome.”

To the moon: a successful rebrand

Breeze was in the middle of a rebrand when they started looking for a better way to do swag.

“Before Swagup, we just mailed new employees a t-shirt and a ‘thing.’ Now, we do New Hire Gift Boxes because we really loved the idea of giving them a bunch of branded stuff.��

Breeze realized they could make their rebranding more fun internally and decided to involve the entire team. So they sent a swag pack with the new gear to everyone.

Elizabeth told the team, “You’re gonna be getting a secret that’s got the Breeze logo all over it but under no circumstances do you open it, just leave it on your desk.”

The big reveal was at their company-wide meeting on Thursday, and it took a coordination effort to time everything right.

“Everyone was like, wow Liz thank you so much this is amazing, and in my mind I'm like, you have no idea how easy it was. Y'all made me look like a superhero.”
—Elizabeth Reed, Operations Coordinator at Breeze

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For a remote team, the experience was a fun way to bond. “Getting to at least open it up in a group team meeting helped us feel connected, we’re all getting to have all these cool things together.”

We asked Elizabeth about her experience with us and got two thumbs up back. “I’m just super super happy with the experience. For 2020, I’m so stoked. The process that we have now using you guys is just more efficient and more quality. Definitely would recommend it.”

For a company like Breeze, working with a simple product and people-focused team is key.

“The ease of just getting everything selected and ordered, it was just so easy. It was an enjoyable experience, Grayson was very personable,” Elizabeth says.

“Everyone I talked to via email or on the phone was very easy going. Not sales driven in a way that wants to capture me as a customer to get me to spend as much as possible, it was just like what works best for you, low key and simple. I was really grateful for it.”

To sum it up in Elizabeth’s words:

“It’s super easy to get all of the stuff ordered with logos, and the proofs and then boom it's shipped, done. I was like, this is just too easy, this is awesome!”

—Elizabeth Reed, Operations Coordinator at Breeze

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