0 (2s):
Who's ready to rock today. Fire Nation. JLD here and welcome to Entrepreneurs On Fire brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network with great shows like Salesmen. Today, we'll be breaking down how to build 100 million dollar brand in five years to drop these value bombs. I have brought Jeremy Parker into EOFire studios. Jeremy is a serial entrepreneur and award-winning documentary filmmaker. He is currently the Co-Founder and CEO of Swag.com. Swag.com is the best place for companies to buy and distribute quality swag that people will actually want to keep. They work with 5,000 plus companies including Facebook, Google, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, Spotify and TikTok.

0 (43s):
And today Fire Nation, we'll talk about customer target methods. We'll talk about growth trajectories, the importance of brand in a crowded market, and so much more. When we get back from thanking our sponsors. Still think you can create an online course the same way you did five years ago? Think again. Thinkific has looked at the top 20% of course, creators to see what they're doing now to be so darn successful. Find out for yourself at thinkific.com/firetrends. Business Made Simple hosted by Donald Miller, takes the mystery out of growing your business. Recent episodes, like how to attract and retain top talent and how to make more money with your current products are straight fire.

0 (1m 24s):
Listen to Business Made Simple wherever you get your podcasts. Jeremy say what's up to Fire Nation and share something that you believe about becoming successful that most people disagree with.

1 (1m 40s):
Hey John, great to be here. I would say most entrepreneurs think they need to have all the answers from day one. And really you just need the vision or not even the vision. You need to pick an industry that you feel like you would, you know, fall in love with that. You want to be part of there for the next seven years. So that's a really, that's it. You got to go out there, put yourself out there, learn from your customers, get feedback, constantly adapt, constantly pivot. And you'll ultimately find the right solution, the right results. But most people feel like they need that information from day one before they start it. And you really don't. You just need to start. That's the main thing.

0 (2m 15s):
So Jeremy, today, we're talking about how to build a 100 million dollar brands in just five years. So let's start at the beginning. What's your backstory.

1 (2m 27s):
Yeah, so I was a documentary filmmaker in college and I graduated from Boston university and I won the audience award. That's 2006 Beltone film festival. And I thought that that was going to be my career. And I remember I was on the top of the mountain, Vail, Colorado, and I looked at the audience and half the room where these major celebrities that everyone's heard of and half the room where these more struggling or this or more creatives. And I did an internal gut check and I asked myself two questions. Number one, do I love what I'm doing? And number two of my that good at it. And both answers were no. And I realized at that moment that this is not the career for me. So got back to college. I was a junior in college at this point. I wanted to figure out what I want to do with my career moving forward.

1 (3m 9s):
And I thought maybe I could become an entrepreneur. I didn't really know that much about entrepreneurship. I never started the business, but right when I graduated college, I started my first business, mostly as a way to learn about what I was good at, what I enjoyed, what I wanted to do with my career. And I did several different startups from starting a t-shirt company, right out of college, to starting a, a company where we partner with celebrities and own their social media presences and did product placement and YouTube videos to, you know, all these kinds of different things. And I ultimately found myself really super interested in the promotional product space for my first job out of college and I and building brands. And I started Swag.com and in 2016, really trying to focus on today's buyer, the millennial, and giving them the best experience possible.

1 (3m 58s):
Since we launched, we've grown over a hundred percent every single year. Last year we did over 30 million of sales we're on track to do north of 60 million of sales this year. And we were recently acquired by CustomInk the leader in our industry about six months ago.

0 (4m 12s):
So Fire Nation, what are we talking today about building a hundred million dollar brand in five years? Jeremy's has just given you a little background of his backstory, but let's get really detailed into the specifics of how you got into this industry.

1 (4m 28s):
Yeah. So my first job out of college, I started working for this company called envy sport, and they're a very large player in the promotional product space specifically for collegiate apparel. And that was my first job when I was 22 years old. And I remember going to these different trade shows and seeing who the buyer was. I know 12, 13 years ago when I was in the industry, the buyer was a much older buyer and they did everything, very manual presentation, decks, back and forth emails, phone calls to close sales. And you fast forward 10 years. And I had this aha moment that the industry is only getting bigger and bigger, but the buyer changed and the buyers no longer this 40 50 year old office manager, it's a millennial and what do millennials want? They want to buy things a little bit differently.

1 (5m 9s):
They want to streamline the experience. They don't want to talk to anybody. They would rather just be able to do it themselves. So I started trying to build Swag.com focused on today's buyer. That was kind of the initial aha moment. And when we were starting, obviously we knew we wanted to go after the B2B, but there's so many different buyers within organizations, whether you're the marketing team or the sales team that wants to buy swag or the office manager, that's buying swag for the internal office culture building or the HR manager, who's buying swabbed for onboarding new hires. There's all these different divisions within, within the company that buy it. So we had to really figure out who is the right buyer from the start and how could we expand? So we really started to go really in and focus on the office manager because we figured that the office manager is really like the Trojan horse into the company, right?

1 (5m 53s):
If they're buying a hundred, t-shirts, they're giving those t-shirts to all of the departments. Now, if every t-shirts is Swag.com and in your label, it's basically them introducing us to all these other departments that could be buyers. And we really start to go full force on the office manager and the first year, and now we're working with marketing teams and sales teams and every division within companies that are really started from that, that understanding of how they get into the company.

0 (6m 15s):
Now, one thing that I really was kind of impressed by was the fact that you got this four-letter domain, this four-letter dot com Swag.com. Can you tell us the story behind that?

1 (6m 26s):
So from the very beginning, the idea was we want to convert offline conversations to online purchasing. And I knew if I got in front of people and they saw my brand, they might not want to buy right then and there, especially if you're going after B2B buyers, right. That you might get in front of them. And they might not have their event for three to five months. So I needed it to be something super memorable. They discover us in January and then neither remembers in November when they're buying for their holiday gifting. So we figured Swag.com powerfully, you know, super short, simple. It basically explains what we do. If you're Swag.com, you already know that we sell promotional products and promotional swag. So we want to get that name. And obviously it's very expensive. So from the very beginning, we couldn't afford it. And we worked out a deal with the buyer that we would exclusively licensed the name for a two year period with the option to buy.

1 (7m 12s):
So from day one, without any funding that any money we had, the Swag.com domain name that we could start going out to the market with. And we went to customers. They assume that the furthermost before, no, our first customer is Facebook. They thought that they've heard of us before. And the second customer, we keep using that brand name to build upon itself. And now it's being, you know, beyond effective or people see an ad for us, or they read about us, or they read a blog post about us. And then they just remember it, you know, their coworkers, their bosses, we need swag, they just type directly into the browser. So our.com. So we don't have to necessarily pay as much marketing as our competitors, you know, to drive people to our site.

0 (7m 48s):
So you found the person who owned Swag.com. What was the process of acquiring it?

1 (7m 52s):
It was a long process. They were asking initially like 1.2 million, it took us a while to negotiate it down and try to figure out how we can get it. Ultimately, the buyer, we were able to work out a deal where we would license the name for a two year period with the option to buy it. That owner had a great deal. They basically, worst comes to worse. We couldn't afford it. Like the company failed. They would still retain ownership of the domain name. If things went well, we ultimately buy it for the agreed upon price and they would get a small percentage of our company. So there was, we made it a win-win for all, all people involved.

0 (8m 28s):
That's pretty impressive. Fire Nation makes me want to go back to 1996. When I was sitting in my bedroom, thinking I'm going to buy Boston red sox.com, Boston celtics.com like all this poor seams that I liked, like across the channel. And then I was like, oh, I just, I don't have any money because I'm 16 years old, but you know, what different time, different place in different world, let's talk about your customer targets methods. I mean, you've obviously done a lot of things over the years. Tested, tried a lot of different opportunities advertising. I mean, of course, as you just mentioned, Swag.com has such a good domain name, but kind of speaks for itself in a lot of areas. Talk about those target methods of your ideal customers.

1 (9m 7s):
Right? So in the very beginning, we were, you know, knocking on doors, being, traveling salesman that was like the first year. And that's really because we didn't really know the right platform to build. We didn't want to spend all this time building the platform and then customers don't want it. So we want to really engage with potential customers, learn what they're looking for and ultimately build it. So we went to different companies and we knocked on doors and we know main manual sales. And our strategy from the beginning was we considered ourselves logo hunters. So we wanted the big name brands. So then if we could put the big logos on our website, people would just assume that we could obviously help them as well. So we went after Facebook and then we got, we work and then probably with TV. And we just did, you know, manual sales in the beginning.

1 (9m 47s):
The second year. It really transitioned now that we have the platform built. Now we knew the right product to build, and we had this row of logos. We could change our marketing strategy. So we went really into paid ads. We felt like we were able to drive enough traffic to learn a lot more, but paid ads is very expensive, you know, on Google, on Facebook, it's expensive. So we just want to do it enough that we can learn more opened up the pool of customers to our site, see what was broken, see what we could fix it. We can make better. Then the third year it became really about SEO and really do organic traffic and trying to figure out different pockets and different keywords that we could rank for. So our entire business, it's not always been one thing that's worked for us. It's constantly adapting and picking the right traction channel for the right period of time.

1 (10m 30s):
And I think people have to realize that, like, if you start one way, doesn't mean it's going to work all the time. And if you do something that works great, it's not going to work. You might have to change it and pivot it and change your idea. So we're constantly adding new traction channels and you figuring out different ways, how to drive traffic and drive the right type of customer to our site.

0 (10m 47s):
And I love this evolution, Fire Nation. This is try new things, testing new things, seeing what works, what doesn't work, you know, being analytical, figuring things out. And we have a lot of things we're gonna be talking about with the growth of this $100 million brand in just five years. When we get back from thanking our sponsors. As an entrepreneur, just starting out or looking to scale up, it can be tricky to know which advice to follow. And if you've been thinking about making an online course, part of your business, the Thinkific Trends Report is one of the most important things you'll read this year. The team at Thinkific analyzed the top 20% of creators to discover what they're doing differently to make them so darn successful in this report. You'll uncover why top creators are two times more likely to use communities three times more likely to sell courses and bundles plus learn why it's time to say goodbye to the hard sell.

0 (11m 36s):
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0 (12m 16s):
So how can you make things easy for your customers? It starts with knowledge like having a 360 degree view of how your customers have interacted with your business in the past, what their buying preferences are and how likely they are to become a repeat customer. But how do you gain these insights with a HubSpot CRM platform? That's exactly what you'll get easy to use tools that give you and your teams, the full picture of your customers. Just one example of how powerful having that full picture can be. Well HubSpot's intuitive payment tools allow you to help your customers have a seamless purchase experience with full access to payment data, your teams get the full customer story, meaning they can provide the best possible service. And with directly embedded payment links, your customers can quickly and easily purchase and pay from emails, live chats, and more, learn more about how HubSpot can help your business grow better@hubspot.com.

0 (13m 8s):
Jeremy we're back in just like I wanted the story of Swag.com. Every person, every company has that first customer story let's hear yours.

1 (13m 20s):
Yeah. So our first customer was Facebook. And how this happened is we knew we needed to have a big name brand that we want to have on the logo, you know, on the homepage where people come on and say, swipe.com oh, who they work with Facebook. So we had a friend who worked at Facebook, who got us into the offices in the New York city office. You know, anybody could really get in, if you have a connection, they have lunches there, et cetera. When my co-founder and Josh went to the office, we, there was these big conference rooms. There's tons of them all over the place. And we just kind of set up shop. You know, we went into one of the conference rooms, we put all of our swag items down. We had like, we're like a traveling salesman and people walk by and not know what was going on, but people stopped in while you guys doing.

1 (13m 60s):
And we made our first sale that way, where somebody came by, they needed some t-shirts. They felt the quality of the products that we're offering. And they wanted to do with us. And that first sale, we think we made like 5% margin, but it wasn't about making money. It was about learning experience, making connections. And also, as we said, become logo hunters really get that first logo. So we closed Facebook. The next day we went to WeWork and we started talking to them. And when they asked us who else we work with, we said Facebook. And obviously we don't lie, but that's true. But they didn't, they didn't dig in a little bit deeper, but they figured that we work with Facebook, clearly we'd work with them. And then we signed on, we work and we, we kept doing that for the first few months to get those big blue chip companies on our site.

1 (14m 40s):
And that's going to say, it's like the first year was all about learning the right product to build. But also it was about getting those initial logos because most people think you have to start your way from the bottom and work your way up. But that takes too slow. So we want to start the weight from the top and work our way down. And we had this big name logos, ultimately these smaller startups who come to our website will, will feel confidence in us.

0 (15m 1s):
So Fire Nation, I really love this first story experience. And I mean, this is the thing that I did as well. When I was first launching entrepreneurs on a fire, I got a yes from some really big names of like, yeah, I'll be on your podcast at some point, but I'm busy this month, but I, I will lock it in. We'll do this for sure. Like, let's make it happen next month or the month after. So then when I would go to other guests, I'd always say, well, listen, I have, so-and-so coming up on the show. I have this person locked in for a certain date and a certain time. And that is the reality I did. They feel like, well, if these people that are being on the podcast and make sense for other people too, as well, so you can really use and leverage truth in these scenarios when people are like looking for validation and your growth trajectory, Jeremy has been out of this world, I mean, a hundred million dollars in five years.

0 (15m 47s):
Talk to us about that trajectory.

1 (15m 49s):
Yeah. The first year of the business, 2016 was very manual sales. We did about 350,000 of sales. Then we launched the first version of our e-commerce site. In 2017, we did about 1.1 million, 2018. The site's getting a little bit better, did about 3 million, 2019. The site did about seven and a half million, 2020 hits. And you know, obviously very scary for the whole world, but for our industry, just imagine the promotional product, industry events, not, not happening anymore. Trade shows, not happening anymore. People are leaving the office. So we had to really pivot and adapt and become the defacto place to allow companies to buy swag, warehouse it with us and it to individual addresses.

1 (16m 31s):
So people who are engaging with the remote team and keeping that company culture thriving, even when no one's in the office, sending swag to that best customer, if you're not going to see them at the trade show, sending swag to virtual event attendees, to humanize the event, HR managers onboarding the new hires in the right way because no one was in the office. We had this amazing platform that will allow them to distribute that swag and engage. And we went from seven to half million and the whole industry is going down 20 to 40%. Our sales increased by a hundred percent to 15 and a half million last year, we did about 33 million. So we're really every year, more than doubling, at least doubling. And this year we're on track to break 60 million this year.

0 (17m 9s):
Wow. I mean, Fire Nation. This is the thing where you need to adapt. You need to be able to adjust and be willing to say what's happening right now in this world. Like what's happening right now. And then how I, how do I become the best solution to a real problem? And the problems had changed in Jeremy's world. The problems changed in all of our worlds and those who adjusted and pivoted to staying or becoming the best solution to real problems. Those were the winners. So let's end with the importance of brands. I mean, especially in a crowded market, which of course swag is a crowded market. So talk to us about that.

1 (17m 44s):
Yeah. When we started the business, people thought we were crazy. You know, there's 30,000 promotional distributors. How are you different? I would have that conversation so many times. How are you different? What's going to separate you from everybody else. There's so many companies that sell promotional products and our feeling was well. We had a lot of ideas. We didn't necessarily know all the answers from day one. We knew we were going to learn when you were going to pivot, when you were with a focus on today's buyer, build the best experience possible, making it easy for customers to find what they're looking for, design it by in a matter of seconds, and then easily distribute swag to multiple different addresses. Once we knew we had this vision of making the experience better, but the brand plays a really big part in it. If everybody, you know, if everyone's being attacked by all these different companies and they're trying to, to get their business, we have to stand out.

1 (18m 29s):
We have to be memorable. And that's what it takes me back to swag purchasing, especially B to B is it's not an impulse purchase. It's not, you're buying a pair of shoes. It's nothing like that. You really have to stay on top of mind when you get in front of them. Once they have to remember you later on. And there was no company in our industry that had a really strong brand that was super memorable. And we figured that if we had that memorable brand and we could convert these offline conversations to online purchasing, it would really set us up for success. So we went all in on the brand and not just the colors and user experience, but the name itself, all of those things together really allowed us to win.

0 (19m 6s):
So Fire Nation brands be the brands own. The brands, use the brand and the different ways that you know are going to connect with your potential customers, clients, and avatars, and make that happen. And Jeremy, you shared a lot of value bombs today. Take the stage for a minute. Here's the microphone. Give us the one key takeaway from your entire story of growing your brand to a hundred million dollars of everything we've talked about here today. What's the one key takeaway.

1 (19m 33s):
Yeah. I think my biggest takeaway is entrepreneur and it's something I used to mess up on. And I, I made many mistakes before I started swagging. I learned from those mistakes, everyone always thinks it's an overnight success. 5, 6, 7 years. You start a business and you just happens. But it's typically a lot of failures and learnings along the way. So if you're an entrepreneur, keep your head up it, you know, you're going to learn. It might not be this one. It might be the next one. It might be the one after that, but you'll ultimately get there. If you keep learning and being open-minded to changing. I would say my biggest takeaway that I used for swag that allowed us to really get out the door, previous startups. I used to overthink every single thing and think I had all the answers.

1 (20m 13s):
And I think you really need to remove ego from being an entrepreneur. It's not necessarily, you have the right answers. You want to get something out the door right away. You want to learn from your customers pivot and make it better and keep learning. And I think if you have the mentality that you're either going to win or you're going to learn, you'll ultimately get there a lot faster.

0 (20m 30s):
So Jeremy, a Fire Nation wanted to connect with you with your company, with your business, share those details. Any call to action you might have and then we'll say goodbye.

1 (20m 39s):
Sounds great. Yeah. Please check us out at Swag.com. Swag.com or reach out to me at jeremy@swag.com. We'd love to help you out. If you're looking for swag to buy for an event or a trade show, or you want to build custom boxes, you want us to warehouse that you want to distribute to multiple different addresses. You want to integrate into Zapier API. APIs and automate the distribution of swag. When it's a new hires birthday or their five-year anniversary, please reach out to us. We'd love to help you out with all with all of your swag needs,

0 (21m 6s):
Fire Nation. You're the average of the five people you spend the most time with. And you've been hanging out with JP and JLD today. So keep up that heat, head over to EOFire.com type Jeremy in the search bar. The show's page will pop up with everything that we've talked about here today. Best show notes in the biz, of course, head over to Swag.com. I'm actually looking at the site right now. I need to have some custom visors sent my way. So I'm checking that puppy out and see what he has going on for your next big shebang. And Jeremy, thank you brother, for sharing your truth, your knowledge, your value with Fire Nation today, for that we salute you and we'll catch you on the flip side. Thank you

1 (21m 43s):
So much for everybody.

0 (21m 44s):
Hey, Fire Nation today's value bound content was brought to you by Jeremy and Fire Nation. What can 3000 of the world's most successful entrepreneurs teach you? How about how to achieve financial freedom and fulfillment? My first traditionally published book, The Common Path to Uncommon Success is a revolutionary 17 step roadmap that will lead you to the lifestyle that you've been dreaming about. This book took me 10 years of accumulating the genius of the world's top entrepreneurs. And you can get it all in one place. When you visit UncommonSuccessBook.com, I'll catch you there. Or on the flip side. Still think you can create an online course the same way you did five years ago? Think again. Thinkific has looked at the top 20% of course, creators to see what they're doing now to be so darn successful.

0 (22m 29s):
Find out for yourself at thinkific.com/firetrends. Business Made Simple hosted by Donald Miller, takes the mystery out of growing your business. Recent episodes, like how to attract and retain top talent and how to make more money with your current products are straight fire. Listen to Business Made Simple wherever you get your podcasts.