Jeremy Parker - Founder of Swag.com, Dad, Award Winning Filmmaker - Talking to Cool People w/ Jason Frazell

Episode Transcript
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Jason Frazell (00:12):
Hey everybody.
Welcome to the podcast today.
I am here with the amazingJeremy Parker.
He is the co founder and formerCEO of swag.
com.
Currently the founder ofSwagspace.
We're going to talk a lot aboutwhat that means.
And Jeremy, so glad we're ontoday.
Great to see you.
How are you doing?
Doing great.
Thank you so much for

Jeremy Parker (00:32):
having me

on.
Yes.
Very welcome.

Where are you joining us from today?
I'm calling from Bell Harbor inMiami.
So that's a nice spot.
It's it's paradise.
Honestly.

Yeah.
We were just, we were just,Jeremy and I were just catching
up before we pressed record.
Former Manhattanite, just likemyself, and I don't know if you
and the fam ever lived inBrooklyn, but we, we, at the
time we moved to Brooklyn andcalled it The Suburbs.
We lived, like, literally southof the Brooklyn Bridge, and now
we both relocated me a couplehundred miles away, and you I

(01:02):
guess a couple thousand milesaway, maybe something like that.
Yeah.

You're in the middle of 2021 and

it's pretty easy, easy living here.
Easy living.
Yes.
Look very nice looking at thebeach.
Well, we're going to talk a lottoday, Jeremy, about your
business journey, moving fromfounder to CEO and then back to
founder again, and what, whatthat, what that meant to you
from both what that meanstechnically, but also from a
mental perspective, we weretalking about your journey

(01:30):
before we do that, Jeremy, justlike to have you share with the
audience, anything like you'dlike to share with us about you
or anything you'd like us toknow about you.
Sure thing.
So

personally, I'm a I'm a husband and a father of
two young kids.
So as you all can imagine, it's,it's exciting.
It's it's crazy.
It's a lot of learning.
It's patience.
It's, it's everything.
And as you're doing the startup,you have the kids.
It's, it's really cool.
So that's, I guess.
And on the business side, and Ihave a very unique background
because I used to be adocumentary filmmaker.

(02:00):
That was my passion.
And I went to college for that.
And when I was about 18 yearsold, I was the winner of the
Vail Film Festival.
It is a feature lengthdocumentary.
And wow.
Yes, I was doing that.
And then I realized.
Maybe that's not the right thingfor me.
It wasn't my, my necessarilypassion at the time.
I didn't think I was fairly thatgood at it.
Even though I came off of win, Iwas like, maybe I'm not the best

(02:21):
at it.
All the other films in thefestival were just better than
mine, even though we won theaudience award.
And I gave it up.
It was like the weirdest thing.
Like I, at the festival nextday, I pretty much mentally
said, This is not for me.
I'm going to try to do somethingelse.
Graduated college, did variousdifferent startups from starting
a t shirt company, my first jobout of college under a company

(02:41):
called MV sport, they were inthe promotional product space.
So I got kind of an insight intothe promo space early on when I
was about 21, 22 started thebusiness with my brother.
And Jesse Itzler, who's a, youknow, world famous entrepreneur.
Marty Jett, private jet company,Zco.
And we started a productplacement company for YouTube

(03:02):
videos and celebrities, where wewould help them get brands, like
big name brands, into theYouTube videos.
That was sold to a publiclytraded company when I was 25
years old.
I then had like a three yearstint doing a startup that, that
failed, that ultimately didn'twork out called Vouch, it was a
social networking app based onwhat you truly vouch for, what
you truly love.

(03:22):
And I think the idea is a greatidea and I think it probably
could work now even better, butI don't think we built the right
product, the right solution, youknow, there's many stories of
why I think that failed and whatI took from that.
And then when started Swag.
com.
And swag.
com became the fastest growingcompany in the promotional
product space.
So we work with over 15, 000companies from Amazon and Google

(03:45):
and all the big companies thatyou can imagine.
And we help them with theircorporate merch, their corporate
swag.
In 2021, we were acquired by alarger company called custom
Inc.
And I was the CEO of swag.
com under custom Inc up until.
Past December, where I left tostart a new startup underneath
customing called Swagspace.
And I'm excited to talk to youabout it, Jason.

Yeah, yeah.
Thanks.
Thanks, Jeremy.
Lot there.
What am I curious about first?
Have you always been anentrepreneur?
Like as a, like a grown up?

No, no.
Honestly, I didn't even knowwhat entrepreneur was.
Until after college, I was afilmmaker.
I wanted to be a filmmaker whenI was younger and I was
passionate about filmmaking andtelling stories.
But I had this like weirdrealization that I mentioned
that I was at the veil filmfestival.
And after the award, there wasthis quote unquote celebrity
brunch is the next morning.
And I walk into this room andhalf the room where these major

(04:40):
actors, everyone's heard of.
And half the room were morestruggling artists.
And I had to do like a realinternal gut check to myself,
like.
Is this my life?
Is this going to be my career?
Like which side of the room am Igoing to fall out on?
And, and I had to reallyinternalize it and say, do I
think I'm that good?
Honestly, like I love it.
I love telling stories.
I love the process of makingmovies, but.

(05:03):
Am I, am I that good to breakthrough the noise?
It's such a hard industry.
And I, I,

I

answered it for myself and I said, no, I don't
think I am that good.
I think there's a lot of peoplebetter than me.
There's a lot of people who caremore about it or more
passionate.
I loved it, but more passionateabout it.
You have to be in filmmaking.
And I got back to college.
I was at Boston university.
I was a senior at the time and Ihad no other experience in my
life except for filmmaking.
So just put in perspective.
So I graduated college.

(05:30):
I didn't know anything.
So I figured, let me just starta t shirt company.
Cause that was the first thing Icould think of.
I thought it sounded relativelyeasy, even though I was wrong,
but I thought it would teach meall the aspects of building a
business and I would figure outwhat I was good at.
So like a t shirt company, youfigure out how to manufacture t
shirts and this is pre Shopify.
So you had to like actually hireprogrammers to develop a

(05:52):
website.
I had to learn how to makesales.
To boutiques, I had to learn howto do PR and branding and all
these different things.
And I became kind of anentrepreneur.
And I just, I look back andfilmmaking and entrepreneurship
is so similar.
It's like, it's juststorytelling and it's building
something out of nothing.
So that's how I think of anentrepreneur is like, you're
really taking an idea and you'recreating something out of
nothing.
It didn't exist one day.

(06:13):
And then a month later, a yearlater, two years later, it's
something now exists.
You invent the future.
And it's very similar tofilmmaking and building a
business.
So I've started to really fallin love with it.
And I haven't stopped.
I've been an entrepreneur

ever since.
Yeah, man.
Thanks, man.
I'm a little, my mind is alittle blown thinking about you
at a festival, winning an award,walking in and like the
trajectory you were on was morelikely to be, I think by winning
an award, you automaticallyyou're getting some credit, like

(06:47):
some, some cachet in theindustry.
The more likely you could end upon that side of the more famous
folks famous and make a goodliving at it.
And my, like from all, fromeverything you've shared so far,
you seem like a very intuitiveperson.
Like you seem like you're verybased on like what feels right
to you, because that wasn'tprobably the logical decision
that a lot of people would havemade that most people who are

(07:08):
like thinking about it wouldhave made.
And, and I'm just fascinated bythat.
And then I want to, I want tohone in on the, I just decided
to start a t shirt company.
Was that When you did this atthe time, was that an industry
that was known to like, Hey, youcan go in and make good profit
margin.
It's like kind of easy to setup.
Or did you just like happen toeither talk to somebody or have

(07:30):
an idea of like, Oh, tight tshirt company?

Well, the first thing with the film, yes, it was
a very weird thing for everyonearound me.
My decision to leave filmmaking.
Yeah.
Imagine I'm at Boston universityfilm school.
There wasn't that many awardwinning filmmakers.
At who are currently at college.
It wasn't a thing like you go toschool so that you could
ultimately leave school, make amovie that wins it.
And I'm, and I'm, I'm this kidwho's winning it in school.

(07:54):
So it was like this weird kindof thing where it's like,
everyone's like congratulatingme.
Amazing.
This is it.
And I, in my head was like, I'mhere for seven more months to
finish school and I'm done.
I'm out of film.
I don't know.
It was just like, you have a gutfeeling, but I was, I was a
filmmaker in the festival, but Iwas also watching the other
films cause I'm a true lover offilm and there was better films

(08:16):
there.
Sure.
I was talking to people andthere was people who really, I
saw the passion in their eyes.
Like this is their life.
They're never going to doanything else.
And I loved it, but I didn'thave that same fire in me for
film.
So I was like, It was just likethis smack in the face that even
though we were winning, I havemy award right here.
I still am proud to, I'm stillproud to have it.

(08:38):
Yeah, let's see it.
Well, it looks like a niceapartment.
I it wasn't I don't know.
It wasn't the right thing.
And with t shirts, no, I had noexperience.
I'm not fashionable.
I didn't know anything aboutmanufacturing.
I didn't know anything aboutanything.
And that was the thing.
I just thought, people wear tshirts, people buy t shirts.
I don't know.
People buy t

shirts.

Yeah, I don't know.
I didn't know anything aboutprofit.
I didn't know anything aboutanything.
I know business experience.
I didn't know what margin was.
I didn't know what EBITDA.
I didn't even know these termsexisted, but I did know that I
was, I loved telling stories andI felt like an entrepreneur who
could tell a story.
I can maybe tell a nice storyaround a t shirt, whatever the
product is I was going to sell.
And I started to really divebeing an entrepreneur and I

(09:17):
started reading, All the blogsonline about how to be an
entrepreneur.
And I was following Mark Cuban'sblog, blog Maverick, which is a
big, you know, inspiration forme when I was starting and I was
just becoming a sponge.
Cause it was like, I wasstarting from the beginning, I
was starting over in some ways.

Yeah.
Looking back at where you've,you've come to today, sitting
here today and thinking aboutyour, sorry, were you 20, 21 or
22?
When you started the first tshirt company?

Yeah.
I was like right at, so wheneveryou, yeah, 21, 22 after, after
college.

Yeah.
So looking back at that timenow.
What do you, what do you knownow that you maybe, maybe don't,
and I hate the term wish youwould have known then because
the experience matters, but whatdo you know now that like, you
just had no clue about when youstarted this business 20 and
when you first started out ofcollege?

Yeah, I would say entrepreneurship is a lifetime
sport.
I would say that's like one ofthe big things I've realized.
You know, we, we made swag.
com into this big success and itgets acquired by a much larger
company and everyone's like,wow, you just started swag.
com five and a half years later,you sell it for all this money.
And I'm thinking to myself,well, how many ups and downs I

(10:30):
have to go on for the 10 plusyears to get me into the place
where I was able to start aswag.
com and be successful.
So it's just immense amounts oflearning.
Over the course of my career andI made so many mistakes, but the
good thing is I learned fromthem.
Like, I'll tell you an example.
I I started this company calledVouch.
It was a social networking appthat, that ultimately didn't

(10:50):
work out.
And we had everything in placefor it to work out.
I just came off of selling mycompany to a private, to a
publicly traded company.
I was sitting on some money.
I had major celebrity partners.
I was able to easily raisefunding because we came 25 years
old.
And we failed.
Why did we fail?
So, and I, I take pretty muchthe blame for it.

(11:12):
I mean, who knows it's, it's,it's, it's learning, but I was
so obsessed with the details ofthe site and I thought, and I
had some sort of ego.
I don't, I didn't realize at thetime, but now looking back, I
did that.
I thought I knew the rightsolution to build for the club,
for the customers.
And I want to build the socialnetwork.
It was about what you vouch for,what your favorite things, and
they're just a high level of theidea.

(11:33):
We saw Facebook and Facebooktook, you know, had the like
button and the status update andall these different sites that
became popular from Instagram orfrom Snapchat or from Twitter,
they all took different piecesof Facebook and made a dedicated
experience around a certainexperience, right?
Instagram took the pictures,Twitter took the status update.
We wanted to take the likebutton because the like button
is the most valuable,monetizable option on Facebook.

(11:55):
So I built this session thatwe're And I spent over a year
designing it and thinking aboutevery little detail.
What happens when somebody movestheir thumb this way or presses
this button?
What's the animation?
What's, I was obsessed with thedetails.
I frankly lost sleep over thedetails.
And then what happened is welaunched the company about 15
months after we started.
And all the things that I gave ashit about that I thought were

(12:16):
going to be the biggest moverneedles, like needle movers, no
one cared about.
It was like all the things thatI didn't even think that those
were the things that theywanted.
And I realized I wasted a yearand a half of my life building
the wrong thing.
And that was like the smack inthe face of like As an
entrepreneur, sometimes you haveto remove ego and you have to
build what people actually want.
And you have to, so when Istarted swag and that ultimately

(12:37):
failed because we weren't ableto pivot enough and move enough
and learn enough because wewasted so much time and so much
energy and so much moneybuilding the wrong thing for
people who didn't really wantit.
So when I started swag from dayone, my thing was, I'm not going
to build anything yet.
I'm going to start making salesfrom day one.
I'm going to have a coming soonlanding page and I'm going to
start making sales becausetotally everything.
And also you're going to learnby talking to customers what the

(12:59):
right thing to build is.
So I started, I was in New Yorkcity.
I was at my co founders.
He had like a pool table room inhis building.
You know, there's a, we had nooffice, we had no money for
anything.
And we were working at this roomand every, you know, hour,
somebody would come into playpool.
We would have to move our stuffoff of the pool table.
Cause that's the only desk inthe

room.

And I'm spending most of my days going at, at
WeWorks up and down thehallways, knocking on doors,
talking to people and trying tosell.
I was like a traveling salesmanand it was good, but it was
really to learn like why peoplebuy certain things or what
they're buying or how they'rebuying it or what other, who's
our competitors and why theylike them versus this, what they
don't like.
And we learned so much in theearly days that when we start to

(13:39):
actually build the site, Thatautomates everything and
streamlines everything.
We, we had so much confidencethat we were building the exact
right thing because we knew it.
And we knew exactly the audiencewhere it was.
Now, I'll take one, one, onequick thing before.
Yeah.
Initially, flag.
com, I thought our customer wasthe marketing teams.
That was my big idea.
Marketing teams, they have thebiggest budget, they're buying
for trade shows, for events.

(14:00):
You know, you 10 person company,but you could be spying tens of
thousands of dollars worth ofswag because you're sending it
to your best customers.
Sure.
But after speaking with actualmarketing managers, I realized
that everyone has the same idea.
There's 23, 000 promodistributors.
Everyone's going after themarketing manager.
How is me, swag.
com, a coming soon landing page,going to break through the
noise?
So what I realized, it's reallythe office manager that we

(14:24):
should be going after the officemanager.
No one's going after them.
They are buying for much smallerorders and they have 10
employees that they're buyingfor the 10 people.
If they have a hundred employeesare buying for a hundred people,
but they're the Trojan horseinto the company.
If the office manager buys ahundred t shirts and they're
giving it out to the marketingteam and their sales team, and
they're this office in thatoffice, they're basically doing
the work for us.

(14:44):
They're introducing us toeveryone who has decision making
ability and no one's goingthere.
So we pivoted our entirefocused, we became the swag
platform for office managers.
Now swag.
com, we have 15, 000 customers.
We're doing, you know, 40million a year in sales.
We're a much bigger company.
We're going after alldepartments.
But if we didn't see that keyinsight, break through the
noise, who knows where we'd beright now.

(15:06):
So I think for entrepreneurs whoare wanting to start, get out of
your own way.
Don't have such ego try to beopen minded to everything be
okay that your opinion couldchange because it's important
You don't have to have the rightidea.
It doesn't really matter thenit's about getting it's getting
the right idea It doesn't haveto be your idea.

Yeah, Jeremy.
That's so brilliant I'm thinkingabout in my my corporate career
how risk the other place youreceive swag a lot Depending on
the company is when you gethired You get like, you might
get like a t shirt or asweatshirt or something that
demonstrates that my guess in asmall company, that would be the
office manager or HR who buysthat not marketing is my guess.

That's exactly right.
So

just having that, man, that's so, that's so
brilliant.
Yeah.
Yeah.
That's brilliant.
That's very cool.
So I think what I want to askyou about next here is, do you
remember, do you remember Youknew that swag was going to be a
success.
I don't know if that was afinancial target or an EBITDA

(16:07):
target or what it was, but whenyou go, Oh my God, we're
actually onto something here.
Do you remember that moment?

Yeah, I remember.
I remember very clearly it was2017.
So we started the business inJanuary, 2016.
When we started it, my mindsetwas, I don't want, I don't need
to be a millionaire.
That was not the mindset that Iwas in, in 2016.
I was a 30 year old guy, I wassingle, I was living in New York
City, I didn't have much money.
I wanted to just own my life.

(16:34):
I wanted to make a salary, 100,000, 200, 000, in that range,
every year, and control my time.
That was my initial thing.
And I felt like I could do thatin the swag industry.

I felt

like there was a way to do that.
A lot of people were doing itand I felt like it was a good
industry, but the more I wasselling, the more I was learning
of the problems in the industryand how I can make a better
process.
So it wasn't until probably mid2016 where I started to actually
think all these challenges thatpeople having, I could actually
automate it.
I could streamline it.
I can simplify it.

(17:04):
I can make a much betterexperience for customers.
So when we started to build thefirst version, we had one
developer at the time.
Building our MVP to launch it inJanuary 2017 and that was like,
it wasn't like immediate.
It wasn't like the floodgatesopen the platform, frankly,
wasn't very good in the earlydays, but we started to see
people that something that usedto take me maybe hours, like

(17:24):
literally weeks to create apresentation deck or to do price
quotes or go back and forth withclients.
And it was streamlined.
Like I still have to help them.
I still have to guide thecustomer through the process,
but it was removing 80 percentof the workload.
And I realized, wow, like we did350, 000 our first year of sales
and I was pushed to the max.

(17:44):
And I had all this like wasted.
If I had 80 percent of my timeback, I could probably get to
700, 000, a million.
I could probably get to thatpoint.
And that would get me to theideal salary that I wanted in my
second year.
It was like this realization,like, Oh, this could, this is
actually going to work.
Now we got to 1.
1 million the second year, wejumped up 7 million to 15

(18:06):
million to 30 million.
I didn't expect it to be ahundred percent growth up to 30
million.
By the time we got acquired, thecompany was doing over 30
percent sale.
I didn't expect that, but I knewI at least had something there
that, you know, that was goingto work.

Yeah.
Did you, did you have to takeany investment as you grew?

We did, but not, but frankly, we were very lucky
with that.
We took very little.
We raised.
Less than 4 million, 3.
8 million all in, and we onlyraised when we had an idea to
accelerate growth.
We were never this I'll tellyou, I'll tell you the big
challenge of being anentrepreneur, and I don't think
people really ever say it.
This is the challenge.
It's a very lonely sport to bean entrepreneur, and everyone

(18:49):
thinks they're a failure untilyou're not.
So what I mean by that is this.
If you're a a doctor.
And you become a doctor.
There's people are celebratingyou throughout your life, right?
There's your family is impressedby you, your girlfriend, your
wife, your friend was impressed.
You become a lawyer.
You get a good job at a highpaying firm.
You're able to see that moneycoming in.
You're able to become a partner.
Just even in a normal career,there's, there's raises.

(19:12):
You become an executive, youbecome on the C suite
entrepreneurship, being afounder, you don't get that you
starting at the top, but thattop is such a small little,
nothing.
Does it like, unless it sells,you're not, No one celebrates
you.
There's no outside validation.
And you often get internally,you know, not depressed, but
like down on yourself.
Things are not working.
You're throwing yourself againstthe wall and nothing's sticking.

(19:34):
It's like, it's constantchallenges until it's not a
challenge.
So this is what I'm getting at.
A lot of entrepreneurs, whatthey do, and they don't really,
I don't, I've internalized thisonly recently.
People try to get outside press,Right.
So you always see likeentrepreneurs trying to get
written up in tech crime,business insider, that's one
thing.
And they try to raise money.

(19:55):
Okay.
Cause what are those two things?
If you really think about it,it's out validation.
It allows people on the outside,your family, friends to say, Oh,
wow.
I saw you in the press.
You must be doing great.
Oh my God, this big VC investedin you.
You must be doing great.
There's very, in my mind,there's, there's.
It's smart to raise VC if yourbusiness is VC fundable.
If it's a business that is goingto scale to a hundred million

(20:15):
dollars, if that's your goal andyou need the money, or it's a
big high tech kind of comp, youknow, they actually need money
to build, raise VC.
That's unbelievable, right?
Like the innovation in thisworld would not exist.
The big innovation, the chat GPTis the open AI's would not exist
without VC.
Well, for 95 plus percent ofentrepreneurs, you don't really
need VC money.
It's really the ego.

(20:36):
It's, it's a way for you tovalidate yourself.
You don't really need press tobe in business insider.
Is that really going to movethe, no, you just want to get a
nice photo with your, with yourface on it and you want to feel
good about yourself.
So I started to realize that andI realized I don't necessarily
need to raise money for this.
I'm making money.
It's a profitable business.
Swag.
com was so good where basicallyyou get paid up front.

(20:57):
Right.
Amazon, Google comes to mywebsite.
Front.
Sure.
And we don't owe the vendors.
We don't owe the suppliers thatwe work with for net 60.
So we collect the cash and wedon't owe the cash for 60 days.
It's an unbelievable businessmodel.
And so everything that we made,That's great.
We just reinvested it back intothe platform, back into the
site, made the tech better, madethe site better, built the team.

(21:18):
So I just think, I thinkoftentimes as entrepreneurs, if
you can remove your ego, You'llmake way better decisions for
yourself and you'll most likelykeep way more of the company
when it is that time to have anexit.

Yeah.
I'd say as an entrepreneur,definitely.
I would say as a human, that's agood thing to do too.
Is as a husband, as a wife, as aparent, as no matter what you're
doing, we can remove our ego or,you know, like think about where
our ego is making us right aboutsomething is what I heard you
talk about.
With vouch.
com is you are right in yourmind.
You're right that this is whatit is.
That's your ego, Jeremy, beforewe talk about kind of like the

(21:52):
next, you know, like sellingswag and then your transition,
I'd love to hear a little bitabout your experience with
hiring from when you first startout to growing a team, because
I, you know, I know a lot offounders, they said it's very
difficult for them because youstart, you got you, your co
founder.
Likely you're a co founderbecause you get along or maybe
you have disagreements, butthere, you know how to get along

(22:13):
and suddenly go, Oh, we needsome other people to help us
that one don't have equity inthis company.
So they don't care as much as wedo.
And two, they may not be asclosely aligned.
So they're just like a staffemployee.
What was your experience whenyou started making hires?
And what did you look for inyour first few employees?
And then the second part of thequestion is, by the time you

(22:34):
wrapped this part of it and soldto Custom Inc, I think you said
you had about 140 employees.
What changed for in yourphilosophy of hiring?
Because you're at that point,we're hiring C Suite and things
like that.
Yeah, totally.

I would say I got very lucky with my co founder.
I co founded this company with acollege buddy of mine Josh.
And we went into business and wewere actually smart about it.
A lot of entrepreneurs Andfounders, co founders don't
really do this.
We had such different skillsets.
So what I was good at, Josh wasnot good at.
And when Josh was good at, I wasnot good at it.
So I took, I, we always like tosay, I took the front of the

(23:05):
house.
So I was, you know, the website,the brand, the user experience,
the vision, more of the vision,the, I was the CEO, more of the
vision of what people see.
And Josh was in charge of allthe operations.
So once an order came in, he wasthe one managing the suppliers
and the three PLS and thewarehousing and the FedEx rates
and UPS rates, he was all thenitty gritty stuff that no one
actually saw, but actually madethe business work.

(23:27):
And it was so good because wewere never stepping on each
other's toes.
Like I would do something, hewould never question me and he
would do something.
I would never question himbecause we had this, this, this
confidence in each other that weowned our respective things.
That was really lucky.
And we had just the two of usfor the first.
Year and a half of the businessthat we were running.
So we were doing 350, 000 firstyear.
We got up to close to 1 1.

(23:47):
1 the second year, but middle ofthe year, we hired our first
person, Alyssa, who joined tohelp down the operation side.
Alyssa was just really smart.
Like I, we didn't know anything.
Like we were so early to thehiring people.
We just wanted to hire smartpeople.
And some of those people endedup working out.
And some of those people didn'twork

out,

you know, early on.
There was a point in business,we had about 10 people.
where we had to like literallylet go of four of them.
There was a period in like amonth period we let go of four
people because we hired thewrong type of people.
And I know obviously that mynext business, as I said, you
learn from every startup, mynext business, I wouldn't go
through this pain as a startup.

(24:23):
Every single time you hirepeople, it's different life
cycles in the business.
So the early on, you want tohire people who can roll up
their sleeves, who are completeteam players, who are willing to
go the extra mile, who see thevision, who have some options in
the company and really believein it.
And you tell them to do onething and then the next day they
do something else.
They're okay changing andadapting to their work because
that's just who they are.

(24:44):
The early people we ended uphiring were more corporate.
They were more like names, likebrand names.
They came from top startups.
They were VC backed startups.
They didn't have that.
ability to roll up theirsleeves.
They were like number 50 to 70employees typically, which is
early when the company becomes athousand employees.
It does seem early, but theyreally weren't early.
It's a different mindset.
When they joined, they had amanager already.

(25:05):
They were probably three or fourpeople on the team already.
They had a structure already.
And in the early days, in thefirst 10 people, there is no
structure.
There is no managers.
There is no process.
You're creating it all.
So I think early days, you gotto find the right type of people
for that thing.
And as you scale, it does becomeeasier to make the hires,
because if you have a boss, ifyou hire an executive that you
believe in, they're going to bethe ones to set that person who

(25:28):
they're hiring up for success.
You have to really believe inthe executives that you're
hiring and then, you know, hopethat they're going to be a great
leader to, to manage the peoplebeneath them.
And so we've been very lucky andobviously not every employee
works out, but for the last fiveyears, we've had a very good
track record, way better trackrecord than our first couple of
years.
First couple of years, we madeso many mistakes.
I would also say internallyearly days when you become a

(25:51):
founder.
By definition, when you're afounder, you're the CEO or
you're, you're the, you're thehead of market and you're head
of sales, you're head intern.
You're literally do every singlething as a founder in the early
days, and you become, I don'tknow the best at everything, but
you become fairly good at everylittle thing and you start to,
you know, have your own way ofdoing things.
So when you hire somebody, youhave to repeat yourself.

(26:13):
The whole point of hiring is tosay.
This person's going to do whatI'm going to do, and I'm not
going to do it.
I'm going to focus on this,right?
Cause they're, but the problemis said than done, easier said
than done.
So I found myself in the firsttwo years being the ultimate
micromanager, which is not agood place to be.
And it's just hard not to do.
You see people doing things andin your mind, it's the wrong

(26:33):
way.
Like, don't do that.
Don't you like, and you want tojump in, but sometimes you kind
of, even though you want to jumpin and you probably would solve
it and make things better.
You sometimes have to sit backand be like.
It's okay.
They're going to learn.
They're going to mess up, butthey're going to learn.
And they're going to, that'sgoing to be the experience that
they're going to need to getbetter.
And they always say, you know,like you're going to replace
yourself with somebody and youknow, just if they're 80 percent

(26:55):
as good as you, hopefullythey're even better than you,
but if they're 80%, that's goodenough.
It doesn't need to be perfect.
With executives, it does need tobe very good.
You need to feel reallyconfident team that you can let
them go so much so that Gita,who I hired as our chief.
customer officer about two and ahalf years ago.
I, I passed her the seat, the,the basically we call her

(27:16):
general manager, the generalmanager role of swag.
com when I stepped away to doswag.
So you have to really, for me,she was bad.
She was a better operator thanme.
Like she was, she is a betterquote unquote CEO than I am.
And when you realize that youkind of have to ask yourself
like, well, if if my value isnot this, And my value is

(27:36):
something better, or like Ienjoy doing something different.
Maybe I should be focusing whatI'm better at and what I enjoy
doing and let somebody who'sactually really great give her
that, that, that shine and thatability to really take it to the
next level.
So that was kind of my thing.
And my boss, you know, the CEOof custom Inc.
And I told him, I said, I'm atthe company.

(27:57):
I want to help the company inany way I can.
I think the best way for me todo that is to start something
new and invent something new.
And I think.
Gida can actually run swag.
com way better than me.
So I think this is actually aperfect fit.

Oh, and I'm, I'm curious, what was the, what was
the initial feedback from yourboss at the time?
He was

very uncertain in the beginning.
Not that he didn't, yeah, hedidn't really know Gita, I mean
Right.
It's a big company, you know,custom Ink, thousands of
employees, you know, it's right.
He doesn't know.
He know everybody at that point,and I, and I.
I pushed for it and I said, I, Itry, I feel so confident that
when you get to know her and yousee her in action, you see her
work, you're going to be soblown away by it.
And he was like, I, I, I gotthem in conversations.

(28:40):
I brought Gita to more of theseexecutive meetings.
She's unbelievable.
It's so obvious to anyone who'slike, and he felt a lot more
confident after a couple ofmonths, took a while to get us
there.
Right.
Cause it's like, he bought mycompany, he knew me, he bought,
and now I'm saying, I actuallydon't want to be the CEO or I
don't think I'm the right personto be CEO.
So for him, it was like, what'sgoing on here?

(29:00):
But he totally agreed.
He's like, makes total sense.
And so, you know, it's sometimesit's the, the, the, it's not
always easy, the right thing todo, but you still have to do it.

Yeah.
So Jeremy, thanks for sharingall that.
I, you already have a hit onwhat I wanted to talk about with
your journey next is, and I 140employees of swag.
com when you're acquired, youwere still running that
business.
Consider I guess you would havebeen a general manager of the
business inside of custom Inc.
Yeah, exactly.
And then you decided, Hey, it'stime for me to.

(29:35):
Give this to Gita and go backand do, and found something new
all over again, this side,inside the customing family.
I want to talk about both thetactical part of that, but also
your mindset there.
Because we talked about ego.
Yeah.
There are so many people like,Oh, I want to build a big
company.
Like, you're like, I have astaff of 139 folks and I'm going
back to, in some ways, that pooltable.

(29:57):
Like that pool table with acouple other people doing the
thing.
So do you remember, like, like,was that an easy trip?
Was that an easy thought processfor you?
Were you, were you really, orwere you like twisted on it?
You know, so I talked to yourwife about it.
Was it like a, like, how did youknow that that was the next move
for you?
Cause that seems like.
That's such a shift, especiallyfor entrepreneurs are like, I
want to become a founder andthen a CEO, and I want to grow

(30:19):
and I want to make it big andsell it, and then I want to do
this thing.
It's like, Oh, you're doing the,the, the new thing again, when
you already had.
Yeah,

yeah.
It was a I don't want to say itwas a hard thing.
I, I instinctively felt it wasthe right thing.
So when you sometimes feelsomething in your gut, that's
the right thing.
It makes decisions easier.
I don't know.
I, the big thing for me is I'vebeen known for the last eight
years as the swag guy, right?
Like forget business, right?
Like every interaction, like Igo, I meet with new friends.

(30:49):
My friends say, Oh, you got totalk to Jeremy swag.
com.
Like that becomes your identity,especially for every
entrepreneur, their startupbecomes their identity, but even
more so, they actually getsacquired that, you know, has,
That actually works to somedegree and it's on some scale,
like that becomes your identity.
So going, moving away from thatidentity to now starting

(31:10):
something completely new is aweird feeling.
It's totally a weird feeling,but it's the right, it's the
right thing.
You know, I felt like it was theright thing for me.
I looked at the business of swagand I said, what is my skillset?
What makes me different and whatdo I, what truly gives me energy
and being a CEO, didn't do anyof those things.
I never really wanted to be theCEO.
I mean, I wanted to foundsomething.

(31:31):
I wanted to build something.
I want to have free time, youknow, my own time and control my
destiny.
I like that.
I like having just myfilmmaking.
I like having an idea and thenmaking it come to life.
So like taking something fromzero to one is what I really
loved.
The CEO role is not what Iloved.
It's just by nature of whathappens, right?
Like you start something, itstarts to work.

(31:51):
You're not going to hiresomebody to be a CEO in the
second year of the business.
It doesn't really work.
So you become the CEO, you startlearning and then you start
doing financial modeling, thenyou have people, a hundred
people, you're, you're managingpeople and there's board
meetings and there's raisingmoney and you're trying to get
all into this stuff you nevereven wanted to do.
It was just part of what, yeah.
You have to do and then I kindof after doing this and being

(32:14):
this like Wheel for eight years,I realized I stopped myself.
I said, number one, is this evenwhat I want to do anymore?
And the answer was no.
And number two, am I the rightguy to continue this wheel, to
get us from whatever we're doingto a hundred million a year in
sales, 200 million.
And I felt like maybe I could doit, but am I the best person to
do it?
And I had somebody literallyright next to me who I felt like

(32:37):
was better than me.
I felt like she could lead theteam.
You know, she's just better atbeing a CEO in my, in my mind.
And that's the interestingthing.
It's like, even she says, she'slike, it's so rare for a founder
to be so forthcoming and saythat she's like, I've never seen
that.
Like most founders who are CEOs,they have this huge ego and
they're like, even if they'renot the right person, they

(32:58):
pretend like the right personand they think the right person.
And she's like, it's, it's rarefor, for you to have this
feeling, but I don't know.
I just, that's how I feel.
And I felt like.
I had this opportunity to buildsomething that is unique to me.
I'll tell you about Swagspacevery quickly.
But yeah, I love to hear aboutSwagspace.
Yeah, Swagspace.
I've had this idea for eightyears.

(33:18):
I've had this idea at the sametime that I was starting swag.
com because they're verysimilar.
They're so cool.
And they're different.
So with Swag.
com, in our first year before webuilt technology, I was doing
everything manually.
Like, the whole industry isfragmented.
It's back and forth emails, it'spresentation decks, it's phone
calls to closed sales, thecustomer wants a three color
logo versus a two color.

(33:39):
You have to do the calculationagain for printing.
It's very complicated.
Then when you actually get theorder in, You have to create the
invoice manually.
All these things, all of thesethings take time.
You send the invoice over, youcollect the money, you collect
the sales tax, you remit thesales tax, and that's where the
real work begins.
Then you have to start placingthe orders at the, the vendor
level.
So I have to buy blank t shirtsfrom this place and send it to a

(34:00):
screen printer.
I have to buy this stuff fromthis place and to an
embroiderer.
I have to buy, You know,notebooks here and water bottles
here and this here and thathere.
Like it's, it's like you'reliterally spending so much time
to get the orders over thefinish line.
Then if you ever want to dokidded boxing for onboarding new
hires, you have to get a 3PL ora warehouse to consolidate.
Oh,

sure.

So much manual effort.
And I found myself in the firstyear of the business spending
about 20 percent of my time onselling, right, which is
actually what I wanted to do.
And 80 percent of my time on thebullshit.
Like I was just spending so muchtime on bullshit, wasting time,
it was a nightmare.
And I realized at that moment,what if we could streamline the
80 percent and give people back80 percent of their life so they

(34:40):
could focus 100 percent of theirlife on selling.
That was my, just an idea.
And so I started building swag.
com.
We started automating everythingand started to really, really
work.
And then I started thinkingafter we got acquired by custom
Inc.
Custom Ink does 600, 700 milliondollars a year in revenue,
right?
Right.
They're doing a lot of buyingpower.
And I have this amazingtechnology platform that I spent

(35:01):
the last 8 years building atSwipe.
com.
What if I white labeled thistechnology and I gave it for
free to anybody who wants toeasily sell Swipe?
Ah.
Imagine you're a promodistributor.
There's 20, 000 other guys whoare like me in 2016 who are
doing everything manually.
For free upload their logos,their brand colors, press a
button instantaneously have thebest e commerce experience in

(35:21):
the industry.
Okay.
We handle everything.
They can send the link to theirclients.
Their clients can go through thecheckout flow, buy stuff.
Now, when they buy stuff allautomated, it hits the customing
back end and we become the defacto supplier for everything.
So we just removed all the 80percent and we give the seller a
large chunk of the order.
Then they got us thinking, well,they're screen printers.
They also want to sell hardgoods.

(35:42):
They only sell tarot now, whydon't they do it?
There's event party planners.
They sell swag, they haveclients who want swag, but they
can't offer it because theydon't know how to do it.
It's too complicated, but nowthey can.
They got a whole new industry.
Designers, imagine you're abranding agency and you're a
designer who creates a logo forsomebody.
That client takes the logo andswag.

(36:04):
Right?
Why don't they buy it from thedesigner?
Why doesn't the designer havetheir own swag platform where
their clients, once they createthe logo, their clients can just
check out the designers work andthey make a whole new revenue
stream without doing anything.
So, Swagspace is trying tobecome the universal swag
platform for anyone who wants tosell swag and we just made it
Literally a click of a button,and for free, frictionless, to

(36:25):
have not only the front facingtechnology like a Shopify, but
also the back end supply system,and it's completely connected.
So that's kind of the big idea.
Very cool.
Like, I'm such a unique positionthat to do this, because I was
an old school promo distributor.
I saw the pain that everyone wascurrently in.
I had that insight, I builtswag.
com, the technology, and I knowthe tech is really great.

(36:47):
And we have the buying power ofcustom ink.
So if this was ever going tohappen, like if anyone ever had
this idea to streamline theentire industry, it's a 24
billion industry, if you couldever streamline it, I think I'm
honestly the right person to doit.
So I felt like this is the rightshot to my boss and he was all
for it.

Yeah, brilliant.
That's so cool.
Jeremy.
I worked at a I worked at an ecommerce startup in New York
City for a while.
So I understand a little bitabout the space.
They were actually acquired byShopify.
And I know that Shopify has,that's Shopify's whole thing,
right?
Just become like not the backend part of it, but just like
become the de facto thing thatjust works and that you can

(37:27):
obviously white label, do allthe custom branding.
Brilliant.
I love that idea so much.
Where are you all at in thecycle of having that, of having
that as a real life productoffering?

Yeah.
So we just 15th.
So we're two and a half monthsinto it and it's a learning
process.
You know, it's, we have, wedon't want to grow too fast.
We don't have too many peoplebecause as I said in the early
days, I want to learn what theright thing to build is like
over the last two months ofspeaking to our beta users, I
realized things that we need tobuild, like we need to make it

(37:59):
even more white labeled.
Like our URL is like Jenny promodot swag dot space.
Right?
Because the name is Swagspace.
Swag.
space.
For many people, that's finebecause it looks like a
subdomain, right?
No one realizes they're leavingtheir site when they click on
shop swag, gennypromo.
com.
It takes you to gennypromo.
swag.
space.
But some people don't want that.
So we're now launching at theend of this month.

(38:19):
a white label website.
So it's fully white labeled.
We found people like customdomain.
Yeah.
Custom domain.
We found that people in ourindustry and screen printers,
they might even have a website.
So they don't want to just havelike a catalog that people go
to.
They want to have like ahomepage, but they don't have
any technical ability.
To build the site or go to theWix or do this.
And that was a blocker.
So we're building a templateabletheir own homepage, their own

(38:40):
domain name, their own site.
Like we're figuring out what ispreventing people from doing it
or what the challenges are.
We found that we have some userswho have like a hundred sales
agents.
And right now it's built for onelogin.
It's like everyone has to usethe same login, but that's not
really ideal.
For, for multiple users, youwant to get everybody having
their own login where they cankeep track of their, of their

(39:01):
sales and they can getcommission payouts.
So we're building a multi userlogin.
Like when you launch something,you don't want to, you don't,
you.
You can't have everything thatyou would envision.
Like we have a lot of ideas.
You can't have everythingbecause it takes too much time
and you never launch anything.
It's my issue with vouch.
I just spend too much timebuilding what I thought before
getting feedback.
So we launched probably 60percent of where the vision is.

(39:24):
And over the last few months,we've been trying to bridge that
gap.
And by the end of next month,we'll have like 80%.
We have a lot more features,but.
It's honestly working.
We're getting hundreds ofthousands of dollars for the
sales already in the first twomonths.
People are using it.
It's easy.
It's free.
And the big vision, I mean, whoknows if we'll get here.
I mean, it's a lot of learningand it's going to, well, we'll
see what happens.
But if you get a thousand of the23, 000 promo distributors,

(39:48):
right, just a thousand of them.
And they do an average of amillion dollars in sales a year.
So you just get a thousand ofthem doing it through, it's a
billion dollars of revenue.
So you don't need that manyusers.
You get a hundred of them, it's500 million.
That's not even includinggetting designers and screen
printers and party planners andentrepreneurs.
Literally anybody who wants tostart a business.
Any of your listeners who arelike in between things, who want

(40:08):
to start a business.
Literally anybody in seconds andfor free could create the best
swag site in the market.
That's the beauty of it.
One of our beta users has, I'm afriend of his, he, we were
having coffee, we were talkingabout it.
I was telling him this back inDecember about what I'm doing
and I'm about to launch this newthing.
And he's like, Hey Jeremy, I'mlike in between jobs.
Do you mind if I become a user?

(40:30):
He's like, I've never sold swag.
I've never, I'm not an eventplanner.
I had a job.
I was just an employee at acompany.
I said, yeah, why not?
This actually be a great kind ofcase study.
He's our number one seller inthe first three months.
He's done almost 80, 000 ofsales in two months.
He made 30, 000 for himself inprofit.
Without doing yeah, it'sanybody.
It could be the local mom.

(40:50):
It could be the stay at homedad.
It could be anybody.
Imagine you want to sell to alocal charity, your kid's
school.
Does that have to be your maincareer?
You sell 20, 000 to your kid'sschool and your charity and
local restaurants.
You're making 30 percent on topline.
I mean, that's, that adds a lotof extra money to people.
So literally anyone could do it.

Yeah, brilliant.
Yeah.
I'm just, I'm thinking for bothfor my business and some of the
other folks that I know,nonprofits and such, where that
makes sense where instead ofgoing to, I'm just thinking
about a nonprofit I'm involvedwith where they, they do things
like sweatshirts and t shirtsand they have like fundraising
competition contest where.
You know, certain levels, youget certain things.

(41:29):
Why not just buy it fromthemselves is what I hear you
could do.
It's almost like buying it fromyourself.
You could.
There is, there is, so

there is a caveat to it.
We do have an applicationprocess that we don't approve
everyone.
So we want to make this reallyfor people who are selling it.
We don't want it, becauseotherwise, anyone can buy it
from them.
But it's, it's theoretically youcan do it, and if you were going
to sell it to that charity, youcould give them a great deal.
You could give them 30

percent to make new money.
What?
Yeah, but a lot of non profitsalso people want their swag,
like, oh, I like your logo.
I'm, I'm at, Hey, like I win, Isee this cool sweatshirt that I
win because I raised a thousanddollars.
But what if I wanted that for mykid and I didn't raise a
thousand dollars and go,amazing, Jeremy, that's so,
that's brilliant, brilliant.

(42:13):
I'm, you've got me thinking overhere.
You could probably see me forthe people listening.
We could see me.
I'm, I'm like, actually, like,I'm like, oh, how can I, I don't
want to be a seller, but I doneed to buy some things from my
business.
I'm like, Oh, dad, this, thismakes so much sense.
What a Jeremy, I just want totell you as we wrap up here,
what a cool journey.
I'm really, I'm really amazed byI'm amazed by all of it.

(42:34):
I think I'm most amazed by whatyou said, the fact that you're
willing to give up the CEO role.
That is not something that a lotof folks do that, at least that
I know it happens.
But the fact that you're willingto say there's somebody better
than me really had to like,that's an ego check for sure.
I know that would be a hardthing for me to say it many
times.
And I want to wrap with aquestion, you know, a more

(42:57):
personal question for you.
About your growth was like tolearn, like people like you,
what's next for you and likeyour executive leadership and
what's next for you in terms ofthe skills you're working on as
you've had a successful, you'vehad a successful, what I, it
sounds like a very successfulexit.
You're now doing somethingagain, that's really aligned to
you, but like.

(43:17):
I know that it's common forpeople to get so heads down in
business that they, they forgetto do the development for
themselves.
Like what's the, what's the bigskill that you're working on
right now?

Yeah.
Well, it's not even a businessskill because business skills, I
find myself learning in thebusiness often.
I'm trying to get super healthy.
Like just insane discipline.
I found myself, I found myself,there was a during my
entrepreneur, you know, being inthe business and grinding so
hard, I found myself, I got alittle heavier over the years.
and I found myself being like210 pounds.

(43:49):
Easy to do.
Too too nappy.
Easy to

do!

So easy.
And about two years ago, Istarted this like complete
health kick, and really tryingto get fit, and I lost nearly 30
pounds over the last two years.
Congrats!

That's awesome.
And I

think just the mentality of waking up, And
treating your health just likepeople treat your business is an
important thing.
Like, yeah, you're, if you'regood at business and you're
going every day and you'reworking really hard, you have,
you have it in you to be alsoreally fit.
And a lot of people lose sightof that or they don't
necessarily, they don't thinkthey care.
And you, you will care when youget older and you start feeling,

(44:23):
you know, it's tired and youhave young kids, you're going to
feel it.
And then people say, Oh, it'stoo hard.
I don't have time.
You can make time if you're abusiness owner, you're able to
navigate time and schedulemeetings and change things and
prioritize.
And for me, health has becomelike something I will never,
like I will never not focus on.
Like I'm always going to focuson health.
Yeah, life.

That's, that's so cool.
Makes you a better leader.
Totally.
You're feeling more

energy, makes you better husband and father,
everything.
It just changes overall, makesyou feel better.

Yeah, picking up those picking up those young
kids and you go, Oh, my backdoesn't hurt when I do that.
Yeah.
Or like get on the floor withthem.
You're like, Oh, that's my myknees aren't popping.
Not that I've ever had thathappen, but it has happened to
me as well.
Yeah, that's so cool.
Jeremy, I want to thank you somuch for being on.
This is an awesome conversation.
Congrats on the success.
I'm going to go check.
I'm going to go.
I am going to go snoop aroundand find your documentary.

(45:16):
I'm not going to have you saidit to me.
I'm just going to go find it.
I'm a big film guy as well.
Cool.
Congratulations on everything.
Really excited to see what youdo at Swagspace.
That sounds like a great idea.
And we'll have you back on againsoon, catch up and hear what's
up with you in the future.
Thanks so much.
Appreciate it.
Thanks.
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Jeremy Parker - Founder of Swag.com, Dad, Award Winning Filmmaker

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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}Jeremy Parker - Founder of Swag.com, Dad, Award Winning Filmmaker