Case study · Swag.com · 2016 — today
We have been Swag.com’s engineering partner since the very first version of the store, through the remote-work boom of 2020 and its acquisition by Custom Ink in 2021.
The problem
We met Swag.com co-founders Jeremy Parker and Joshua Orbach in New York in September 2016. Buying branded merchandise then meant emailed quotes, endless mock-up revisions, manual invoices and sales tax, separate suppliers for blank products and printing, and someone checking a spreadsheet of addresses by hand.
Most of the industry’s 23,000 distributors spent around 80% of their time fulfilling orders and only 20% selling. Catalogs ran to thousands of pages of near-identical mugs.
Swag.com’s bet was the opposite: a short, curated list of products people actually keep, and software that does the busywork.
“It takes all of the manual process of traditional swag buying, and we’ve automated it, streamlined it.”
The first version had to launch fast and still last. We shipped the product catalog, a product builder that places your logo on the item in seconds, checkout and the order-processing flow, on a stack chosen to scale with the business.
In 2017 Aleph One invested $50,000 in Swag.com alongside its pre-seed round. By the end of that year Facebook and WeWork were ordering through the platform.
As demand grew, so did the team. We hired, led and shaped it: reorganised QA around automation, introduced Scrum for accurate planning and roadmap delivery, and added leadership roles as the team grew so communication stayed fast and bureaucracy stayed low.
The result was a team with high talent density and retention, which let Swag.com keep increasing its investment in technology without losing return on it.
The idea came from a visit to a client’s office, where Jeremy saw HR and office managers packing swag kits by hand. What if Swag.com stored the merchandise and shipped it, one box or a thousand, whenever the customer asked?
We turned that into the inventory platform. Companies keep stock in shared “closets”, give HR, marketing and office teams in different cities their own permissions, move inventory between closets, add approval steps, and ship to a list of addresses by uploading a single CSV.
The pandemic sent everyone home and cancelled every conference, the industry’s biggest channel. Swag.com doubled down on the inventory platform we had launched a year earlier, and companies used it to ship swag straight to remote employees, customers and leads.
While the promo industry declined, Swag.com’s business grew more than 100%, and it made the Inc. 5000 two years in a row.
2021 · The outcome
Five years after the first version went live, and a year after Swag.com doubled while the rest of the industry shrank.
The inventory platform began with office managers packing boxes by hand, not with a feature list. Most of what we built came straight from customer feedback.
From 3 to 42 engineers, with QA automation, Scrum and new leadership roles added as the team grew, so speed and quality held up.
Architecture decisions like multi-tenancy turned new ideas, from white-label partner stores to a Shopify app, into weeks of work instead of new platforms.
What they said
“They’re very passionate about the idea. It’s not just a job to them. They feel like a part of the team.”
“The AlephOne team is one of the best tech teams I have worked with. I am impressed by the volume of work the team is able to accomplish, and the quality of the work released.”
Complex platforms, overdue rewrites, agentic workflows. That’s the work we enjoy most.
