Episode 308 - Jeremy Parker - ENHANCED VIDEO
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Corey Kupfer: [00:00:00] Jeremy Parker graduated from Boston University in 2007, where he majored in film production. During his junior year, his feature length documentary secured an audience award at the 2006 Vail Film Festival. Following his academic achievements, Jeremy embarked on a diverse career path. He established a creative promotional products division under Envy Sport.
Then, in collaboration with his brother David and Jesse Itzler, co founder of Marquee jet investor and partner in Zico Coconut Water and owner of the Atlanta Augs, Jeremy co founded an e commerce platform designed to distribute unique promotional codes through social media influences, Facebook, and Twitter posts.
This platform was acquired by a publicly traded company. He currently serves as co founder and CEO of swag. com, acquired by Custom Ink in November 2001. And he has positioned the company as the premier destination for businesses looking to purchase and distribute quality promotional products.
I mean, their clients include Facebook, Google, Amazon, Apple, [00:01:00] Netflix, Spotify, and Tik Tok. And I am so excited to have Jeremy on the DealQuest podcast. Welcome.
Thank you so much for having me.
So Jeremy, so listen, I want to get into, you know, how you developed this company at such a young age and how you, eventually, you know, sold it and now you ended up in business partnership with, you know, a major player like that, all of which are deal related and what this podcast is about.
But before we go there, I want to take you back to when you were a little kid growing up, maybe 10, 12 years old. What did you want to be? Because, I'm, you know, guessing I say this all the time, you know, for most people, I'm guessing whatever you're doing now wasn't what you wanted to do back then and, clearly we already said in your bio that you were into film, you know, in school.
So, I'm assuming that, you know, a promotional products company wasn't your, dream at 10 and 12 years old, but you tell me.
Jeremy Parker: Yeah, when I was 12 years old, I had no idea what promotional products were, honestly. I think I wanted to be probably a basketball player or baseball player. Yeah. Grew, growing up, I was super into sports, like that was my life.
And then when I got into high school I really got into filmmaking. So I [00:02:00] really loved storytelling and I thought I would want to go to college for that. And I ultimately did. I went to Boston University. I majored in film production. I thought that was going to be my career. You know, I was, well, I was maybe 18 years old, 19 years old.
I made this documentary called one percent. It was a feature length documentary. We were at the veil film festival. So when the top film festivals in the country and I'm on the top of the mountain and we win this huge award, the audience award. And the next morning I wake up and I go to the quote unquote celebrity brunch and half the room where these, actors, everyone's heard of like really A list stars and half the room were more struggling artists.
And I did like an internal gut check, and I said to myself, number one, do I truly love what I'm doing? And number two, am I that good at it? And honestly, both answers were no. You know, even though I won this award, the three days of the festival, I was going to all these movies, and I was seeing how amazing these movies were, and I was kind of like, Wow.
These people really love it. This is true artistry and my film, even though we won [00:03:00] it, I didn't feel like I had it in me. And, it was just like smack in the face realization that maybe what I've been pursuing is not necessarily the right career path. And when I got back to college, I was a junior in college at the time.
I still had to finish my major and I finished and I graduated college. I had no experience except for being a filmmaker. And I thought, you know what, maybe I'll start a business. I didn't know anything about business. I, Really no experience at all, but I knew I was a good storyteller. And I figured that building a brand is like telling a story and I could start a company for very little money.
And I thought of a t shirt company. But I could learn what I was good at, you know, manufacturing, production, PR, branding, building e commerce site, you know, it kind of fully encapsulates all the business. And I would learn what I was good at, what I was bad at. And I would kind of gravitate towards what I was good at.
So that's kind of how I got started, from filmmaking . to an entrepreneur and then it's been a long journey ever since ups and downs along the way.
Corey Kupfer: Love it. One other question looking back. What was your first deal of any type that you can think of? Even if it was something small in your kid [00:04:00] or all in your career or was I assume maybe there was something before the big sale of the company.
Jeremy Parker: Yeah, totally. Well, I've had some random different stories throughout my life. You know, when I was 13, I went, it's actually 12, I was in Israel and I was on a family vacation and my parents took me to this orphanage in, in Netanya. It's a city in Israel and this is an amazing home. They take care of all these kids these displaced kids who have a lot of family issues or their families are drug addicts or parents that passed away, et cetera.
And I was the same age of a lot of these kids who were living there and it's like hundreds of kids. It's amazing. It's amazing. And I was playing with one of the kids in the room. So I was, we're hanging out and I realized he didn't have any toys, you know, that many toys. So I went to my dad and my mom and I said, I'm going to, let me go home forever.
It's, well, let me raise some money and buy the kids toys. That was like my idea. It was like a small idea, like really a small idea for a 12 year old boy. And I got home and I launched this festival. I call the festivals like a little, you know, water balloons and just like a fun thing in my backyard.
And I [00:05:00] charged everybody 10 and we raised a thousand dollars or so, and we bought toys and we brought it to Israel. And it was like, it was a nice gift to them. They made a room called the Jeremy Parker Toy Room at this orphanage. And this was, I'm 39 right now, so this was 13 years ago, this was 13, so 26 years ago.
This room is still in existence. Every year, people come to the orphanage and they donate to the toy room. So I've been told there's been literally millions of dollars worth of donations. investment in this orphanage because of a small idea that I did. And I've realized throughout my career, you never know where an idea is going to come from or where it's going to lead.
So if you have an idea, try to do it and you'll see where it can go. And I guess that was my first, I first kind of deal. Then I, then you mentioned in the intro, I, I started a company that was acquired by a publicly traded company when I was 25 years old, a little high level of that. Me and my brother were, watching American Idol one day and, the judges were drinking, you know, out of a Coke, cup.
And obviously these guys are all fit. They're not drinking Coke. So it was [00:06:00] product placement. And then we were watching YouTube videos later in the day. And my brother really had this insight. He saw these YouTube stars that got millions of views. I mean, back 25, this is 14 years ago. So this is really early YouTube.
It's like the wild west. And he realized all these YouTube stars are getting millions of views and they were not making money. They were like living in their parents basement. And now that you know, all the YouTube stars are multimillionaires and there's Instagram now and Twitter and all these people are making tons of money doing product placement.
But back in the day, they didn't really do that. And my brother had this idea. What if. We partnered with companies like State Farm, Verizon, all these big companies and get their brand into the YouTube stars video and become kind of like this agent for the YouTube stars. And we started to do this and we started to make a lot of money and we started to make these YouTube stars a lot of money.
And then our idea got a little bit bigger. And we said, well, why are we stopping with YouTube stars? Why don't we actually buy the rights to major celebrities, Twitter and Facebook feeds? This is like early days. Like I can't say the names of the celebrities that we bought the rights to, but. Imagine a celebrity had like 4, 000 followers on [00:07:00] Twitter and now they have like 40 million followers.
So it's really early. And we started buying all the different rights to these celebrities. Now we didn't have the money to do that. You know, I was like a 25 year old kid and how am I going to buy the rights? So I partnered up with Jesse Itzler, Jesse Isler, you know, created Marquis Jet, private jet company sold to Warren Buffett, Ziko Coconut Ware sold to Coke, a lot of amazing entrepreneurs, super accomplished.
And he brought us into a deal with, a guy by the name of Bob Sillerman, who's another media, Mogul and worked at a deal with him where we would basically get some funding to buy upfront rights to these celebrities. So think of it as like a, like when like music agencies or, record labels, like do a front money to a new artist and they pay them upfront and then over time based on, you know, the record sales they get paid back.
So we took that model and we started going to all these different major celebrities and buying their rights so that they would have to go through us if they ever wanted to do a promo deal. That company. You know, we started growing and ultimately got acquired by this publicly traded company [00:08:00] that was run by Bob Sillerman.
And then I had a big failure, you know, I started a social networking company, spent three years doing it, raised money doing it, and it just never took off. And, you know, with entrepreneurship that I've realized it's a life game. It's like, it's never, there's no beginning and end. It's like, even if you have a win it's the next game.
It's the next challenge. And then you might have a loss, but you kind of have to learn from every experience and build yourself up and kind of learn which, what to do better next time. And then right after that three year failure, then I started swag. com and high level for your audience. Swag. com became the fastest growing company in the promo industry.
We scaled from zero to over 30 million in six year period. 30 million a year in sales. In 2021, we were acquired by custom ink, the leader. in the industry. So we were swag. com helping businesses buy promotional products like Facebook and Google. And you listen to some earlier, we have 18, 000 businesses that buy from us that buy swag in bulk, that warehouse swag with us and do individual distribution.
It's a whole process. So we are the leader in the B2B [00:09:00] space for swag and, custom ink is the leader for consumers, you know, happy birthdays, parties, father's day, team sports organizations, et cetera. So the combination made a lot of sense. I was the CEO of swag. com, for the last two years, up until last December, where I stopped being CEO.
I passed that off to somebody who is my right hand woman, Gita. And I started a new division under customing called swag space. So for the last seven months. I've been building this new division underneath customing called swag space. We're basically a high level. We took all of the technology that we built at swag.
com and we white labeled it and gave it away to all the promo distributors in the industry. There's 23, 000 prominent industry, industry insiders. They make sales, but they do everything manual. They have no e commerce. Here they have the best e commerce experience in the industry. Now they can make sales way more frictionless.
And when the orders come in, it hits our back end and we also become the de facto supplier. So we're giving like everyone the front end tech to make sales as well as the back end supply to actually fulfill their orders. And [00:10:00] it's been going great so far.
Corey Kupfer: Right. So there's like five or six or eight different kinds of deals that you mentioned that all right.
So I want to break them down. Okay. So first of all, You saw, you know, even identifying this deal opportunity for, YouTube stars, influencers, people like that to do product placement. How did that, like, did you just, I mean, you said you started on, you know, on America, like, so did you see that happening in traditional media and movies and that kind of stuff and say, oh, hey, there's this thing over here?
, like, you know, I'm of the generation maybe where I understand that you know, and that's how you sort of put it together on how those deals might work in that new medium or newer medium. Yeah, that's, that's,
Jeremy Parker: it's pretty much my brother really was the visionary there. He's the one who, He, we were both filmmakers, and we actually made the movie together that won the Vail Film Festival, and I mean, when you're starting a movie, you're seeing, oh, how we're gonna monetize this movie, especially when it's like an independent flick, and you think, maybe we'll get some product placement, we'll do that, so we had that in the back of our mind, and then my brother realized it with YouTube [00:11:00] stars, that they did it, they were making money And they're making more views than even TV and movies.
Like, why are they not making the money? And it's online. So if they do a product placement, there could be like a button right there where you click and actually force conversions versus watching a TV and then it's like going to your computer. So it's a much easier, less friction thing. So he noticed that, and it started to work and I joined him and then we were discussing it and we're like, well, why are we starting?
Why are we just stopping with YouTube stars? There's all these other social media platforms, where celebrities are really new. It was kind of like buying oil before we, before they realized that oil was valuable. That's kind of how we thought of it. We're like in the wild west. And we said, well, we know these YouTube stars cause we've been doing this for two plus years.
We don't know these celebrities. How are we going to get these celebrities? And we looked around our network and. We knew somebody, we knew somebody, we knew somebody who ultimately got us in touch with, Jesse. And we knew Jesse's background was so perfect for this kind of partnership. Because we just heard amazing things about him and he's wildly creative.
But also, a lot of his, [00:12:00] success was, you know, in his relationships. Like how he built Marquis Jet. There's so many amazing stories about how we built Marquee Jet with different celebrities being like the focus group and how we built Zico with different celebrities that he had that network and we felt like he would be the perfect person to kind of be able to walk in the door with these celebrities and they would trust him.
And then we could kind of parlay this into it. So I would say that every single thing that we've done, especially with deals it's really saying like, Especially young entrepreneurs. I don't know who listens to your audience, but if they're young entrepreneurs, most people don't have connections.
That's like by nature, you don't have it, but there's, you could always figure out how to get it with a good idea. You could get in front of anybody and even more so now. I mean, now Instagram, you could DM somebody, you could Twitter message somebody, everybody is one, one message away and it's really true.
And if it's a good idea. People see the value in good ideas. And every entrepreneur you're reaching out to was a young entrepreneur with no connections at one point. So, we all remember that moment. So, I think it's much easier than people give themselves credit for. I love it. Or they think it [00:13:00] is.
Corey Kupfer: And without obviously disclosing anything that's confidential, but, you said you had a partnership , right, with Jesse, , like, so he and some of his connections brought the capital, you brought, like, what can you talk about on, you know, without any, confidential things on generally what that kind of, you know, deal looked like?
Jeremy Parker: We were co founders. I would just think of it like that. You know, so we all bring different strengths. You know, at the time I was 25 years old, I was a user experience background. That was a branding guy. Jesse's obviously a branding guy. He has a lot of connections. He's very creative. My brother is brilliant.
You know, Harvard business school, applied math at Columbia. Like we brought, we all brought different skill sets to the table. So think of it just like a co founders bringing each other. Jesse wasn't. Giving money was more about, you know, having connections to different influencers, different investors, and we raised money for that.
Corey Kupfer: Got it. And then
Jeremy Parker: you,
Corey Kupfer: okay. And then, yeah, in terms of that decision to raise capital, so was that, again, without, you know, any confidential details, so that was an equity raise where, where, they also, so you had an investor, You know, [00:14:00] class or people or a person or, you know, exactly.
Jeremy Parker: Every business that I've realized over my career and some businesses we raised money and some businesses we raised money and it failed and it didn't work. And it was, it's a horrible feeling to lose people's money. That's, you know, it's one of the worst feelings as entrepreneur. It's bad for yourself because you're spending your whole life on it, but you also feel this extra level of burden.
So, especially when you take in family money. And so that, that is a risk I've become over the years. Even with swag. com, we raise money for swag. com, but we raise very little, over the course of the business. We only raise when we needed to raise. It was like, if I was going to raise any money, I would have to have a real plan for that money.
It wasn't just like for security or to give us more runway. You know, we were profitable. We were making money. We were making sales every single day. It was like. Why am I raising this money? Oh, it's to hire this role in this role. Who's going to actually get us to the next level, or I'm going to, you know, be able to hire a few more developers that will be able to build this feature that we think will be an unlock for our customers.
It was always about that. So we always were so like frugal with our money, like [00:15:00] obsessed, like not to spend. And we made sure we were optimizing every little thing. You know, there's several years in, in swag. com where we weren't even thinking about raising. I, we raised less than four, 4 million all in, and we were doing a You know, tens of millions of dollars of sales a year, we had a hundred person plus team, by the time we got acquired.
So think of it as like that. We raised very little money. The only reason why we even raised like a million, 1. 2 million in the last year was because of COVID. And when COVID hit, we didn't know what was going to happen to our industry, right? Like all the events, Shut down all the office party shut down.
So it was just kind of a safety a raise for safety just to get us through the time. And we ultimately never even needed that money. It was like sitting, we never even touched it because we were able to kind of pivot and become the leader in swag distribution to help people send swag to the remote employees, which allowed ourselves to go from.
7 million pre COVID to over 15 million exit rate of COVID. So we really over doubled even through COVID when the whole industry was contracting. So my opinion in my next [00:16:00] business, next thing I start, I'm going to be very mindful of what I raise and only raise if I truly need it. Now, there's some businesses that I have friends who start who you a hundred percent need to raise because it's a real tech play.
It's, it's like super AI. It's like, you need this. But for most businesses out there, I've learned. And it's like, upon reflection, that raising is often, it's like an ego sport. It's like, it's not necessarily needed. It's, if you have to put yourself in the mindset of an entrepreneur, entrepreneur is like, you are the loneliest person in, by nature, right?
Usually you're at the You're working tirelessly. You're not making a lot of money. Most people who hear what you're doing, at least startup culture, think that, you know, you don't even have a real job. That's the mentality, most of the time. And you start to look for outside validation. I know in my earlier career I used to.
And the really, the two ways to get outside validation are one, like press articles. That's why you see all these articles. articles written about with the co founders and like a cool pose that makes them look like rock stars. It's more like self motivation and like, Oh [00:17:00] look, I'm actually doing something or raising funds.
And I've realized a lot of people get into that trap of raising money where they don't need to, or raising from people they don't need to and really internalize it and say, do I need this? If yes, then do it. If not, then keep grinding. It might be a little bit harder in the short term, but in the longterm your future self will thank you.
Corey Kupfer: And also it's interesting, because it also forced you to be more disciplined. I mean I've seen, you know, right, entrepreneurs that raise money give them a little more freedom and leeway, , but sometimes they use it very effectively but sometimes it actually causes them to make bad business decisions to not be as efficient right
to not really make those decisions in a way where they'd have to make them much more efficiently if they didn't have the capital available. Okay. So,
let's talk about, So did I hear you right that you had the original company exit and then swag. com? So two sales? Yeah,
Jeremy Parker: two sales.
We had the exit for the social media company and I was 25. Yeah. And then I started swag.com when I was 30 and I sold it when I was 36, [00:18:00] so six years, 350,000. The first year I was a traveling salesman. Me and my co-founder Josh, knocking on doors. I mean, every day was doing a deal. Honestly. It was, I'll give you like the early stories of swag.com.
It was crazy because the swag industry is a $25 billion plus industry. And there's 20, 000 plus promo distributors. So there's a lot of people selling this, right? And the average promo distributor is about 500, 000 to a million dollars a year in sales. So just to put in perspective, right, how do you cut through the noise?
I mean, that was the big question. Like why? And when I was starting swag. com, all, everyone was saying like, what makes you different? Like, why would anybody want to use you versus the 20, 000 other people? Like you're a nothing. You're like, so the first thing we had to do was we had to get the domain name.
Swag. com, which obviously as you can imagine is a very expensive domain name. The reason why the domain name was so important to us from the very beginning is, My feeling was this, if you're scrolling Facebook and you see a pair of shoes, a pair of jeans, you might buy it. It's a consumer, it's an impulse purchase, you buy it.
If you're [00:19:00] seeing an ad for buying swag and you're buying through a company, you're not really going to buy it unless there's a need for it, if there's like a specific event coming up. So you might get an ad in front of somebody in January and you really need to stay on the top of their mind in November when holiday season comes around.
So my whole idea from buying the name swag. com is I wanted to turn offline conversations to online purchasing. That's what I kept thinking. So. It was integral to getting the name. Now, the name is insanely expensive. And there's a story, I'll tell you a quick version of it, of how we even got the name. The guy was asking for over a million dollars or so.
Ultimately, we negotiated down to somewhere around 200, 000. I still don't have that money, even though, now, if you saw swag. com on the open market, it would be like three, four million dollars. Like the industry of domain names have gone up like crazy. But this is six years, nine years ago. So it's a little bit cheaper.
We worked at a deal where we gave some equity to the owner of the name, and we were able to exclusively license the name for a two year period. So we're able to use the name for those two years. And then at some point over those two years, any point we could buy the name for [00:20:00] 200, 000 and we're able to run it.
And my feeling was, Okay. Everyone kind of wins, you know, obviously we gave up equity prematurely. And so the guy, it was a great deal for him, but we weren't able to get that name without it. We didn't have the 200, 000 to do it. So it became kind of this thing where we could launch the name from day one.
If there's a business here, okay, we'll give a little bit of equity and we'll pay the 200, 000. If there's no business here, there's no skin off our back. We didn't kind of, we didn't have to lose anything. So we got the domain name and then it was all about, well, how do we actually get customers?
Corey Kupfer: Hang on a second before we even move on because I want to point something out, like I often talk about on this podcast about the mindset of a dealmaker and listen, Jeremy, you have such a dealmakers mindset.
There's things, you know, like you speak about them like it was natural, right? And a lot of people don't even think about this stuff. So I want to just slow you down a little bit and break it down. Like, so let's think about what, you know, what they did here. Right? So they recognize the value of the name.
A lot of people would have stopped at the fact that we can't afford to buy this name even back then, not to mention now. Right? Right. Right. But came up [00:21:00] with a creative deal structure that allowed him to do that. Said, Hey, well, I'm going to do a license with an option of purchase. Right. Which is what he, you know, what he did a two year license and the option of purchase got to try it out.
And listen, yes. I mean, you know, you heard Jeremy say that, you know, gave away equity too early, but listen, in hindsight, that's always easy to say, but when you, when you wouldn't otherwise be able to do it, you don't have the cash to do it. The currency you have is equity. And sure, you try to preserve your equity as much as you can, but I'm sure you don't regret actually having to pay that equity, even though it was expensive in hindsight.
It obviously allowed you to, you know, to do what you're about to tell us about the rest of the journey. But I really want to break that down. You know, that was a creative deal structure that Jeremy came up with and put in place on this license. And if you think about it, from the owner of the company, The main point of view, right, it was a smart deal on his part as well because, right, if they exercise the option, then, then he knew he got the price he wanted.
In the meantime, right, he has an economic deal on a license. You know, and if it doesn't [00:22:00] work out, he gets it's the main back in two years. So, You know, it made sense from both sides. So I just wanted to break that down a little bit for those folks. His mind don't quickly as work as quickly as the deal makers mindset that you obviously naturally after.
Thank you.
Jeremy Parker: Yes. So that was that first step. And then, you know, what I've, what I know in terms of B2B, it's all about social proof, right? Like if somebody comes to swag. com and it's a coming soon landing page, People are gonna say, Oh, cool name. It's probably a company. They're probably doing something.
It's exciting. But if you were the role of logos of big name companies and Facebook and Google and WeWork and all these big companies, they're gonna say, wow, a lot of the companies use it. We're a smaller startup. We should probably use them as well. So it became, we became logo hunters, you know, me and my co founder, Josh, that was our entire mentality in the early days.
It was. To learn the right product to build. And also at the same time, if we could do it, make some sales and, get logos. It making the sales were great cause it helped us learn, but it wasn't about no profitability or maximizing EBITDA. It was nothing. It was getting the logos. [00:23:00] So we literally knocked on doors.
We went up and down hallways of we work. We made sales. We went to Facebook. Our first real order was from Facebook and we got in the office, stay at the office in New York city. And, we had a connection of a connection who got us in. It was like a big lunch at Facebook, right? And you could go in, you get this free, amazing lunch.
And we went into Facebook for lunch and we were having a meeting and telling this friend of a friend what we do and seeing that maybe they would want to be buyers, et cetera. He's not a buyer. Okay. And we saw an empty conference room. In Facebook's office and we went into this conference room and we had, you know, we're trapped swag.
You can think of it like a bag of all this, like notebooks, t shirts, water bottles, all these different things. And we laid it out on the table within Facebook's office at all. These people kept walking by and like thinking we got permission, quote unquote, to set up there and we're coming in. What do you guys do?
Oh, we sell swag. You want some? And we actually sold over a 3, 000 order to an employee at Facebook who was buying for her specific department like a new release or a new opening or something. I actually framed the t shirt in my apartment somewhere. Basically it's like, it's because [00:24:00] it's like our first big t shirt order.
And now we're like, wow, we have Facebook. We can put Facebook on our lo on our website. Great. The next day, literally the very next day, we walked into the corporate offices of WeWork. And we were trying to sell them t shirts. And they asked us. Who else you work with? And we said, Facebook, obviously, we're not lying.
We said, Facebook, and they probably assumed swag. com. They work with Facebook. They must work with many other people. Let's just give them a shot. So we got, we work. And then we went to Bravo TV station. We were showing up in real time. It's hard for people to kick you out the door. If you're already there.
Right there, at least get, you know, hear you out. And the worst comes to worst. They say, no, but our proposition to them was whatever you're paying for swag now take off 30%. Cause we did not care about. The money we cared about the logo. That was it. And then we got enough logos that it justified that people could trust us and we built some clientele and then the prices and the discounts kind of went away.
Now we have, you know, 18, 000 businesses that buy from us from every company you could think of, is buying from us and they're doing it on our site and they're checking out and it's automated and [00:25:00] streamlined. But that wouldn't have been possible. My feeling is like in the very beginning, every part of a business, there's a different, traction channel that works, right?
Like in the early days, we had no money. We didn't have money for Google ads. We didn't have money to do anything. So knocking on doors was our currency. That was the only thing we could actually provide and make it happen. But at some point that's not necessarily scalable. So then you do the next thing.
Then you start saying, okay, all the money we made there, let's reinvest into Google ads. That's, you know, that's not necessarily working because it's too expensive. Then you, so you kind of keep the new foreign partnerships. So it becomes like this thing of constant trying to iterate and keep growing with what you're able to have at that point in the business.
I love it.
Corey Kupfer: So on either of these businesses, did you, when you started them, did you start them with the intention of selling them? Was that always the plan or did it do it sort of, you know, evolve into that?
Jeremy Parker: Yeah. Never. No, I never thought about selling any of it. When I was starting all these businesses, swag.
com was a little bit more experienced at that point. But in the early days when I was doing the YouTube, it was just, we thought it was a creative idea. We thought we could make it happen and let's just build it. I [00:26:00] mean, it wasn't, we didn't even think about, we just thought about building a business.
We were very young. With swag. com, you know, I don't know what I was thinking. Honestly, in the beginning, I just wanted to build a great product. I don't think I ever thought about selling the business or going public. It was never even that think, that thought. I frankly never even thought I can make it over 5 million of sales.
That wasn't, In the early days, I kind of, that feels like so far away, you know, it takes you a week to close a sale in the beginning and it's like, that's like a thousand dollars and like, wow, I have to do a million dollars in this a year and then you hit a million. It's like, oh wow, that's amazing.
Let me see if I get 10 million, 10 million, try to get 30, it keeps growing and growing and growing. And then you look back in seven years and you're like, how the freak did we get here? But no, it was never with that intention. It was always like, I kind of fell in love with the business of making the experience better for customers.
I became obsessed. It was always about like, here's what we have now. Where are the challenges? How do we fix it? Oh, there's a problem. Let's build it. And I was so heads down for six years. I didn't even let myself look up and breathe and see what I built. Until the very end, until we started getting people reaching out to us, and saying we [00:27:00] want to buy you.
I'm like, wow, okay. It was not my intention. It was not my thought. It's probably not going to work out because you always hear these horror stories of these deals falling through or sucking up time. And I'm like, I don't even want to deal with it. But I could tell you the story about how it all happened, but there's a lot of.
There was a lot of kind of things that happened that all kind of worked and getting to know Custom Ink over the years, because it really took almost a two year, 24 month process from the moment they reached out to us to the moment we actually closed the deal, that we felt, started to feel really confident that this was the right home for where we should go.
Corey Kupfer: Right. And it sounds like you had other people reaching out as well. So did you pursue other offers? Did you work with a banker? Did you do it on your own? Like what was your process? And once you. at least started considering a sale of the company.
Jeremy Parker: Yeah, we never worked with a banker. We thought about it.
We, we interviewed bankers. So what happened was custom meeting, we connected with them right before COVID and we hit it off and we were never thinking about selling, but it was, it's always good. I feel like to meet other people in your industry. I mean, just to be on the radar and to network and who knows, [00:28:00] maybe there's a partnership there, maybe there's an acquisition there, maybe there's some learnings, like maybe if there's a friendship, frankly.
It wasn't about anything and we met with him in, February. So Custom Inc. Reached out to us in February. We were connected to them and we hit it off and it was, you know, it became kind of like, Hey, we should keep this conversation going. Who knows where it could lead. We have.
You know, we have different mentalities for how we approach the business, but both are right in our respective fields, and then COVID hit. And once COVID hit, it became kind of like, it wasn't really a priority to meet. So we kind of all just didn't talk. And then they reached back out towards the end of the year to see how we were doing and how we were making it through.
And we kind of were explaining that we really pivoted hard in COVID from this bulk business to an individual distribution business. Thanks. You know, allowing people to individually distribute swag to the remote employees and their best customers and leads to keep that company culture thriving. And the conversation just kept going and going and going up until November of the following year.
So, February of 2020, we met [00:29:00] November of 2021, ultimately we were acquired throughout the process. There were several other, large name companies in our industry reaching out to us. But honestly, the more we got to know custom ink and for me, it was a culture fit thing. It was a, a vision thing of where we saw the business.
I didn't want to be acquired. And then they take the pieces of swag. com and get rid of the brand and the company and the people. It was very important for me. And I just saw a lot of growth opportunities for where swag. com could go, that it really remains an independent business. We should use it. the best parts of the parent company to learn like learnings or to help us market or help us figure out exactly, you know, how to get it out there.
But I really felt like swag. com had a lot of legs and it's been going great so far. So we feel like we made the right decision.
Corey Kupfer: I love that. I love that. And it's interesting because, you know, listen, what one classic thing that often happens, which apparently has not happened to you. And I want to Probably this into this, you know, new focus [00:30:00] you've had for the last seven months.
But, you know, often founders, entrepreneurial founders who sell their company and, you know, they're required to stay on usually under some sort of employment agreement or consolidated agreement at a time. And a lot of times, frankly, that doesn't work out because, you know, it's their natural mindset.
Move into a corporate environment is just, you know, a mismatch, you know, you don't get to be the king or queen anymore, you know, you're subject to approvals and all this kind of stuff, whatever. Right. You, however, continue to stay on, continue to help grow swag. com, you know, post acquisition.
And now you're really being an intrepreteur right in, you know, under the corporate model here in terms of this new thing that you're developing. Which means that you have an acquirer who is smart enough to, give you the freedom, right? And creativity to keep your entrepreneurial juices, flowing, it seems.
Jeremy Parker: That's exactly right. You know, I am a entrepreneur through and through. And it got to the point when I was becoming a CEO, because the CEO is very different than a founder. And I would say a lot of founders start [00:31:00] businesses and by default, they are the CEO. And they start doing things like a CEO should do, but it's not necessarily their true passion or what they're frankly the best at.
And I find myself, being the CEO of swag. com and realizing, you know, there's other people, even within my company that could probably do this better. So why don't I let them do it better than me and let me use my skill set of creating new value and creating the future and building something out of nothing.
So this idea for Swagspace came and actually came in the very early days while I was building Swag. com. When I was building Swag. com in the first year, I was that traveling salesman, I was doing every order manually and when I, and I'm somebody who also kind of focuses on my output and I'm like obsessed with like, like how much time I'm spending on different things to maximize my productivity.
And I found myself spending about 20 percent of my day on selling, which is what I wanted to do. And about 80 percent of my day, I'm frankly the bullshit, fulfilling orders, weighing and holding suppliers, you know, collecting sales stack. It was all this stuff and I'm thinking myself, how could anyone [00:32:00] really scale in any real way when they're such a small percentage of their day is actually on the growth driving and the revenue driving and so much of the day is on the BS.
And we started to build our first version of the e commerce site in that first year and we launched in 2017, the second year, our e commerce site, 350, 000 first year. To 1. 1 million. And then the third year we went to 3 million. And the team was just me and my co founder, Josh, and maybe one employee at a time.
So we were like nine X ing our revenue. In a period of like two years and it all had to do with this technology that we streamlined. And my thought was, what if we took all this amazing tech that we built and the tech has gotten only better and millions of dollars in profit reinvested back into the platform, but taking the best technology ever and giving it for free to all the promo distributors in the world who account for 17 billion of cumulative revenue, allowing them to handle their sales in a much more frictionless, easy way.
And then what if, once the orders come in, We become the de facto supplier, so no more needing to wait on hold with [00:33:00] different suppliers. Once the orders come in, we collect the money, we collect the sales tax, we remit the sales tax for them. We convert the low res logos to high res logos. We send the order confirmation emails directly to their customers, white labeled.
We do it all for them. They could just focus on the selling. Like every, it's if 20 percent it becomes 100 percent of selling, like how much more revenue can they do? And that was the idea. And I pitched my boss, Mark, who's the founder and CEO of SwagArch. com, I mean, of Custom Inc. And, he loved it and he was willing to take the shot, you know, with any startup there, there's no guarantees, but I think the opportunity Is big enough.
And I also think it's meaningful enough where we honestly believe we could take all these promo distributors that are kind of in this pocket of they can't grow. They're so busy. They're buyers getting younger and younger. How do we take them into the next phase, next feature? We want to be their partner.
So we think it's a really great. business. We launched it in January. And we're scaling. We're at, we have over 200 users on the platform. We have hundreds of applications. We're not accepting everybody. We really want to [00:34:00] have it where we make the experience so great. And we didn't want too many people using it and too many voices.
We want to really make sure we're building the right solution. Next year or the following year, we might open it up the floodgates. But if you could think about this, you know, If there's 100 active users and each user on average does, you know, 500, 000 to a million, you know, there's a lot of money funneling through the platform.
So if we could really help people that, that's our goal and it's going great so far.
Corey Kupfer: Well, I love it. I mean, you know, there's a few things that come to mind within that story. You know, one is a concept that I've talked about on this podcast and the entrepreneurs I mentor and my clients like, I'm probably sick of hearing it where, you know, which is exactly what you're saying is this conversation I call highest and best use, right?
Like you were saying, Hey, your eyes, the best use, what you really want to do, what your secret sauce is, what your passion is, what do you want to call it? Right. What you're only spending 20 percent of the time doing, you know, and you can talk to sales and you had 80 percent of your time doing this other stuff.
And when you can, for me, there's three factors in it. When you can. Take something you're great at, but that's not [00:35:00] enough because there's things I'm great at that I hate doing, you're passionate about, and here's the other piece that you alluded to, which is key it's highly leveraged, it makes a difference, it moves the needle, right?
When you put those three things together, if you can focus only on that, And not only did you do that, right, as you moved along, but what I hear is that this platform is allowing, right, I know a lot of people in the promotional products business, right? And yeah, they'd love to be out there so you can't be in that business without wanting to sell, right?
But then they got to fulfill and they got to take orders, they got to take payments, they got to figure out this, and then they get, they occasionally have issues with the product, they got to deal with customer service, right? Also, they don't want to deal with any of that stuff, so it's a brilliant solution.
to allow those people to be in their highest and best use areas. The other two things I want to point out is that it's just two things. First of all, this is part of this is what we call a white label deal and that's an underutilized deal, right? I've seen so many situations, where people build great internal technology for their business and they don't understand that they might be able to, hey, that other, you know, folks in the industry could use this and maybe [00:36:00] we should white label it.
So basically, you know, you're behind the scenes and white label deals can be totally, you can be totally anonymous behind the scenes. It could be totally their branding. Sometimes you have some combinations powered by or affiliated with or things like that. So a white label deal is something listeners that you should be thinking of.
And then finally, there's something that we talked to occasionally on this podcast. that you know, Jeremy didn't specifically say but it's part of this is the willingness to think about doing deals with folks that you might see as your competitors. Right. Cause some people like, Oh no, I'm not going to do anything.
And I've, you know, the people who really understand the opportunity to do something with that quote unquote competitors, you know, competitors have often built amazing, amazing businesses because You know, you do understand the needs that they have and you could provide it. So you know, I just want to, again, break down some of the things that he's saying.
I don't know if you have any other thoughts, you know, on. Yeah, it's actually
Jeremy Parker: the last part is a very good point. When I was the CEO of swag. com, I don't want to say the names of these people, but there's, there's a [00:37:00] lot of gifting platforms in our industry that were raising a lot of money. I mean, one of them raised over a hundred million dollars.
There's another, or where he's 50 million. A lot of people kept coming up to me because swag. com in many ways are, especially our distribution platform is like somewhat of a gifting, right? They buy swag and it could gift it to people. It's not our core competency is gifting, but it's something. And they're like, well, how are you guys going to compete?
And you've raised so little, these companies are going to be raising so much more money than you. And it gets in that kind of fear. Not me, but. Other people have the fear around you. And I looked at the situation and I said, well, I've mastered swag. I know our swag. com platform is by far the best platform.
The gifting platforms that they're building, their core competency is not swag. It's gifting. It's a different thing. Maybe they need to offer swag as part of their gifting experience. And we worked out with the two largest gifting platforms, those two big companies, everyone's nervous about. A deal where we white labeled our technology with their logos and all of their clients, when they add swag to their experience.
[00:38:00] It's powered by not doesn't say swag. com. It says their brand. No one knows us But it's powered by us and we make a majority of all the revenue So they're funneling literally millions of dollars worth of orders to our platform and we're handling it all for them and we realized we could do this because The technology that we built over the last Eight years at this point will be like seven years when we approach them.
It's a lot of money, a lot of time, a lot of energy, a lot of focus. It would take them so much work and effort to copy it. And we've mastered the production side of things. So that they would have to really kind of change up their entire focus to do it. And it made a lot more sense to them just to partner with us and even give us the majority of the money.
Because it allowed them to give a better experience to their clients. that their clients were asking for that they could not provide. And it worked out for everybody. So, we have been in partnership with them for over, almost four years now at this point.
Corey Kupfer: That's amazing, right? And it keeps those clients in their ecosystem because if they, those clients had to look for this elsewhere, then there's a risk they start looking for the core, you know, offerings that they can do elsewhere.
So, that's [00:39:00] another great example of, you know, a kind of use of a white label deal and working with a theoretical, you know, competitor. That really, you know, makes sense for both sides. I love that. Before I ask you my final two questions, You mentioned briefly that you did have a failed venture, in between these two successful ones.
What is the single biggest lesson you had from that failure?
Jeremy Parker: Sure thing. Yeah. So I built a social networking app called Vouch. It was, I believe, a great idea. It's still a great idea, but I don't think we executed properly. So vouch is democratizing Oprah's favorite things. If you can imagine for everybody, the idea was very simple.
We looked at Facebook and we said, Facebook is this massive platform, best social network, biggest social networking app, and all these new. Kind of social media apps took a bit and piece of Facebook and made a dedicated experience around it So instagram took just the pictures and said we're just going to make a social networking app based on the pictures And twitter took the status update and you know all these different kind of things They took a little piece of it and we wanted to take the like button That's what we felt.
[00:40:00] We felt like we could create a really amazing experience around the like button, the like button is the most Facebook. It's how they know what people enjoy is how they advertise to people. So we can make a really great experience. So we built this app called vouch. People could vouch for their favorite things or favorite restaurants or favorite dish, their favorite music.
You could follow your friends and see what music they're listening to movies and books, and you could follow your celebrities and see what they like and all these different things. And we grew it. And before I'll tell you the biggest issue with it. I spent a year designing the app and building the app before we launched it, a full year.
And I lost sleep over every little detail, like how, what happens when somebody moves their thumb this way and then this swipes up and that swipes up and every little detail. I want to make this app perfect, how I thought of it to be perfect. And we launched the app. And what I realized very soon is that all the things that I lost sleep over, the audience did not give a shit about.
They didn't care less about. And there's all these other things that they cared about that I didn't even think of. And if I just got out of my own way and launch faster, [00:41:00] I would have learned a lot faster what audience liked. And I would have had a lot more runway to actually figure out product market fit and make it work.
So when we started swag. com from the day one, that's why I say I became a traveling salesman. I wanted to make sales from day one and to learn the right thing to build. I didn't want to build anything until I knew for a fact it was the right thing. And I'll tell you something, that one lesson from the failure of Vouch right before Swag, I honestly think made Swag.
com a success. Because when we started reaching out to all of these buyers at Swag. com, my initial idea was to go after, the marketing teams. That was the initial thought. Let's go after the marketing teams at Facebook and Google. And, you know, we know we, we knew we wanted to go to B2B and do, you know, corporate.
Swag. But who within the corporation do you sell to? There's a lot of divisions. We initially thought the marketing teams, because it makes sense, they sell, they buy for a giveaways and for trade shows and they have a huge budget and it's all these things. But after speaking to so many marketing teams, we realized that everyone's going after the marketing team.
Like, how are we going to cut through the noise? How are we going to be? Distinct or unique, compared to the 20 other thousand people that [00:42:00] are reaching out to them. And when I knew this is that the office manager is really the one we should be going after. No one thinks of the office manager, the office manager, if they have a 10 employees are only buying swag for 10 people.
If they have a hundred employees are only buying swag for a hundred people. It's a very limited budget, but the office manager is the gateway into the company. If they buy a hundred t shirts and they give it to their employees. That's a hundred people seeing swag. com and interlabel. That's a lot of people knowing about us.
That's the marketing team knowing about us. That's the sales team knowing about us. That's every division that we ultimately want to sell to is now feeling the quality of swag. com having the inherent social proof that my company's already using swag. com. Why don't we use them? So we started going all in on the office manager and that would have, that would not have happened unless we got out of our own way and said, we don't have all the answers.
Let's learn from potential customers what the right product to build is.
Corey Kupfer: I love it. And you know, like in software technology companies, whatever they, that concept they call it, you know, middle lead viable product, right? And the current, you get it out there and you iterate and you get feedback, whatever.
And that concept applies to, you know, [00:43:00] every other business. And I, that's a great, great lesson that you left people with. Well, okay. So we, I want to, the final two questions are, number one, how do people find out more about everything that you're involved in?
Jeremy Parker: You can obviously email me at jeremy at swag.
com. Super simple swag, s w a g. com. Check out the new business swag space. It's swag dot space. If you're in the promo industry and want to create a store to sell swag more easily, we'll love to help you out or even, and we're not marketing this really, but this is, we have a lot of users who are doing it this way.
If you're in like promo adjacent, if you're an event planner, if you're a graphic designer, if you're a screen printer, if you're a party planner, anyone who could sell swag, It hasn't done it because it's complicated and it's difficult, which it has been previously. Now it takes literally seconds to get set up and it's completely free to use, use this as a new revenue stream.
So we're seeing a lot of success with that as well.
Corey Kupfer: Love it. So Jeremy, my final question on the podcast is always about my highest value in life, which is freedom. And for me, that means everything from freedom around the [00:44:00] world, from all people from oppression to why I've been an entrepreneur for decades and haven't had a boss.
What does freedom mean to you and how does it impact your life and business?
Jeremy Parker: Freedom. You know, freedom is being able to hang out with my kids. I have two young kids, one on the way, you know, I work really hard. I work hard not like to make money. It's more for building something that I'm proud of.
I think of, you know, business. I'm lucky at this point because I've had some success, to think of business as more of a sport. It's kind of a challenge. It's a puzzle to figure out. And I don't always make the right decisions, but I'm constantly trying and I love kind of building something and creating this vision.
I have nothing. And it, and having the flexibility, frankly, to stop working one day and hang out with my kids or take a vacation and feel like I, I have control over my life. Love it.
Corey Kupfer: Jeremy, thanks for being such a great guest on the podcast.
Jeremy Parker: Thank
Corey Kupfer: you so much for having me.
