What swag should a startup make for launch day?
Make a launch tee: one design, one or two shirt colors, the logo or a single line of copy that captures the product. Launch day is the one time the whole team wears the same thing in the same photo, and that photo lives on the website, the careers page and every social post for a year. Keep it simple, print it on a shirt people would buy, and order a few extra for the first customers and the people who helped.
The Premium Soft Tee is the launch garment most startups pick because of the retail fit and the softer fabric (it is comparable to a Bella+Canvas 3001 / Next Level 3600). A full front print, or a small left-chest mark with a slogan on the back, both work.
What goes in an onboarding box for new hires?
Put a shirt in the right size, a handwritten note and one useful thing (a notebook, a good pen, a sticker sheet) in the onboarding box. The shirt matters more than the extras: it is the thing they wear to the first all-hands and the thing that shows up in the team photo. Ask for the size in the offer paperwork, not on the first day.
Because Merch to Order saves every design, the onboarding shirt does not need to be stockpiled for a year. Order 30, which is the minimum, keep spares in medium and large, and reorder the design from your account when the stack runs low. A back print with the company values or the founding year is a flat add-on: $1 more per shirt for a back print.
What should the team wear at a conference booth?
Wear one bright, high-contrast shirt color that nobody else on the floor is wearing, with the logo large enough to read from ten feet. Booth shirts have one job: make it obvious who works here. Orange, royal blue, lime green and red all do that; black and grey disappear in a hall full of black and grey. Print the website or a short question on the back so people in the queue have something to read.
Order one for every person on the stand for every day of the show, plus spares. A three-day show with four staff is twelve shirts, so a 30 shirt order covers the show, the next one and the new hires in between. Send the staff home with them afterwards.
Is swag a good investor gift or update?
A shirt is a fine investor gift when it is good enough to wear, and a poor one when it is obviously the cheapest blank. Investors get a lot of swag, and the items that survive are the ones that fit well and look like a real brand. Pair the shirt with a short printed update or a photo of the team wearing the same thing, and it becomes the reminder that the quarterly email is not.
Send one in the right size (ask, do not guess) and skip the box of branded pens. One good garment beats five small things.
What do founders get wrong with swag?
The two classic mistakes are ordering hundreds of shirts in one size and choosing the cheapest shirt to stretch the budget. Five hundred larges means a closet of larges: use a size split (roughly 10 percent small, 30 medium, 30 large, 20 extra large, 10 2XL) and order less than you think, because reorders are two clicks. A thin, boxy shirt saves a couple of dollars and guarantees nobody wears it, which makes it the most expensive shirt you can buy.
- Ordering one size for everyone. Use a split and keep spares in the middle sizes.
- Cheap shirts. Pick a garment you would wear; each product page lists the fabric, weight and the wholesale shirt it compares to.
- Too much text. A logo and at most one line reads; a paragraph does not.
- Skipping the proof. Check spelling and placement on the proof; it arrives within a day and costs nothing.
- Ordering 500 for a 40-person company. Order for the next quarter, then reorder from the saved design.
What does a realistic startup swag budget look like?
Fifty Premium Soft Tees printed front and back cost $500 before tax, and 30 Classic Cotton Tees with a front print for the onboarding stack cost $210, so a launch-plus-onboarding budget for a team of a few dozen is about $710. The launch tee number is $9 a shirt plus $1 for the back print, giving $10 a shirt. The classic tee number is $7 each from 30. There are no setup fees. $1 more per shirt for XL and 2XL.
Those are today's published prices, which is the point: you can put the number in a budget before you upload a logo, and the price calculator gives you a total for any other quantity.