Making lasting impressions
Branded merchandise has come a long way beyond tradeshow freebies most people know, like basic T-shirts, flimsy thumb drives and unreliable logo pens. Lisa Battles examines how brands turn to highly curated promotional items to build awareness, affinity, loyalty and even communities, from exclusive merch drops to coveted swag.
Promotional products haven’t always been considered as the most sophisticated marketing tools, mainly because of the type of items typically used. If an item is free, it’s fair to expect the quality to show it – usually cheap, mass-produced and solely functional, if that. To quickly attract a line of swag baggers at an industry show, all a brand had to do was improve its promo items in the slightest, say adding its logo to a better-quality T-shirt or eco-conscious water bottle.
Over the past several years, savvy marketers have seen the value in these investments when met with enthusiastic consumer demand. As a result, more brands today are creating promotional products strategically designed to suit the lifestyles and preferences of their ideal customer profiles.
Take Liquid Death, the Los Angeles-based water company that has captured consumers’ thirst for unexpected product design and marketing. For those unfamiliar with the brand, Liquid Death sells water in cans that look like a tallboy beer with the tagline “Murder your thirst.” The brand’s dark-humour-driven art, ads and verbal identity are the opposite of what other water brands do, not to mention the intentional choice to use recyclable cans instead of bottles and its “death to plastic.”
Since its founding in 2017, the company has expanded its product offerings to include several flavours of iced tea and sparkling water. It’s also built a robust merch shop, full of “killer merch for your mind, body and home.” Alongside the expected hoodies, tees and jerseys are “The Flasket” so that “finally, you can drink from a casket” and “Death Clock” wristwatches developed with Nixon, a fellow California company and lifestyle accessory brand. Better luck next time to those seeking a solution for missing any of a music show’s lively pit action. While Liquid Death partnered with incontinence products company Depend to create a “Pit Diaper” (complete with quilted faux leather, studs and a chain), it was sold out at the time of this writing.
On the pricier side of its online merch shop, the brand collaborated with Plunge to create the “Freeze to Death,” a cold plunge designed to look like a huge can of Liquid Death. Perhaps to avoid leaving hot tub lovers in the cold, it also advertised a forthcoming giveaway of Liquid Death hot tubs elsewhere on the website. Oftentimes, free promo items are far more sought after than high-priced ones.
Image credit: Liquid Death
New consumer expectations
Most agree the biggest difference between merchandise and swag is the former is sold and the latter is free. On most other counts, the lines seem to blur more every day with changing consumer value perceptions and expectations.
The most important among these to consider? Customisation – as much as your time and budget will allow, says Ted Church, principal of Boulder, Colorado-based Anthem Branding. Church has worked in branding with promotional products for over three decades and founded his agency 18 years ago.
“People kind of expect it in this day and age. On social, you want to stand out from the noise and you want to have it where [people think] ‘Whoa, that’s different. That’s cool,’ then you’ve got to present something that is completely custom and unique. It can’t be the same old thing someone has already seen with just a different logo on it,” Church says.
“When we started the agency, we wanted to take this high-class, high-touch, best-in-class thinking to branded merchandise and apparel. The whole thought is, if you slap your logo on just a cheap, plastic piece of crap, you are doing your brand a disservice. Our whole thing was [to consider]: Let’s understand the target audience of the client. What is something that is going to resonate with them and going to be the right aesthetic and utility for that particular client type? And then, is it going to align with what this client is trying to do in the messaging from the marketing perspective but also be something that is going to have a little bit of surprise and delight and wow factor? So that’s the approach we take when we are doing something premium and custom.”
With tight timelines and budgets, sometimes you do have to opt for more readymade products. Even in those cases, Church says, you can still be thoughtful when aligning the brand and customer values with an ideal supplier partner.
Promotional product distributors and suppliers are rising to the challenge, as well, according to insights gathered from Promotional Products Association International Research, which polled the industry in autumn 2023 for its Outlook 2024 report. Forty-six percent of respondents identified the promo products industry’s top strength as a combination of customisation, adaptability and evolution, which applies not only to the companies but their products.
“Again, there’s a time and a place: When you need something quick turn, then you have to curate the right item. But if there’s enough time, we can go custom make something, cut in stone, built from scratch, totally built bespoke and custom for the client – custom packaging, Pantone matches – that most people just can’t do, or aren’t willing to do, or don’t have the resources to do. We’ve just been at it so long, we can rally any resource to make that stuff happen,” Church says. “That’s when it’s really fun for us, to take that creative thinking with the client and really come up with something cool.”
Creating standout stuff
Church says standout promo products can be transformative marketing tools in many ways, driving sales as free gifts with purchase, building employee advocacy through internal merch shops and generating awareness through targeted influencer networks, to name a few.
A few of his favourite recent Anthem projects include collaborations between E.L.F. Cosmetics and food brands Dunkin’ and Chipotle. In both cases, his group worked with the companies’ in-house teams to develop custom makeup bags that resembled food packaging for new product launches aligned between the brands. Both sold out in minutes.
As with many of its clients, Anthem also develops merchandise Chipotle sells in its customer and employee shops, such as a silver weekender duffel bag that emulates a tinfoil-wrapped burrito, custom “Guac + Chips” slide shoes, festival blankets and pickleball paddles. For New Belgium Brewing’s Voodoo Ranger IPA brand, the team developed a fully articulated action figure and retro lunchboxes.
When it comes to influencer kits, Church says an all-time favourite was working with Nemo Design of Portland on a concept to generate excitement about American rapper Wiz Khalifa’s collaboration with the shoe company Converse. They identified the top 100 tastemakers in hip hop and drop-shipped them each a realistic, branded DJ case holding a custom pair of shoes, an album, signed merchandise and more, all carefully enclosed in laser-cut foam.
Another of Anthem’s more recent and well-received influencer kits was for the product launch of the workout recovery tart cherry juice brand Cheribundi. The fully branded box featured a layer of product samples that lifted to reveal high-quality workout gear, including a hat, socks, a stretch band and more.
“When people find us online and they look at the way we showcase our work, they are like, ‘Ah I get it. This is what I have been looking for. You guys are different. These are the cool things I am interested in looking at!’ We love it because everything is so pop-culturally relevant. Customers are really excited to promote their businesses [in this way], and it’s not a necessary evil like insurance or something. It’s always changing and evolving,” Church says.
Image credit: Anthem Branding
Exclusive drops and creating connections
While branded merch serves as a walking advertisement for companies, for brand fans it signals their social status and virtues to others. Connecting with other brand enthusiasts within communities can create a sense of belonging. People want more than just a product, and that connection delivers an experience that goes deeper than what a brand seems to deliver on the surface.
That’s been the observation and lived experience of By Way of Dallas founder and designer Hance Taplin, who launched his streetwear and cultural brand to “create something cool” for his chosen hometown of Dallas over a decade ago.
A native of Colorado, Taplin built his early-career design portfolio in corporate marketing and has since worked for or collaborated with countless others, including Nike, Google, Lululemon, multiple collegiate teams and all of the Dallas-based major league national sports teams.
Fans of the brand know to watch the brand’s Instagram for exclusive merch drop posts, usually including geographical coordinates for where they can find them. Whether designed exclusively for the By Way of Dallas brand or in collaboration with others throughout the city, the designs retain a distinct style of bold colours and use of typography. The drops are usually limited edition runs of pieces incorporating high-quality materials – and command high resale prices from collectors.
“Anything has an opportunity for a cool design that people would want to keep. It is good to see that people are elevating and not just slapping logos on things. I don’t believe in a lot of fast fashion. I believe we should be a lot more cognisant of what we are producing. If it is something good, let’s hang onto this forever. No reason to throw it to the Goodwill,” Taplin says. “A well-designed piece of merch is also an opportunity to create conversation for people. It’s free advertising essentially for your brand. But merch itself gives people an opportunity to be individuals through expression. Not every brand needs merch, but it goes hand-in-hand with how we can challenge ourselves from a creative perspective.”
From merch to meaningful missions
Taplin has found that the status of his community brand and merch collaborations has opened doors to do even more meaningful projects. One was designing and donating custom jackets for college-age golfers from traditionally underrepresented groups competing in the Southwest Airlines Showcase at Cedar Crest Golf Course in 2023, a new, nationally televised amateur tournament. Another was working with D Magazine on recurring, immersive annual art shows that bring together hundreds of people who equally represented every city neighbourhood.
His favourite new project has been with Scottish Rite for Children, a world-renowned paediatric orthopaedic hospital. After several years of planning, children with limb differences can choose custom-designed prostheses featuring designs by Taplin or many other artists and influencers who’ve lent their talents, including sports marketer Jordan Rogers and the Dallas Cowboys quarterback Dak Prescott.
Image credit: By Way of Dallas
“This wasn’t about having people lined up and purchasing things that they may or may not need. This was solely for children with limb differences,” Taplin says. He says beyond maintaining his primary sports team collaborations focused solely on merch, he is most satisfied continuing to pursue a deeper purpose in his other collab opportunities.
“There has to be a purpose or a problem-solving opportunity. I love to do an activation where we are doing a panel discussion. With By Way of Dallas, the thing is we do really good merch and collections and such, but it’s really more about bridging the gap and connecting both sides of [Highway] 75, literally diversifying Dallas, using our apparel as a medium to create conversation,” Taplin says.
“Everything I do is in a limited amount because I don’t want to pollute the world with merch. Also, quite frankly, we don’t always need new sweatshirts and new hoodies. Let’s just relax. I am going to rely more on producing less and doing more storytelling and activations. We will attract the people with the merch, but there is always a broader message we are trying to tell.”
While people often say experiences matter more than things, it seems that more thoughtful and intentional things are becoming integral parts of those experiences.
This article was taken from Transform magazine Q1, 2025. You can subscribe to the print edition here.
