Jeremy Parker Podcast Transcript
Jeremy Parker joins host Brian Thomas on The Digital Executive Podcast.
Welcome to Coruzant Technologies, Home of The Digital Executive Podcast.
Brian Thomas: Welcome to The Digital Executive. Today’s guest is Jeremy Parker. Jeremy Parker graduated from Boston University in 2007, where he majored in film production. During his junior year, when his feature length documentary secured the Audience Award at the 2006 Vail Film Festival.
Following his academic achievements, Jeremy embarked on a diverse career path. He established a creative promotional product division under MV Sport. Then, in collaboration with his brother David and Jesse Itzler, co-founder of Marquis Jet, investor and partner in Zico Coconut Water, and owner of the Atlanta Hawks, Jeremy co-founded an e commerce platform designed to distribute unique promotion codes through social media influencers Facebook and Twitter posts.
This platform was acquired by a publicly traded company currently serving as the CEO of Swag Space and co-founder and former CEO of Swag.com, which was acquired by Custom Ink. Jeremy has positioned the company as the premier destination for businesses looking to purchase and distribute quality promotional products. Swag.com boasts an extensive clientele, including major players like Facebook, Google, Amazon, Apple, Netflix, Spotify, and Tik TOK.
Well, good afternoon, Jeremy. Welcome to the show!
Jeremy Parker: Thank you so much for having me.
Brian Thomas: You bet. I appreciate jumping on, love doing these podcasts and especially jumping into your story today.
You’ve got quite an entrepreneurial journey. So, I’m going to jump right into the first question, Jeremy, starting from your days at Boston University, what drew you to film production and how did winning the audience award at the Vail Film Festival for your documentary influence your career trajectory?
And maybe you can tell us how this early passion for storytelling has played a role in your entrepreneurial journey.
Jeremy Parker: That’s a great question. So, I actually, I’ve always wanted to be a filmmaker ever since I was really young and Boston University has one of the best, if not the best film program. So obviously I was very excited to get into the school and I was very focused on documentary filmmaking specifically.
And it’s just a, it’s just amazing thing where you could do with documentary films. You could build a story from nothing, and you don’t have to have a lot of money. Like you can have very little money. Frankly, the film that we made that won the audience award, we film for less than like 5,000.
It’s very inexpensive film to make. And we were in veil. All these films were, you know, a million, 2 million, 3 million budgets with major movie actors. And it was just amazing that we were able to compete and win this award with, with very little budget. And it just got me thinking, like, what else can you really build with a very little budget?
So, I remember I was on the top of the mountain in Vail, Colorado at this film festival. And we just came off of this big win, and it was just like a surreal experience. I was 18 years old at the time, 18, 19 at the time. And there was this quote unquote celebrity brunch the next morning that we went down to in Vail, Colorado.
And half the room were those major actors and film producers and directors that everyone’s heard of. And half the room were, you know, more struggling artists. And I asked myself a question. I said two, actually two questions. Number one, do I love what I’m doing? And number two, am I that good at it? And both answers were no.
And it was just like this instant realization that I should not be in the film, and I should not be in this, in this industry. And it’s such a weird thing to think about just when you come off this high of winning something to instantly, really within like hours, instantly realize that maybe this is not the career path for me.
And when I Got back to Boston University. I was still a junior in college, and I still had a solid year to finish up and I was just constantly thinking what am I going to do after I graduate because I knew that film. I loved it. It was a passion, but it wasn’t like something I wanted to spend my entire life on.
I just realized I was just like realization, and I just figured that maybe I’ll start a business. I know business experience whatsoever. I knew I was fairly good at telling stories and I figured that building a business is somewhat similar. So right after college, I started a t shirt company as my first ever entrepreneurial, true entrepreneurial journey, I guess.
You know, starting a film is entrepreneurial in many ways, but it was like the first business experience I had. And I thought of starting a T-shirt because t shirt company, because, you know, you think of t shirt companies fairly easy to start. That’s why I thought I was wrong, but you think of it as like, Oh, just a t shirt company.
How hard could it be? And at the same time, you learn a lot about building a business and branding and marketing and building an e commerce site. And all this stuff, manufacturing and production and selling. And I thought I would just learn what I was good at. I didn’t really necessarily care if it was a success or not.
And ultimately it wasn’t, it was not a success, but I really learned the types of things I actually enjoy doing. And it kind of just set me on this path of starting businesses and learning. And some of those businesses succeeded. Like we built a company called tip media. Or basically where we’re the first ever one of the first people to be doing product placement in YouTube videos.
So, all these YouTube stars were making no money, you know, living in their parents basement, if you will. And we got them, you know, really big paydays by getting State Farm, Colgate, Verizon, all these big-name brands into the YouTube stars video, where these YouTube stars were getting tens of millions of views who were not making money.
Now they were able to make money. Now everybody in the industry, this product placement, every Instagram post has ads. But, you know, back 15 years ago or so, that wasn’t a real thing. And so, I started doing that. And that was a success. And then right after that, I started a social networking app that ultimately failed.
So, it’s like the ups and downs of the entrepreneurship journey you know, really leading me into Swag.com.
Brian Thomas: That’s an awesome story. And what I picked out of that, there’s several gems in there. But the 1 thing I picked is at such a young age, you ask yourself those questions that typically someone at that age wouldn’t ask about what am I going to do?
Is this really something I’m passionate to do the rest of my life and able to ask that question at 18 or 19 years old is pretty profound. And we don’t see that typically in someone at that age. So, I love that story. And Jeremy switching gears to our 2nd question swag. com experience remarkable growth.
Making it onto the Inc 500 list twice, what were some of the key strategies and innovations that propelled this growth and how did you maintain that momentum during that time?
Jeremy Parker: Yeah, it’s a Swag.com is a whole separate thing, but we started swag. com in 2016. And I think the biggest takeaway that I, and I would just tell other entrepreneurs who are listening to this podcast mistakes I’ve made.
And these are, this is like the kind of main mistakes I’ve made in failures and what I’ve. What I fixed and I didn’t kind of do in swag dot com a lot of entrepreneurs are very egocentric. Not even realizing it, but you have to be. You have to be so confident in your idea and you’re going to will it to existence.
That’s great. That’s actually what’s needed to build a startup. But often on the counter side of that. You often, you know, don’t open yourself up to feedback. At least I did it early on. And when it, when it came to vouch, my social networking app that ultimately failed, I, my biggest mistake is that I thought I had all the right ideas.
So, I was designing it kind of in a bubble of what I thought the user would want. And I spent literally a full year developing this app, every feature, what happens when you swipe the button this way or that way, or what the color should be or what this should be. And I just, I frankly lost sleep over all the details.
And when I launched the platform, none of the things that I lost sleep over the customers cared about. It was all these other things I didn’t even think of those are what the customers truly wanted. So, I realized that I need to get out of my own way and start talking to customers from day one and learning from them and building the platform that’s right for them.
Because if you spend a year building something and not launching it, because you want, you think you’re, you have all the answers. You’re, you’re wasting so much valuable time and money and resources and learning potential that what if I had all that knowledge way earlier, I could have actually made it successful.
So that was a big learning. And I took that with swag. com swag. com from the get-go. It was just a coming soon landing page. We had no, we had no website. I was knocking on doors with my co-founder, Josh, and we were just talking directly to people every single day, 10, like 10, 20 people a day, how they buy swag, why they buy swag.
Can we help them with their swag? Many people, you know, shut the door on their faces. Many people bought from us. Many people said, no, we’re not interested, but we were learning exactly the right product to sell to the right audience to go after. I mean, even in the early days, I had that thought. That the marketing teams within companies would be the ones to buy swag from us because it makes sense, right?
Marketing teams by they have huge budgets. They’re buying for leads. They’re buying to send to their best customers. So, if you’re even a 10-person, small startup, you could be spending tens of thousands of dollars in swag because you might have thousands of customers, right? But when I was talking to these office managers, these marketing teams early on, I realized that everyone’s going after the marketing team.
Like what’s going to differentiate swag dot com. A no name company with a coming soon landing page. It just, how could we cut through the noise? There’s 22, 000 other promo distributors in the space. What I was learning from those conversations is that maybe we don’t go after the marketing teams. Maybe we go after the office manager.
And no one really thought about the office manager at the time. They’re like this gateway into the company, right? The office manager, if it’s 10 people in the company, they’re only buying for 10 people. So, it’s a much smaller budget. But what’s cool about it is if they buy it, they’re giving it out to the marketing team at their company.
They’re giving out to the sales team or this office or that office. They’re basically introducing our brand to every single other department in the company. And then those departments see the quality and then they want to become customers of ours. So that was kind of our key insight. And I wouldn’t have had that insight unless I really got out there and was speaking to literally hundreds of people and targeted users.
So, we really learned the right audience to build it for. And then when we realized the office manager is kind of the gateway and no one’s really going after them. Let’s build the platform specifically for the office manager. We could always expand later on and, you know, onboard marketing teams and sales teams and this and that.
And we have obviously as we expanded, but sometimes you just gotta be so laser focused on the right audience at the right time. So that’s what we did. And we grew from. You know, 350,000 the first year to 1.1 million to 3 million to 7 million to 15 to 30, and now we’re doing over 40 million in sales. So, every single year, just really growing the business.
And a lot of it wasn’t just staying by the main playbook and just keep going. It was reading the room, you know, understanding what the audience is, understanding the changing and dynamic, you know, when COVID hit. Everyone’s, you know, no one’s going to the office. There’s no need for the office manager to buy swag for the office.
No one’s there. There’s no trade shows. There’s no events. Everything went down. Our whole industry dropped over 20%. Swag.com grew over 100%. How do we do that? Right? Because we noticed when everyone is like kind of hiding in the bunker, this is the time for us to capitalize. If everyone is disconnected, how can we actually use swag as a connector?
So, we built this whole distribution platform allowing people to send swag to one address or to multiple addresses at once. If you’re not in the office, how do you keep that company culture thriving even though no one’s in the office? You can easily send swag. So, we became that platform, that go to platform that pivoted from, we used to do just like swag and bulk, send it to your office to now swag and bulk, we could do that, or you could buy swag, we’ll hold it in our inventory, and then you could do individual distributions to all these remote addresses.
So, we kind of really kind of understood the landscape and why people wanted to use our service and we went all in on it.
Brian Thomas: Wow. Amazing. And. Jeremy, I hear the passion in your voice. Obviously, you’re very, still very excited about what you do. And what I like about the way you built it is you got down in the trenches and you ask customers, you know, what, what works, what doesn’t work and finding what’s really going to help the business grow.
And I just love that story. It’s. At the end of the day, it’s all about the customer experience, and that’s something that you really honed in on, and I appreciate that. So, Jeremy, as a leader, how have you fostered a culture of innovation and creativity within Swag. com, and now within Swag’s base under Custom Ink?
Jeremy Parker: Yes. So, you know, early on in my entrepreneur journey, like I would say, I feel like a lot of the entrepreneurs who are listening to your podcast probably connect with, you know, it is a very me, me, me, when you’re starting a business, because it’s your ideas, your vision. And at some point, that that has to stop and it has to be a team’s vision because you’re hot, you’re hiring people and you want to hear people’s opinion and.
We’ve just built a very we built like a really, I don’t want to say team element, but like a company culture that everyone’s idea matters, that there is no, this idea is better than anyone else’s idea. Everyone should feel comfortable. Voicing their opinion. And we really try to foster this thing that, and I always tell my team, if you throw out an idea and it’s not good, it can lead to a good idea.
Like there’s no, there’s really no bad ideas. So, people have gotten very comfortable throwing out ideas that are just not good. And many times. Some ideas that didn’t sound good to begin with really sparked somebody else to have a different idea, which sparked the conversation, which sparked the right idea for it to come through.
So, allowing people to voice their opinions for them to be heard, to realize it doesn’t matter if you’re the CEO or the most junior person on the team, every opinion matters. It doesn’t mean that we’re going to listen to every opinion in terms of we’re going to go ahead with it. But every opinion is equal and we’re trying to pick the right, the right opinion.
That’s kind of the point, the right idea. It’s not about who said the idea. There’s no ego involved. You know, for me, I love it when it’s a feature set that I didn’t even think of, or when I’m proven wrong, where I think something, and then somebody could convince me that when my opinion is wrong, their opinions better, and then we tested it and they’re proven, right.
That’s amazing. That really shows that the team feels the confidence to voice themselves and let themselves be heard, which. You know, for, for, for a founder, it’s, it’s a beautiful thing that I’m now able to step away from being the CEO of swag. com after eight years and lead a whole new division and just feel comfortable and confident that the team that took over and the whole company is really going to thrive.
And frankly, I even think the company might even do better. I hope it does. And I think it will actually do better without me being the CEO. Like, you know, When you’re starting a business, you’re a founder, right? You’re an entrepreneur. You’re trying to get from zero to one. But you by nature have to become a CEO, right?
Like usually you’re not going to hire a CEO in the very beginning. So the founder, typically one of the founders, typically becomes a CEO. And it’s not the exact same skillset to be a founder and getting something, creating something out of nothing to actually leading a team and managing a team and bringing the most out of the team.
And I think I did a fairly good job. But I don’t think necessarily I’m the best at being a CEO. Like, I feel like I am very good at building something and creating something out of nothing, but being a CEO is a different skillset. So, we have Gita who took over for me and I believe that she’ll even do better than me.
Like, I feel like she has the right skillset to really lead the company, even to, even to next heights. And keep it growing and keep it moving fast and optimizing. So just feel really good about where we’re at. And I think that just comes from the mindset that any, anyone’s opinion really matters. And we, and we can learn a lot from each other and just foster that kind of that, that creativity.
Brian Thomas: Thank you. Appreciate that. And I love how you empower others, grow leaders at all levels. That’s, that’s truly inspiring and that’s true leadership. And obviously that contributes to the success of your company and Jeremy last question of the day. If you could briefly share the incubation of swag space, you’re aiming to create a universal swag platform.
Can you elaborate on the vision behind swag space? And the challenges you anticipate in creating a platform that caters to such a diverse clientele.
Jeremy Parker: Sure thing. So, when I was starting swag. com in 2016, I was a traditional seller. I didn’t have a website. So, I was doing everything through presentation decks, back and forth emails, knocking on doors, traveling salesmen.
And I found myself spending about 20 percent of my day on selling and 80 percent of my day on, on frankly, the BS of fulfilling orders and, and, and collecting payment and collecting sales tax, and then dealing with a hundred different suppliers and buying blanks from one supplier and sending it to a screen printer and buying notebooks from here and more balls from here.
And then if I did boxes, having to find a 3PL to get things up together, I was spending so much effort and time not only getting the orders over the finish line, but then once the orders came over the finish line to actually fulfill them. And it was just, it was impossible to scale and the industry as a whole.
There’s 22, 000 promo distributors. They all are facing the same issue. They don’t have technology. They’re doing the same thing. And it’s very, they’re in this weird position where they can’t, they can’t really grow because the system is not designed to grow. It’s very fragmented and broken. So, over the last eight years, we’ve been building swag.
com and we’ve been optimizing the experience and making it way easier for us to handle orders, right? Customers can find exactly what they’re looking for on their site. They can upload their logo. Our system detects the number of colors in the logo. It prices everything out. They can buy this stuff. They can build boxes, all self-serve, all automated.
And then it got me thinking when we got acquired by custom ink, custom ink is the leader in our industry. And then this huge supply chain, huge supply side. And my feeling is this. What if we could allow any promo distributor, any of the 22, 000 promo distributors to instantly and for free white label our technology so they could put their logo and their brand colors and instantaneously have the best e commerce experience in the industry?
Wouldn’t they be able to sell a lot more stuff? Now, whether their clients self-serve, which many of them will. Or Jenny promo in this case could build the carts for her clients and just share a link to the cart to her client. And now her client could easily just go and check out. Like we just make everything, all the human connection and selling all the fragmentation.
Automated and streamlined. What if you could do that and allow people to make more sales? And then we took it a step further. Once the orders actually come in, it hits our back end and we become the de facto supplier. No more needing to buy stuff from different places and ship it there or buy notebooks from here and wearables from here and mugs from here.
Every single thing is transacted by us. They get 80 percent of their life back and they could just put 100 percent of their time focused on selling. That was kind of the idea. And then as we were building it, we’re realizing, well, this is not only great for promo distributors. This could be really great for screen printers, right?
A lot of screen printers are selling t shirts, but wouldn’t they also want to sell mugs and notebooks to their clients? It’s very complicated before, as I said. But now it’s very easy. What about designers? Imagine a designer designed the logo for somebody, and then that person, that company takes that logo and goes to a website to buy the swag.
Why shouldn’t the designer be able to handle the swag for their clients that they just created the brand for? What about the party planners? You know, people are having a bar and bar mitzvah, a wedding. They want some swag to give away. They, they buy from somewhere else. Why don’t they buy from the event planner who’s organizing everything else?
This universal swag platform could handle anything, whether you’re in the industry or whether you’re a promo adjacent, as we like to say, or whether you’ve never been industry. And it’s like a business out of a box instantaneously, anybody, whether you’re a college kid or a person who just wants to start a business for free can have the best e commerce experience in the industry.
And where we handle all the front-end technology and all the back end supply side.
Brian Thomas: That’s awesome. And again, the passion and enthusiasm you have for this is awesome. I definitely see this growing into maybe the next Amazon the, at the, at this rate, honestly. So, I appreciate the share, Jeremy and Jeremy, it was such a pleasure having you on today and I look forward to speaking with you real soon.
Jeremy Parker: Thank you so much for having me.
Brian Thomas: Bye for now.
Jeremy Parker Podcast Transcript. Listen to the audio on the guest’s podcast page.
