Ask HN: Can we have a conversation on startup swag waste?

I think part of the problem is actually the shift away from shirts. Swag is advertising but at least a shirt served a purpose and if you didn’t want it you could donate it. Many company shirts ended up at Goodwill or shipped off the 3rd world countries.

But shirts are expensive so no one gives them anymore. They’ve shifted to the cheapest items they can find.

I usually turn down swag now and when I’m in charge of swag I always opt for t-shirts with some sort of “use the product quickly” treasure hunt task to earn one.

I would tolerate swag more if it were actually quality. Like you mention, so much of it is junk. But I also hate logos on things I use, so it's only half the problem.

I appreciate that you used the word "continue" in your first question as tech firms have featured swag seemingly forever. I will just say that my DEC Alpha coffee mug, a multitude of lapel pins from an array of companies, and my Nokia monitor screen brush have all stood the test of time, unlike the many golf shirts, posters, lanyards, and pens. The swag you have received seems to be pitiful and wasteful.

This is the time of year in Austin (sxsw) that we load up on a years supply of free promo sunglasses.

The funny perk of being a highly paid engineer is all the free stuff you get.

I don't know if it's an accurate representation of the flow of money but I've always thought of it as the fed sending stimulus money to me directly through banks & VCs.

The useful things I got from startups and/or conferences over 20 years:

- light backpack (got it in 2003 at a conference and loved it so much that I tried to find out where they sourced it from when it finally broke after years of intensive use);

- mugs

- USB sticks (can't have enough as they tend to vanish)

- (unobtrusive) t-shirts

The useless swag (which I often remove from swag backs while still at the event):

- (obnoxious) t-shirts (too attention-seeking or the ones with the wrong logos...)

- most electronics

- most things made of plastic

- paper adware that doesn't really say anything except for logo and buzzwords

Good choices for swag are paper notebooks and pens, but the quality of the swag items will be associated with your brand, remember (it is true the quality has gone down in recent year, and also the spend per vendor)!

I encourage you all to speak out and give generous feedback about the swag offered to you, especially regarding utility, quality and ecological footprint.

I think companies should produce swag that people could be proud of in 20 years if the company succeeds.

A mug will last for years if you don't drop it, a plastic bag will not. One t-shirt I own is non-startup swag but "swag" from a powerboat race, and it's almost as old as me bar a few months.

I actually have an issue currently; I run a volunteer IRC network and people beg me for swag (minor gift for recurring donations and so on).

My issue is that I refuse to make shit.

I want to test products before I inflict them on the people using my services, not only that I want my brand of service associated with high quality.

You can criticize anything you want under the guise of some environmentalist angle. Can everyone stop doing Y because Y is bad for the environment? Where Y can be traveling, drinking the wrong kind of water, having a big house, driving a car, flushing the toilet too often, taking long showers, printing reports, turning on the lights, not living in a tent on the street, getting a new phone every two years.

This is so tiresome. No, everyone else isn't going to change their behavior to align with your personal environmentalist crusade. Leave us alone.

I think the guideline should be that if you're not willing to spend enough to give away a durable good that people would actually use (e.g. a good quality t-shirt), we should normalize giving away useful, common _consumable_ goods. This can avoid increasing waste if it just replaces/delays consumption the recipient was already going to do anyway. It's shorter-lived, so they don't act as a walking ad for you (but no one was gonna wear that bandana anyway) but this way you might create some positive sentiment.

E.g. branded small sanitizer bottles, sunscreen bottles (X Corp cares about your health and well-being!), snacks (we're all occasionally hangry at conferences right?), etc.

GitHub sponsored a coffee van at FOSDEM. That was a solid choice.

Can't cost that much to run a van for the day (I see them in places with low footfall and the incremental material cost is low), quite low waste, widely appreciated by conference attendees. Also the queue was long so people spent a while in front of the logo, some of the time discussing GitHub.

Good swag has insanely high ROI.

I am so grateful for my Windows 11 sweatshirt. I'm proud of what I did for Windows 11 and am proud wearing the hoody.

> Why do companies continue to waste money on useless swag?

They want your attention. Both at the event/when you interact with them first (probably more important), and then later. Swag is a way to get that attention. Useless swag is, as other comments have noted, cheaper than useful swag, but still gets some attention.

> What can be done to have companies think about the waste they are producing from swag?

Oh, most are aware. I think the easiest thing to do is:

* Don't take it if offered.

* If delivered, complain about it to customer service.

If enough folks do this, the value for swag will decrease, and fewer will do it. Or if they do, they'll do it well.

Swag can be a differentiator in the latter case. I can't tell you how many hours my current company, FusionAuth, has spent evaluating our swag t-shirts, but it is a big number. And we hear folks at conferences say "ooh, that's nice" (unsolicited).

Really appreciate this- it's been on my mind for some time. I've been off the convention circuit since COVID hit, but before then I found myself awash in lanyards, stickers, pamphlets, t-shirts, plastic and canvas bags, etc. and it did weigh on my conscience.

I think some of this is purely cultural, insofar as startup tech companies see other startup tech companies do this and want to emulate as a kind of legitimacy-builder. I can attest that making custom shirts/hoodies for your team can actually be more fun and morale boosting than it might seem before you do it.

It's very cheap to produce merch compared to the money you might spend on conference attendance, which is another early sales/marketing driver for young companies- if you're spending tens (or in some cases hundreds) of thousands of dollars setting up booths or flying internationally to be somewhere, what's another couple of hundred to give your logo a bit more visibility?

One thing which isn't widely known is that some popular alternatives to swag i.e. food or coffee giveaways are often strictly controlled/monopolised by convention centres- so you'll often be forced to use their services, which can run into many thousands of dollars.

From my perspective as an attendee, the disposables do get really tiresome. I've joined the ranks of the business-card-free and don't think I'll move back. I'd like to see more eco-friendly manufacturing for this space, which probably starts with moving away from plastics and towards more paper. I do appreciate T-shirts and hoodies I've collected and wear even the old ones to this day.

Could it be a form of cargo culting[1]?

You have a department that is tasked with promoting your organization at public events. They see that other organizations provide lots of wares with their logo emblazoned on them. Some of those other organizations are successful. There are companies that provide customised wares. Thus: your department purchases more of the wares.

And a belief: you can make a big difference by not peddling swag, and being principled and open (albeit not loud) about the fact that you do not. Perhaps it basically comes down to reducing energy usage and waste; the upside to you would be the word-of-mouth reputation benefit from taking a principled stance.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cargo_cult

> Why do companies continue to waste money on useless swag?

Marketing, attracting talent, reminding people you care about your company exist. It has a use and it's cheap.

> What can be done to have companies think about the waste they are producing from swag?

Tell them plastic recycling is a scam perpetrated by the oil business and our weakly-spined governments and just a small portion of plastics get actually recycled; we end up eating and contaminating the environment with most of it.

Once this issue picks up enough steam maybe companies will stop with the useless gadgets in order to show they care about the environment for virtue points.

I think this should be stopped. I have a ton of water bottles, mugs, shirts, USB chargers, pens and other stuff I will never use and often just throw away. Not only do I not need the items but usually they are just cheap crap that breaks if you actually use it. One company handed out Patagonia shirts which actually were good quality but most companies are too cheap for that.

Just stop. It's wasteful and harmful for the environment. If they want to make me happy, give me some cash :-).

That was a nice thing about working at Ghostery. Our swag was LEGIT. Too bad we didn't have a viable business model to go with it

Getting swagged out is a right of passage for those entering tech. However, Comdex (RIP) was the gold pinnacle for swag. I remember Creative giving out mp3 players, Dell giving out laptops, Microsoft giving out keyboard / mice combinations, AMD giving out processors...

Now people have to be happy with some branded shitty USB cables, black shirts (90% of swag shirts are black for unknown reasons and made of 100% shitty cotton), stickers, branded candies (Hey Amazon, looking at you), and the occasional heat resistant gloves (splunk knows things get hot when presenting their obscene price to upper management).

I stopped accepting swag unless it's something unique and cool.

I hate all the damn totes and the drink bottles. How many of those do you need in your life? I must have a dozen nice ones and I've recycled endless dozens more.

I usually refuse to take them if I have the option.

While it can make you feel very special to get a gift bag containing a bunch of things, and getting that "Oooo, I get to open it" I'd rather just have a table with the swag on it. Take what you want. Some people like pens (I always lose mine). Some like cups, or notepads, or whatever. But like you hinted at, each person has things that they will use, and more things they probably won't. And who cares if someone takes a bunch of them - you're almost sure that they'll all get used then!

You need to convince the consumer not to collect something for free they’ll just never use or throw out. It’s human nature, free stuff is rare. So it works.

Most swag is total junk. I don't need yet another cotton bag, notepad, pen or bad coffee cup. I would rather get nothing at all.

I worked at Facebook for years. In the earlier years of my tenure they gave out Christmas (or company birthday? I forget) gifts. Most were not great but one year they gave pajama pants, which have probably seem more use than any other item of clothing I own and are still going strong.

At re:invent this past year (my first industry conference/show), I thought it was comical how much garbage was being given away. I felt kind of guilty to be honest. I'm not one for having many physical goods though, so that's just me.

I guess the problem for me was that most things had no use, like you mentioned. The bags get used for groceries and I'd be lying if I said the Red Hat hat didn't give me a little glee, but a match box car? I'm not going to use this and it feels like a waste on me.

Shirts are fine, although I mostly wear plain colored shirts and jeans I bought in bulk years ago.

My favorite "swag" was probably the mini open bar one booth had. Honestly put me in a position where I wanted to talk about the product with an associate.

These topics are fascinating to read. I've not attended any conferences besides barcamps in Germany and FOSDEM since around 2012 - and I'm still kind of surprised about the (amount of shape of) things that are supposedly handed out, because most of the stuff I still have is actually useful, but that's only like 10 t-shirts and 1-2 mugs and some pens that were not completely useless, so apparently it has picked up in the last years, we didn't get nearly as much stuff 10y ago (which is good, don't get me wrong).

That said, I am totally ok with some of the USB sticks and my favorite bottle opener that's been sitting on my desk for years.

Would have loved to get a water bottle at some point though :P

Pre-pandemic I was thinking the same thing, but at conferences. Since t-shirts and hoodies were a hot commodity, many companies resorted to giving away what is essentially trash. The cheapest items you could possibly imagine. Little toys, and trinkets, and things that were bought from china that will never make it out of the bottom of your conference bag. Sitting there for years waiting to be discovered in your closet and subsequently thrown out.

> Why do companies continue to waste money on useless swag?

Lead list generation. Sales...

Is the answer. You need to entice a potential customer closer to your booth, get their name and have a chance to follow up later.

If a customer represents a few $100 or few $10ks, the customer acquisition cost of a $15 water bottle is quite low.

Here's another idea: QR codes that give you NFTs or alt coins.

You can then turnaround and donate it to a charity.

This generates customer engagement at the very least...

My company sends monthly "gifts" and many of them are great. Shirts, sneaks, a beach chair, a little SoloStove, a ukulele. They're all useful, but heavily branded.

I told my boss I'd rather have the cash value, or maybe a lower deductible.

Funny something like this recently popped into my LI feed: https://www.linkedin.com/company/buzz-swag/

Buzz Swag - esg corp gear eval.

Instead of getting random SWAG from my employer, here's what I want

- A credit to a store for company/org SWAG

- There's a selection of products w/ team logo. It's all high quality stuff.

- I get something I need and use the credit

Maybe if there was like a checkbox:

Yes, I know I'm your valued customer but please don't send me any of your promotional items that I didn't order?

It's just glorified advertising. It's the pollution you see on ad based TV or ad based websites, materialized.

It’s because Patagonia doesn’t let you brand their stuff anymore and no one knows L L Bean exists.

Yes. Please. This so much. Envrinmentally harmful garbage

I loved those IFTTT socks back in the day though.

You could delete everything except the last three words in your title. There's really no need for all the throat clearing.