Stephen Emerson meets Conor McKenna, co-founder of the Glasgow-based corporate merchandise company, who tells him how utilising cutting-edge technologyand aiming high have helped the business to expand
Not all revenue is equal and, in the early days of a business – when money is tight and bills need to be paid – it can be all too easy to accept the orders that are readily available locally.
Conor McKenna and co-founder Ben Greenock made a call early on to reject chasing low-hanging fruit for their venture, Go Swag, and set their ambitious sights on some of the world’s largest companies.
“Anytime you’re turning away revenue, it’s a risky move,” Conor concedes. “But you’re betting on the fact that you’ll win the bigger enterprise customers, and you want to hold your resources to service them properly.”
It is a pivot that has paid off, and then some.
Go Swag was founded in 2019 with just £180 of funds and has since grown at a compound annual rate of 112 per cent for five consecutive years, serving served more than 1,000 organisations, including Netflix, Amazon, Google, Meta and Apple.
This March, it announced a $5 million (£3.7m) Series A led by Mercia Ventures. Existing investor Techstart Ventures and a group of strategic angels also took part. The money will fund a direct push into the US.
Harper Macleod advised Go Swag on the deal; Lewis Silkin acted for Mercia; Tughans acted for Techstart, while Philip Hare & Associates providedtax advice regarding venture capital trusts.
The switch to focus on larger players was based on Go Swag’s operating capacity. While small orders may bring fast revenue, they can clog the pipeline at the worst possible moment.
“It stings you in the long run,” Conor explains. “When the big boys come along and you need to run a six-month programme, suddenly your resources are tied up with 100 small orders rather than the Amazon order worth five to ten times all of them combined.”
Go Swag’s managed service covers design, sourcing, sizing and global distribution from end to end.
That holistic approach has suited multinationals employing staff across several continents, not buyers chasing the lowest price.
“We’re not in the business of racing to the bottom on price,” Conor insists.
Conor and Ben came to the merchandise business from the software sector and had no background in promotional products.
Conor believes their outsider status has been a benefit, as they have been able to tackle industry problems with a software mindset.
“We came into it naively, but that became a bit of a superpower,” he says.“We asked how we could solve this with software and script rather than headcount and manual effort.”
By Conor’s estimate, the market they entered is worth about $1.1 trillion in annual transactions.
The market ran on catalogues of thousands of items and dozens of printing techniques, and it offered buyers very little help.
“You can be responsible for millions of pounds’ worth of budget, and you’re literally clothing your bosses or sales prospects,” he says. “The industry before us just wished you good luck.”
Go Swag’s rule is that everything it sells must be high-quality and high-utility.
Recipients can also choose their own cut and size in private,
However, the enterprise focus brought something more valuable than bigger orders.
Every one of the household-name clients came to Go Swag inbound, largely through word of mouth among the heads of people and sales teams who run gifting programmes.
That strong track record in the industry made the funding round easier to win.
“In a way, it’s harder to win enterprise than it is to win investors,” Conor observes.
Mercia also backed Conor and Ben’s approach.
In traditional gifting, more revenue has meant more staff.
Go Swag’s internal tooling allows the team to handle more business without costs rising at the same pace. Conor reports that investors in the firm have told him the business was being built the way they would want to see the industry fixed.
The next step is a generative artificial intelligence recommendation engine that bundles years of know-how into a model.
Go Swag headcount has risen from 30 and is heading towards 70. The firm has set up a US entity, brought American warehousing online, and held its first pop-up in New York with ElevenLabs, with a warehouse in South East Asia next on the slates.
Conor believes US quality standards lag well behind Europe’s, which gives Go Swag a product the market has not yet seen. The founders’ ambition is for Go Swag to become the default for enterprise gifting, in the way Salesforce and HubSpot are the default for customer relationship management.
The market is fragmented, and its biggest player holds only a few percentage points of share.
Conor sees the minimum order decision as an example of the patience that building a company demands.
“There’s a fallacy, especially in Americanised start-up culture, that there’s one unlock that’s going to bring huge success,” he says. “From my experience, it’s years and years of compounding small wins that builds something interesting. It’s your job as the founder to be resilient and stick at it long enough to see that success.”
WHY GO SWAG WILL NEVER SELL A STRESS BALL
There is one product Go Swag will never sell.
“We have an internal joke that we will never sell a stress ball,” explains Conor McKenna.
“What does that say to your employee or prospect? You’re going to be really stressed working with us? It’s a bit ludicrous.”
Conor cites the figure that around66 per cent of branded goods end up binned and 18 per cent are given away, which is a hit to marketing budgets as much as to the environment.
Go Swag’s answer is a three-part test, everything it produces must be high-quality, high-utility and sustainable.
Conor argues that, if you get the first two right, the third largely follows, because people keep and use products that are well made.
The same thinking applies to fit with Conor describing unisex sizing as men’s sizing rebranded, which means roughly half of recipients receive clothes that do not suit them.
Go Swag allows consumers to choose their cut and size privately, which spares them an awkward conversation with the boss.
FIVE KEY TAKEAWAYS
1 Raise the bar on order size Go Swag scrapped single-item orders to keep capacity free for enterprise programmes worth five to ten times the small orders combined.
2 Solve with software, not headcount Internal tooling allows the Go Swag team grow revenue without costs rising in step, which is the economics that helped win a $5m Series A from Mercia.
3 Take the burden off the buyer The company manages product choice, printing, sizing and global logistics end to end. Nothing is sold until the Go Swag team has approved the quality.
4 Let reputation do the selling Every big-name client, from Netflix to Meta, came inbound through word of mouth among the heads of people and sales teams who run gifting programmes.
5 Compound small wins Conor rejects the idea of an overnight breakthrough. He maintains that success comes from years of resilience, incremental gains, and working alongside people smarter than you.