Jeremy Parker graduated from Boston University in 2007, majoring in film production. His first feature-length documentary secured the Audience Award at the 2006 Vail Film Festival.
Following his academic achievements, Jeremy embarked on a diverse career path.
While working for MV Sport, he established a Creative Promotional Product Division. Then, in collaboration with his brother David and Jesse Itzler, Jeremy co-founded an eCommerce platform designed to distribute unique promotion codes through social media influencers’ Facebook and Twitter posts.
Currently serving as the Co-Founder and CEO of Swag (acquired by Custom Ink in Nov. 2021), Jeremy has positioned the company as the premier destination for businesses looking to purchase and distribute quality promotional products.
What you will learn
- Discover Jeremy’s journey from an award-winning filmmaker to the entrepreneurial force behind swag.com
- Uncover the innovative beginnings that positioned Swag as a preferred partner for giants like Facebook, Google, and Amazon
- Explore Parker’s creative upbringing and how a significant moment at the Vail Film Festival redirected his career path
- Learn from Parker’s initial ventures into business, starting with a t-shirt company, and the lessons learned from facing failures
- Gain insights into embracing creativity, navigating startup challenges, and the relentless pursuit of innovation
- Discover the power of diversification and turning ideas into reality
- Plus loads more!
Transcript
Jeff Bullas
00:00:03 – 00:00:45
Hi, everyone and welcome to the Jeff Bullas show. Today I have with me Jeremy Parker. Now Jeremy 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 Vale 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 Marquee Jet Investor and partner in Zico Coconut Water, and owner of the Atlanta Hawks, Jeremy co-founded the Ecommerce platform designed to distribute unique promotion codes through social media influencers.
Jeff Bullas
00:00:46 – 00:01:16
This platform was acquired by a public traded company and is now serving as a co-founder at CEO of swag.com which is acquired by Custom Inc in November 2021. Jeremy has positioned the company as a 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 Tiktok. Jeremy, welcome to the show. Thank you for coming.
Jeremy Parker
00:01:16 – 00:01:18
Thank you for having me. Great to be here.
Jeff Bullas
00:01:19 – 00:01:42
So Jeremy, yeah, you sound like you had a little bit of a creative spirit. So you obviously when you finished Boston Uni, you decided well, at Boston Uni, you created a feature length documentary. So what was, so what were you doing at Boston Uni that led to, you know, you doing a full length documentary that won an award? How did that happen?
Jeremy Parker
00:01:43 – 00:02:02
Yes. So, you know, I grew up in a household of artists. My mom is a painter and a creative and I, I’ve always, from a very young age, had been leaning towards being creative. My brother is creative as well. So I went to Boston University as a film major. That was my major in college. Um
Jeremy Parker
00:02:02 – 00:02:29
Maybe 18 years old, I guess that’s how old I was. I created a documentary film with my brother called 1%. And uh I don’t want to ruin the movie, but basically we ended up winning the Vail Film Festival in 2006. And as you can imagine, I was a 19 year old uh filmmaker and I’m at the top of the mountain in Vail, Colorado. And Vail is one of the top film festivals in the country. And I remember they had this uh quote unquote celebrity brunch the next day.
Jeremy Parker
00:02:30 – 00:03:07
And so after I’m coming off the high of a win and I’m, you know, pretty young at this point. It’s my first movie I ever made. Really? And I go into the celebrity brunch and half the room are major actors that we’ve all heard of. Right? A list, a list actors and half the room are more struggling artists because that’s what film festivals are like. It’s a combination of struggling artists who haven’t yet made it and big time actors, they are kind of doing it as a side gig to be part of the artsy world. And I asked myself two questions. Number one, I that good at filmmaking. And number two, do I truly love it? And honestly both answers were no. And it was just like moment of realization of
Jeremy Parker
00:03:07 – 00:03:28
Maybe this is not the career choice for me, even though it’s like a weird thing to like be on such a high and coming off a win. I, I really did that internal gut check. And I said to myself, I just don’t think this is the, the long term path for myself. Um Went back to Boston University. I had about a year left of college, finish up college. And then my entire background was in filmmaking. So,
Jeremy Parker
00:03:28 – 00:03:48
so as you can imagine, I didn’t really know what I want to do after college. I didn’t really have any other experience. And I thought I was just coming across the term entrepreneur and I thought maybe I’ll just start a business because I’m fairly good at building brands and telling stories because that’s what you do with filmmaking. Maybe I could take that skill set and bring it to uh building a company and telling a story and, and building a, you know,
Jeremy Parker
00:03:48 – 00:04:18
so that’s what I did. And I launched my first business out of college. No experience. Honestly, the main idea was not to necessarily become wealthy or, or even become successful from the first idea. It was really just to learn what I like doing like what I enjoyed. And so I just picked a random idea. I said, let’s start a t-shirt company because in my head, I’m like t-shirt company, it sounds fairly easy. It wasn’t. Uh, but it sounded fairly easy and I figured that I would learn like what I was good at like manufacturing, maybe that’s what I liked or building websites or, um,
Jeremy Parker
00:04:18 – 00:04:36
pr and marketing or production. I, I didn’t know what I was really good at frankly and I started a teacher company and it was just so many different aspects of building a business fall into this one teacher company. And I just learned a lot about what I truly love to do and, and about, you know, how hard it is frankly to start a business that, that works
Jeff Bullas
00:04:37 – 00:05:01
so into the t-shirt company. What did you discover that you really did enjoy? What, what was, what brought you satisfaction? And I suppose, uh, I suppose deep, not deep joy is maybe not the right term to use here, but something that just you say inside this feels right. Um And I really not only love,
Jeff Bullas
00:05:01 – 00:05:32
you know, the destination or where I’m going, but also I love the process because quite often you’ve got to fall in love with the process. I remember, uh uh Steven Spielberg I think said it. He said you’re not even gonna love what you do, you’re gonna lo you’ve gotta fall in love with the process of what you do. And that was even filmmaking. And obviously, it sounded like you didn’t enjoy the process of filmmaking. What did you discover by doing the t-shirt company? What was, were there any aha moments and things you really? Oh gee, I hate this or I really love that. What?
Jeremy Parker
00:05:32 – 00:05:33
Totally
Jeff Bullas
00:05:33 – 00:05:34
feelings there.
Jeremy Parker
00:05:34 – 00:05:52
Totally. II I found a few things I was fairly good at that. I thought I was very, super uniquely good at. And I also found some things that I truly love to do and the cool thing about it is that they both kind of in so many ways intersected. So I love building a brand. I love the idea of having an idea
Jeremy Parker
00:05:53 – 00:06:19
and see it come to life the same way that I built, you know, this, this uh movie. And I had an idea for a film and then seven months later, the film was live. It was just this amazing feeling of being able to create something out of nothing the idea of, of having an idea for this t-shirt company, which was called horrible name at the time. Honestly, I wasn’t very, I probably wasn’t very good at branding early on, but I loved it. It was called Teas and Tats. It was a high end t-shirt company about tattoo apparel, right? And
Jeremy Parker
00:06:19 – 00:06:56
I just, I always was fascinated by tattoo designs and I, I don’t have any tattoos, but I was just fascinated by it by the artistry. Yeah, I just, I thought it was cool and I created this really high end limit edition t-shirt company and I built this whole story around it and the brand around it and they were super high end like $300 T shirts like really like the most that’s a t-shirt you could do because I positioned it as a piece of artwork so much so that some of our customers honestly bought shirts and framed it for their office because it was beautiful. It was like more than just a t-shirt. It was like a wearable piece of art. So I was telling this really cool story about that. And I also found myself really falling in love with the sales process.
Jeremy Parker
00:06:57 – 00:07:14
Like it’s kind of weird people always put down sales people, but I found myself loving it. I was talking to so many people, I was telling the story. I was, it was like a game in many ways like, can I get this shirt? In the hands of buyers, whether that’s through on an online mechanism like ecommerce or like I was doing, knocking on doors and going to different,
Jeremy Parker
00:07:14 – 00:07:42
you know, different boutiques and trying to get it in the store and try to get better placement. And the whole process was somewhat of a game and it was fun. I really love that aspect. And what was interesting about it is, this was in 2007. So if I could take your viewers back to 2007, this is when the recession hit and people don’t really want to buy $300 t-shirts when they can’t afford dinner and they can’t afford groceries and they’re losing their jobs. So it wasn’t the best time to launch it. We launched about three months before the recession
Jeremy Parker
00:07:43 – 00:08:20
and we were in all these different boutiques and I came up with a and this is where it kind of gets me to swag and I’ll just kind of tell you the story. I was, I was reading, I was reading a blog called blog Maverick by Mark Cuban. And everyone’s familiar with Mark Cuban and Shark Tank there. And, and obviously I was very new to the entrepreneurship world. So I was trying to read as much as I could and learn from all these people who I view as experts. And I had this idea of taking the prices of our shirts, the $300 T shirts and tying it to the Dow Jones. Right. Because the Dow was dropping, the, the recession was hitting the, and I said for every 100 points, the Dow drops, I’m gonna give a discount on your T price. Now.
Jeremy Parker
00:08:20 – 00:08:45
It’s the gimmicky of ideas. Right. But I was 21 years old and that’s, I, as, as listeners, if you have young listeners, it’s actually important to take advantage of your youth. A lot of people give, you know, uh they want to help you when you’re young and when you’re, you know, doing crazy things, it’s kind of like a fun thing to help a young kid. And I found myself getting a lot of value from just being a young entrepreneur willing to do kind of crazy things. And that’s I think a big thing about
Jeremy Parker
00:08:45 – 00:09:13
um from my experience. So I wrote to Mark Cuban and I said, Mark, I have this amazing idea. It’s actually been working. We’ve been tying the prices of our shirts to the Dow Jones and he responded within 10 minutes. This is like a cold email. And he said, Jeremy, I love the, I love the entrepreneurial spirit. This is what’s gonna help us get through this period of time. Do you mind if I write about you? My blog? I said, of course, this is crazy. Awesome. Do it, let’s do it. And uh Mark wrote about this within like 10 minutes. He posted the po he posted it into his blog
Jeremy Parker
00:09:13 – 00:09:51
it was seen by a writer from Adage which is a big marketing magazine, they wrote about us. And ultimately, I got in front of this guy Elliot Pr who is a, uh a big time CEO, he, he is the CEO of a company called MV Sport. And they’re a very large company in the promotional product space specifically around collegiate apparel. So if you go to a University of Maryland bookstore or Harvard University bookstore, you’re going to see shirts branded with the, you know, the, the Harvard logo on Nike Adidas, Under Armour, all the companies that you’ve expected and MV Sport, no one’s ever heard of really MV Sport, but they do a lot of licensed apparel and uh
Jeremy Parker
00:09:51 – 00:10:19
I met up with Elliot, we hit it off, we would bounce ideas off each other. I was like a young 2122 year old kid and we would regularly meet and we have lunches and we would talk and we would brainstorm different ideas. And ultimately, Elliot said to me, if you want to start a business under my umbrella and they have a very large company, they have a company called Weatherproof Garment Company, which is Outer Wear Jackets. They’re a really big company. He said, I I will fund a start up idea that you could build within our umbrella company.
Jeremy Parker
00:10:19 – 00:10:42
And for me that as a young entrepreneur, very little experience, like really very little. I was like, this is gonna be the ultimate experience for me just to learn, um learn anything like learn, learn how to work with a large organization, learn how other people do it, just honestly test things without using my own capital and just learn to make mistakes. And it was an amazing thing. But I built a company under MV Sport called
Jeremy Parker
00:10:42 – 00:11:24
for Art. And what we did is we, we formed agreements and partnerships with different collegiate colleges like University of Maryland. And we would host a graphic design contest at the school and the winning design was printed on T shirts and that were sold at the bookstore at the basketball stadium. So the idea was to make collegiate apparel more fun and more cool and allow the students to reimagine their, their brand and their logo, et cetera. And I did that for about three years under MV Sport and I did it at many different schools like huge schools and I traveled all over the country and I went to Purdue University and all over and I learned so much about the promotional product industry. Like I know knowledge about how to print stuff and licensing and agreements and this or that.
Jeremy Parker
00:11:25 – 00:11:53
Um I took a break from that after three years, started the business, as you mentioned earlier with my brother, uh and Jesse Itzler. We did product placement in youtube videos and social media stars. So now imagine you uh you watch a youtube video, every video has product placement, right? That somebody is drinking a can of Coke in the video and Coca Cola is paying millions of dollars like it. It’s a common practice now that youtube stars, Mr Beast, all these guys are making millions of dollars back in the day. I’m 38 now. So what was this 1314
Jeremy Parker
00:11:53 – 00:12:22
years ago? That wasn’t the case. These youtube Stars were living in their parents’ basement. They were getting millions of views, more views than the American Idol gets, but they were making very little money. And we had this idea what if we partnered up with major companies like State Farm, Colgate Verizon and we got these brands into the youtube Stars. So we would represent a lot of these youtube stars and allow them to make money. A broker, be the middleman and brokerage deals. And we made a lot of these youtube stars millionaires frankly, it was like, it was the Wild West at the time. We got deals from State Farm.
Jeremy Parker
00:12:23 – 00:12:49
Uh I mean, a lot wonderful pistachios, all these big companies and we got these big brands into the videos and then it got us thinking, well, why don’t we actually partner with major well known celebrities and buy the rights to their social presence? So this is at the time where Twitter was just coming out. I mean, taking now Twitter X is everyone knows all these platforms. But early on these things were so new, this was like a start up Twitter was a start up. And just in perspective,
Jeremy Parker
00:12:49 – 00:13:10
one of the big celebrities that we ended up partnering up with and owning his rights had like 4000 followers on Twitter at the time. Now that person has over 40 million followers. So to put it in perspective, how early we were, we start buying up the rights to all these major global celebrities where basically the idea was they could not do any promotional tweet or any post on Twitter, Facebook, youtube.
Jeremy Parker
00:13:10 – 00:13:39
Without coming to us, we would be like their representative, we would bring them deals and it was a little more complicated than that, but that was like the high level thing and that company ultimately got acquired by a publicly traded company. So I was 25 years old. I believe I was even living in my parents house. At that point, I haven’t moved out. I was single and I just sold this company for millions of dollars to a publicly traded company. Um And then I had my first, I guess, major failure, you know, after that, after coming on, like win, win, win type of thing experience,
Jeremy Parker
00:13:39 – 00:13:59
I had this really big failure where we started a social networking company called Vouch and it was based on what you, what your favorite things are. So we had this big idea of looking at Facebook, right? Facebook is massive platform and everyone took a piece of Facebook and made a dedicated experience around it. Instagram took the pictures and made a better experience around pictures and Twitter took the
Jeremy Parker
00:13:59 – 00:14:20
status update and Snapchat took the poke and all these and linkedin took them like the job and what you’re interested in all these different things. And our idea is what if we took the like button and what if we owned the like button and made a really amazing, dedicated experience about what you truly love. So Jeff, I could follow you, I could follow my friends, I could follow celebrities and see all the things you love, whether it’s your favorite book or your restaurant
Jeremy Parker
00:14:20 – 00:14:56
this or that. And it’s like a true actual recommendation. But we made it fun. And that’s really where Facebook monetizes all their money, right? They know what people like so they can advertise. And I still think the idea is awesome. I think we built the wrong solution. I don’t think we were the right guys to build that solution. Um And I spent about three years doing that and it ultimately had to be shut down. So that was tough. And then after that, I just had this idea for swag because swag was something I fell in love with as my first job working on MV Sport. And it was a full cycle. I’m like, let me try to disrupt this industry that I fell in love with so long ago. And so I launched swag in, in 2016
Jeff Bullas
00:14:58 – 00:15:37
before we get into swag. Um I am intrigued by one part of the element of promotion. And t-shirt is the design part. And like, for example, when you’re working under the banner of MB Sport, you basically ran a design competition and uh the best one got printed in, you know. Yep. The, the University store is, do you enjoy design? Is that part of what you do love doing as well. And did you do some of your, do all your own designs for the $300 T shirts? Tell us about the design. Is there a passion for design within you that you love? Holy.
Jeremy Parker
00:15:37 – 00:15:52
I, I love it even, even today. Um You know, I was a CEO of swag.com, but I was also head of product. So everything you see on swag.com in terms of the user experience and design, we have one designer, Steven I’ve been working with for the last five years. Um
Jeremy Parker
00:15:52 – 00:16:19
I do all the user experience with him, you know, like I have an idea, we work on it together. We, we analyze the whole entire vibe of it. It’s very rare for the CEO to also be head of product. It’s not a normal thing, but it’s something that I think I’m fairly good at and I, and I enjoy it. And obviously when you want to work on something you wanna do this aspects of the job that you enjoy the most because usually you give it your all you, you come to, you come to the job with real
Jeremy Parker
00:16:19 – 00:16:48
motivation and like a spirit. And that’s what gave me that kind of energy. So I love design. I love branding. I love making sure things look really good. They’re really elegant, they’re frictionless. Uh It’s, it’s kind of a weird obsession. Uh But I was able to take that obsession and move it towards the swag space and within the swag industry, it was so exciting and the reason kind of why I want to get into it is I looked at this massive industry. It’s a $23 billion industry. It’s only growing, I mean, every, every company charity organization by swag,
Jeremy Parker
00:16:49 – 00:17:16
but there’s very little at the time, there was very, very little innovation and everything was handled through back and forth emails, presentation decks, the traveling salesman. That’s what the industry has made about traveling salesman. And the idea is, well, the buyer is a much younger buyer than it used to be. Maybe back in the day. It was good to show up at the office and bring all your samples and do back and forth emails or, but today the buyer is a millennial and the buyer wants to buy, have a buying experience where it’s frictionless.
Jeremy Parker
00:17:16 – 00:17:43
They don’t have to talk to anyone frankly, but they could easily find exactly what they’re looking for. Design it, buy it in a matter of seconds. Click the button, send the swag to your office. Click a button. Have that swag held in inventory for individual distributions. You want to do kitted boxes on boarding, welcome kits, do it all on the site. Like every single thing that was complicated, that was fragmented, that was disconnected, that frankly made it impossible for people to scale in our industry. We one by one
Jeremy Parker
00:17:43 – 00:18:10
moved all the friction over the years and we made a really robust automated experience that now we have, you know, north of 15,000 companies that buy from us like the biggest names in the in, in the world, buy from us. And we’re warehousing swag for Amazon. You know, I mean, just imagine Amazon is now warehousing their swag with us and holding their inventory in our portal where they can individually distribute. So we’re really just trying to make the experience so much better for our clients and, and that’s what gets me excited like how we could keep pushing the boundaries,
Jeff Bullas
00:18:10 – 00:18:33
right. Yeah, I, I had, you know, a little bit of, you know, experience with swag and it did look very convoluted from what I could from, from an outsider looking in. So you essentially saw a problem which is all this friction and all this, you know, almost like confusion and no simple processes for getting things done. And you basically put that pretty well all online.
Jeremy Parker
00:18:34 – 00:19:02
That’s exactly right. Yeah, we met online and as you can imagine when I was starting the business I was, there’s a lot of naysayers because that makes sense. Like, why are you going into a crowded space? There’s 22,000 promo distributors. There’s a lot of people selling swag. I mean, the average promo distributor who with swag.com is technically a distributor. Uh, the average one does about 500,000 to a million dollars. And there’s a lot of them, that’s what the whole industry is made up of a lot of people doing hand to hand combat and selling and how can you break through the noise? And
Jeremy Parker
00:19:02 – 00:19:20
our feeling was, well, we really make an amazing, we did a lot of other things to break through. But the, the end goal was to build a really amazing platform that allowed people to check out in seconds. Things that used to take days or weeks now take literally 30 seconds and minutes to do so, we just really streamlined everything
Jeremy Parker
00:19:20 – 00:19:48
and found the best suppliers and the the best products not offering thousands of mugs. We offer the top 25 mugs. We want to curate things down to be super easy for people to not only find what they’re looking for, design it, buy it, check out in seconds and then, you know, move on to the next door, like make it up to date the industry. That was kind of the idea and it took a while, I mean, eight years is not such a long time, but it does take a long time to kind of figure out exactly the right experience to build. So we had this mindset of listening to our customers and building what they wanted.
Jeff Bullas
00:19:49 – 00:20:17
So essentially you took a hand, you know, hand to hand combat industry um and turn it into a technology industry. Totally. Yeah. And what were some of the challenges because basically you’re gone from, you know, selling in university stores, you know, and the experience you had to uh becoming a software developer. Really? So what were the challenges there?
Jeremy Parker
00:20:18 – 00:20:54
I mean, a lot of challenges, I mean, over the years, I’ve learned how to make technology uh easy to use and, and somewhat frictionless. But I, I think that the main thing when I was starting swag.com, I had a, I had a couple of principles in mind. I wanted to make sales from day one. That was a very important thing and that stemmed from a vouch, the company that I did for three years that didn’t work out. Uh I was trying to learn what I could have taken away from that experience or how I could have prevented experience like that from happening again. And one of the big biggest things with vouch and why I believe it failed is in many ways my fault. Um I, I was so obsessed with design
Jeremy Parker
00:20:54 – 00:21:19
vouch and I overthought every little feature. Just imagine like when you’re building a website or a mobile app, every little feature, what happens when the person swipes the button this way or that way or what color should this be? And I, I honestly lost sleep over all the little details. And what ha what happened was I didn’t launch for one year because we started building this platform, take a long time to build out this based on what I thought would be the ultimate platform. And I launched it and I realized all the things that I lost sleep over,
Jeremy Parker
00:21:19 – 00:21:43
none of the customers gave a shit about that was the thing. It was like, I just wasted a full year of my life building the wrong thing. And I think a lot of entrepreneurs do that. They build the wrong thing because they’re afraid to get it out. They want, they just, you know, they make excuses to keep it within and a lot of people and I see this with a lot of my friends, like everyone keeps building building building. When, if they just launched it, they would have known to even have anything here. And I, and I said to myself, the next business
Jeremy Parker
00:21:43 – 00:21:59
I start, I’m gonna start making sales from day one. I’m gonna start making sales before I have ever anything. I’m gonna have a coming soon landing page. I’m gonna go the opposite. And I think that’s one of the big reasons why swag.com succeeded in such a way because from day one, we had the swag.com domain name which I bought
Jeremy Parker
00:21:59 – 00:22:27
and I had the landing pages, like coming soon, I had nothing and I said, I’m just gonna learn as much as possible. So I honestly went to linkedin and I reached out to hundreds of marketing managers, hundreds of marketing teams and event planner. That that’s why I initially thought would be my target audience. And I went to, we work and we, we were actually in a we work and we walked up and down the hallways talking to as many people and got rejected. Like, just like being so comfortable being uncomfortable, putting ourselves out there and talking to people. And our feeling was this like
Jeremy Parker
00:22:28 – 00:22:50
we’re either gonna make a sale which is gonna be amazing or we’re gonna learn why they’re not working with us and why they’re working with somebody else and we’re gonna learn what the right solution we should be building is. I didn’t build anything. I didn’t design anything until I knew what the right thing to build was. That was the difference. Like with vouch, I built what I thought was the right thing and it ended up being the wrong thing with, with swag. I want to build exactly the right thing. Sorry,
Jeremy Parker
00:22:55 – 00:22:56
sorry, I lost my
Jeff Bullas
00:22:56 – 00:22:57
voice for, but
Jeremy Parker
00:22:57 – 00:22:59
it’s fine. We’ll cut this out.
Jeff Bullas
00:23:00 – 00:23:01
We got to this. It’s all,
Jeremy Parker
00:23:01 – 00:23:06
it’s all good. Hm. One second. Let me get a drink. Yep.
Jeremy Parker
00:23:21 – 00:23:21
Good.
Jeremy Parker
00:23:27 – 00:23:28
All right. Sorry about that.
Jeff Bullas
00:23:28 – 00:23:30
That’s fine. Jeremy. No problem at all.
Jeremy Parker
00:23:31 – 00:24:12
Yes. So I was saying that I wanted to build the right thing. So I want to learn from customers so I could build exactly the right thing. We just spoke to as many people as we possibly could. It was interesting, the people I thought I would initially sell to, which is the marketing team, event planners ended up being the wrong user for us initially. And and I wouldn’t have known that if I started building the the solution that I thought I had the wrong. So what happened was I started talking to literally hundreds of marketing teams and I realized everyone’s going after the marketing manager, everybody, every promo distributor is going after the marketing team. How can swag.com a no name brand? The coming soon landing page cut through the noise. That was kind of my question.
Jeremy Parker
00:24:12 – 00:24:49
And what I found is the office manager who no one ever goes after. There were the really kind of trojan horse within the company. Office manager buys for internal purposes. So if you’re a 10 person start up, the office manager is buying for only 10 people. They don’t have the biggest budget. If they’re an office manager of 100 person company, they’re buying for 100 people. Still not the biggest budget, right? Marketing teams had the big budgets they’re buying for the trade shows, they’re buying for giving out to customers for leads, but everyone’s going after them office manager. If you get the office manager of Netflix that has maybe 1000 employees. Every single teacher will say swag.com in the inner label. They’re doing the marketing for us.
Jeremy Parker
00:24:49 – 00:25:25
Netflix buys 1000 t-shirts. They’re giving it out to the marketing team, they’re giving out to the sales team to the London office in New York office. They’re doing the job for us. The marketing team sees the shirt, they see the quality, they see swag.com. Why don’t we use swag.com? It becomes like the social proof where we’re getting in the company and no one was going after the office manager. That was a big, big insight from the early days. And I wouldn’t have discovered that unless I kind of kind of got out of my own way and start having these conversations with people to really learn once we know this, that office manager is kind of like the secret gateway. We went all in and we start talking to as many office managers and getting so many content
Jeremy Parker
00:25:25 – 00:25:43
to so many customers and frankly building the right solution specifically designed for the office manager. Ultimately, we added features that were good for the marketing teams and the sales teams. But that was secondary, like when you’re starting a business, you can’t be everything to everyone. So pick one person but make sure it’s the right one contact to really kind of break through the noise.
Jeff Bullas
00:25:44 – 00:26:17
So that’s, that’s and that’s really, really important. Um A lot of, a lot of entrepreneurs don’t get it is you’ve got to find as fast as possible. Who is your customer? Who’s your perfect customer? And you discovered it was something quite different to what the other 20,000 firms were chasing, which is the market manager. Mhm. So, um, you really, so you were learning before you launched in a way? But I suppose selling manually that sort of like, so you’re selling stuff, but that was the hand to hand combat sort of scenario
Jeremy Parker
00:26:17 – 00:26:49
we want to learn. I want to be like everyone else so that, but, but with the intent that I wasn’t going to stay like everyone else, like everyone else is doing hand to hand combat, but they’ve been doing for 20 years. The intent was for me to do it for a year, make sales, but really learn within that year of how I could build the right automated solution. So every aspect that was annoying for me, like I’ll tell you one of the big things that were really annoying for me early on were price quoting. It was a really annoying process. Somebody wanted 100 t-shirts and they wanted the front and the back print and the front had a three color logo and their back had a two color logo.
Jeremy Parker
00:26:49 – 00:27:10
Just a simple order like that took like half an hour to an hour to go to the supplier’s website. See the inventory accounts do the math equation put in the spreads. It was a nightmare. And my first thing was why don’t you build an automated tool where I could just plug in front and the back 100 quantity. Oh, I want to make a 200 quantity and it automatically dynamically price shifts the whole thing.
Jeremy Parker
00:27:10 – 00:27:36
And I just kept finding all these different troubling annoying processes that would just be able to streamline. And now the site is completely, I mean, our site is so good now where you can upload your logo and our system detects how many colors are in the logo. And the nearest Panto match we have like pad and pending technology that if you upload a vector file, we could find the nearest Pantone. It’s a whole different calculation of color. No one knows this stuff. But like Pantone is like the physical color that you print
Jeremy Parker
00:27:36 – 00:28:05
vector files online are the colors you see on your website, right? There’s like an unlimited trillions of colors that you’re looking at right now on your screen, but there’s only a handful of colors that you could print. They’re different. So how do you match those two up? A lot of companies buying? So I don’t know their pants and colors, they don’t know the physical color that they should be printing. But our system is able to detect that and decipher it. And like we built all the, like nearly everything. There was a challenge we like, how do we attack this and, and, and figure out a solution to streamline it. And that’s what we did over the years.
Jeff Bullas
00:28:07 – 00:28:16
Very, very cool. And, and is a I part of that technology yet, or is it, uh, being built in as we speak or has it already been built in
Jeremy Parker
00:28:17 – 00:28:52
A I? Is something that we’ve been thinking about even pre chat GP T um, it’s stuff that we have certain things built into the system and we have other things that are on the horizon. You know, it would be really cool. We were thinking of imagine you’re talking to a sales rep and you’re just having a conversation like, right, and, and you ask the sales rep, I have an event coming up and the audience is XY or Z and I, I have this my budget, et cetera and then the sales rep goes and figures out products and make selections and then the customer says, I don’t like this or I like that and great. And that takes time. It wouldn’t be cool if there was a conversational piece to the site where people could just literally talk
Jeremy Parker
00:28:52 – 00:29:15
to the website and say like as if we’re talking like right now I have this upcoming event and you know, it’s this type of user, that type of user and the system automatically curates the exact right products based on the price points in hand days, the production times, all these things really streamlines it. And then what if they say, hey, and I also work for Facebook. I don’t have my logo on me and then the system knows to pull the right logo and could generate 20
Jeremy Parker
00:29:16 – 00:29:39
different designs with Facebook. So they could just select the design without having their design or even create anything. Now, obviously, Facebook’s gonna want their own designers most likely to design something, but at least to get them started and give them an idea or some suggestions or, or maybe for the simple stuff, our system could automatically generate design. So we have a lot of ideas of where we’re going. Um But at the same time, we don’t necessarily need to push it because the industry is a little bit,
Jeremy Parker
00:29:39 – 00:29:56
you know, old school, more fragmented already. We’re ahead of the curve. We all need to like bring it 20 years ahead. We could, we gotta do it in the right enough time. Like if, if Elon Musk was launching Tesla, you know, 100 years ago, it would be too early now. It’s the right time. So you want to be a little bit ahead of where people are but not too ahead, you know,
Jeff Bullas
00:29:56 – 00:30:25
let’s quickly go back to um because I’m curious about this is uh there’s a term tossed around all the time, which is overused but is important. Um MVP minimal viable product. So you’re hand hand combat for a year, you’re in the trenches, you’re learning about the customer and how to serve them. Who is the customer? What do they really want? Now, let’s automate it. So, what was your first minimal viable product? What did you kick off with? And how long did it take to build that?
Jeremy Parker
00:30:26 – 00:30:55
Yeah. It took us about three months to build the MV products and none of the bells and whistles for swag.com. It was, it was literally just a home page, a browse experience and no filters. So no filters to find products you’re looking for. No search functionality, none of that. It was just, I think it was about 5 to 10 categories, like notebooks, water bottles, pens, I don’t think get subcategories. It wasn’t like apparel, sweatshirts, t shirts, hats, it was just apparel and we had specific products. I think we had about 10
Jeremy Parker
00:30:55 – 00:31:32
products for each category. So it wasn’t a lot of products and we just allowed people to upload their, their logo so they can mock up their stuff. But they couldn’t, the system didn’t generate the colors or how many colors there was no like instant quote tool. They had to manually input how many colors were in. So it was like an honor system honestly because somebody put one color and there’s a three color print, we wouldn’t like reach back out to them to charge him for the extra color. We just, it was because we had a two person team is me and my co-founder, Josh, like we were, it was all on our system, right? And, and no, like building boxes, no warehousing, no distribution, just a regular checkout flow.
Jeremy Parker
00:31:32 – 00:31:58
Um And that was it like right now, we have the ability for clients to check out via ach or net terms or net 30. And it’s, it’s a, it’s a big system like our system in the beginning was so bare bones and we didn’t make that many sales. It wasn’t like amazing, but we learned that there was, it was enough of, of an interest our clients were buying here and there we probably did about, you know, $10,000 a month. Uh At that point, I remember 2017, January 1st, we launched the site
Jeremy Parker
00:31:58 – 00:32:24
and by the end of 2017, we did 1.1 million of sales. So, but most of the sales were like on Q end of Q three Q four. So the first half of the year, it was very slow, but we were learning a lot and we, we saw that people wanted, but they were coming up into issues where they couldn’t check out. So we had to build solutions to make it easier for them. But we went to, you know, 1.1 million at the end of 2017 to 3.1 million to 7 million to 50 million to 30 million.
Jeremy Parker
00:32:24 – 00:32:50
And in 2021 when we were just finishing the year $30 million a year in sales, custom inc acquire this. And now we’re doing the 40 million et cetera, but we’re part of this custom in family and I wanna just make sure I get this across. I was the CEO for swag.com up until December. So up until about 3.5 months ago. So choir by custom in, in 2021 November CEO for two years, I passed on the CEO title to
Jeremy Parker
00:32:50 – 00:33:16
who is my right hand person at swag.com. And I started a new division under Custom Inc. So I am actually back in the MVMVP phase of this new division under Custom Inc. And I’m calling it as you see, swag Space. And I just wanna go over high level what it is. It’s a really big idea. It’s so big and we’ll see if it works. I believe it’s gonna work. I think it’s gonna really help a lot of people. So that’s kind of why it’s giving me the passion to do it.
Jeremy Parker
00:33:16 – 00:33:44
But the idea is this, there’s 22,000 promo distributors. All these guys who do hand to hand combat, they have no technology, they have no resources, they don’t have no warehousing capabilities, they have no box capabilities. They’re stuck at the 500,000 to a million at best a year just based on the limit of how long things take to do. Our idea is what if we took all of the technology that we built at swag.com over the last eight years and white labeled it and allowed anybody to upload their logos, their brand colors and instantaneously have
Jeremy Parker
00:33:44 – 00:34:13
the best e-commerce experience on the market to sell to their clients. So now Jenny Promo, who’s been always wanting an amazing e-commerce experience to offer her clients to make sales easier to do kitted boxes, do warehousing. They would never be able to do it before. You have to have millions of dollars and, and, and, and a knowledge and a know how and design passion, the ability to do this. Now with the click of a button and for free, all she do is upload her logo and her colors instantaneous, the best site on the market. And what happens is once she makes a
Jeremy Parker
00:34:13 – 00:34:41
through this platform, it hits my back end the custom in pet and we become the de facto supplier as well. So no longer does Jenny Promo need to be working with 30 different suppliers and buy blankets from here and send it to a screen printer and buy notebooks from this vendor war balls from this vendor, which takes a lot of time. You know, I found myself in that 2016 year when I was at hand to hand combat learning, I found myself spending about 20% of my day on selling and 80% of my day on frankly the bullshit of fulfilling orders.
Jeremy Parker
00:34:41 – 00:35:09
What if Jenny promo no longer has to deal with the bullshit? What if she could just make more sales free or per time streamline our whole operations and we become this tech layer in between the distributor networks and all the suppliers becoming the de facto suppliers. That’s the idea. But what if you could expand it just beyond even promo, what if designers, even planners, party planners screen printers? There’s all these promotional adjacent industries that could sell swag that would sell swag that want to sell swag
Jeremy Parker
00:35:09 – 00:35:33
and make a new revenue stream. But they didn’t, they can’t because it’s complicated and it’s cumbersome and it’s difficult and it’s a lot of it. But now it’s not imagine like a logo designer creates a logo for somebody. That person takes that logo and goes to a customer, goes to swag.com, goes to somebody else, right? To buy swag. Why doesn’t designer who just created the logo? Now create a cart for their client. Share the link. It’s all fully branded web
Jeremy Parker
00:35:33 – 00:36:04
by the designer and now the customer they just create a logo for buys their swag through the designer. Now, the designer is making 30% commission and making a huge new revenue stream. We have people already in the first couple of months who have done over $100,000 in our beta because they’re easily able to make sales. So these, we just had, while we’re on the call, I got notification. One of our resellers on Swike Space just did a $9000 order through the system. We’re allowing anyone who wants to sell swag with whether you’re in the industry or not in the industry to easily sell it and we take care of all the operations and logistics.
Jeff Bullas
00:36:04 – 00:36:15
I love it. But you’re almost doing well. I say you’re doing a Shopify to the custom website business or you’re doing an Amazon to logistics business as well in no sense.
Jeremy Parker
00:36:15 – 00:36:16
That’s exactly right.
Jeff Bullas
00:36:17 – 00:36:32
So, it’s a little bit of a combination of both really, isn’t it? So, it’s a little bit like, um you’re given the technology because the other thing I was thinking about as you was talking are going the selling in swag in one sense is the simplest part, the logistics and fulfillment is, isn’t it?
Jeremy Parker
00:36:32 – 00:36:55
That’s exactly right. It’s in the selling part is not the, if you’re a sell salesperson, people want what you’re giving them, what’s great about the swag industry is that people have typically uh in hand dates, right? So you’re talking, I’m talking to you, Jeff and your client, you know, when you need this stuff by, you need it by three weeks. So it’s not like when he’s like forever kind of sales processes where you like, you’ll know if it’s ever gonna close and there’s
Jeremy Parker
00:36:55 – 00:37:21
real time horizon, there’s a specifically baked in Time Horizon for most things, right? Like there’s an event, there’s a trade show, there is a birthday party or whatever it is. So that’s really good. So you, if you get people who like you wanna work with you, it’s not. So hard to ultimately close it. It’s annoying. It’s time consuming because you have to make sure every supplier they’re dealing with has the inventory which is a lot of back and forth or has the right colors or has the right size or you might wanna get samples to them so some back
Jeremy Parker
00:37:21 – 00:37:47
and forth processes, but it’s not such a hard, it’s just, it’s time consuming. The annoying part is once you get the order in, first of all, you have to create an invoice manually, typically collect the money. You have to collect sales tax, you have to remit sales tax and you have to buy the stuff from all the different suppliers and they’re all in different timelines. You have to constantly follow up with your rep at the supplier to make sure they don’t ever, you know, run slow. If you’re doing kitted boxes, you need to get a warehouse, you need to ship all the stuff consolidated, you need to box it up. There’s
Jeremy Parker
00:37:47 – 00:38:24
so much operational headache in this industry to actually get the product to delivery and we just remove it. We say you should focus on selling. Once you make a sale, it hits our back end. We handle everything, we handle logistics, we handle the operations. We have a huge team that does this and we’ve had many years of doing it. I mean, custom ink’s been around for 25 plus years. So like that comes from around for around nine years. We have an amazing operational system in place that can handle this type of volume. Um So it just allows people to, to focus on what they’re, what they’re good at and frankly what they enjoy doing, which is the selling aspect. So that’s it. We just make you be a better salesperson.
Jeff Bullas
00:38:25 – 00:39:06
Yeah, it’s um it’s really fascinating to hear your story about this because um a lot of persons have a great idea and then they just don’t realize until they do it. And it’s where you, when you start everything, you approach it with a beginner’s mind. Um In other words, you didn’t think anything was impossible because that, and that’s a great space to start from, isn’t it? Because if you be, you’re a bit older, you’re a bit jaded and you realize where all, all the reefs lie. So sometimes setting off from shore becomes uh I know what’s gonna happen. It’s gonna be a nightmare. It’s gonna be different. Logistics. What I’m fascinated a little bit about is um during the pandemic logistics will
Jeff Bullas
00:39:07 – 00:39:33
became a nightmare. Um And also inflation happened, you know, and, and I think really inflation was driven by uh lack of supply rather than actually any other, you know, constraints in terms of pricing pressures. How do you go finding um suppliers to deliver, you know, quickly and high quality is that, is that a big challenge for you guys?
Jeremy Parker
00:39:33 – 00:40:00
Um at this point? No, because we have such great relationships. But in the beginning, totally, when I was starting the business with, with my co-founder, Josh, in the early days, we didn’t have any experience. I mean, I had some experience with MV sport, which was about 10 years earlier and it was more on the collegiate side of things and honestly, it was more apparel but getting into the promo industry of hard goods, notebooks and pens and mugs and, I mean, thousands of different types of products, umbrellas and speakers. I mean, you could brand anything. It was, it was overwhelming and
Jeremy Parker
00:40:00 – 00:40:30
I just know for myself over the years going to trade shows how many things that have been given to me that I just throw away, which is not good, is it right? It’s not good for the environment. It’s not good for the business for the for the brand Coca Cola gives out a speaker and if the speaker crap and ends up in the trash, who’s that good for? You know, it, it’s, it tarnishes Coca Cola’s brand. It’s bad for the environment. It costs Coca Cola money in general. Like the whole intent of swag is to um make a statement and stand out, but that only really works if it’s high quality. And that was kind of like our key insight is that
Jeremy Parker
00:40:31 – 00:41:02
everything on our site has to be fully vetted and tested by us, it has to be curated. It has to be like we don’t want to offer 1000 mugs. Like our competitors, our competitors all offer thousands and thousands of options. Number one, all that stuff can’t be good. Right. I mean, like the odds that all 1000 mugs are good, just frankly unlikely. And then if you’re a customer, especially like a millennial or gen Z, you’re overwhelmed by too many choices. Right. It’s the paradox of choice. Like you, too many options. You’re not going to make any, any, any selection. So we want to make it really easy for people to find what they’re looking for and everything.
Jeremy Parker
00:41:02 – 00:41:30
So me and my girlfriend and Josh put a lot of our own money. You know, in the early days, we didn’t raise money at that point and we just bought samples from different suppliers and we went to trade shows and we would go to Atlantic City for two days and just walking down up the aisles and, and feel the quality. And we were just like the product that was, our job is like sourcing and finding products while we’re building the site, while we’re selling things. We didn’t stop. We didn’t like, wait till we had the perfect selection of products to sell. We were, it was all at the same time. We didn’t want to wait.
Jeremy Parker
00:41:30 – 00:41:57
So we would show up with a war ball and somebody said, hey, you have a different type of war. It’s like send me a picture, then we would go out and try to find that exact war ball of the client line. Like we were constantly finding the products based on customer feedback. So it wasn’t like not only building the right solution for customers, it was finding the right selection of products for customers. And that’s, that was the mindset shift. You know, as you said before, a lot of people had this fear of failure. Um even before they start, right. And that kills more dreams was a famous quote like uh
Jeremy Parker
00:41:57 – 00:42:27
fear of failure because more dreams than failure ever could or the right, the fear of those. And a lot of people get in the head if they start analyzing, well, all the things that could go wrong, maybe I shouldn’t even start. And, and in my perspective, as an entrepreneur, I think all entrepreneurs have to have this mentality that the only thing guaranteed is that you will fail, right? But that’s ok as long as you overcome it and you can, you have millions of failures and millions of things that you thought were gonna work out and didn’t work out millions that you like, that’s just a part of the business. You have to be ok with that uncertainty. You have to be OK, learning and pivoting and changing
Jeremy Parker
00:42:28 – 00:43:07
and you got to treat it like a game in many ways like it’s not like you never just gonna, no one, I’ve never heard of a start up guy or girl launch a business and just work. It doesn’t, it doesn’t, that doesn’t happen. You have to, like, learn things and make things happen and take opportunities at your advantage. You know, I’ll tell you one story, Jeff during COVID, the whole world shut down. Right. March happens. Uh, uh, everything shut down. As you can imagine. The whole swag industry shut down as well. Right. No one has trade shows. There’s no events, there’s no one in the office. Exactly. Everybody was telling me you gotta cut half your team, you got to hibernate, you gotta just wait this out, you gotta conserve your capital. But my mindset was, everyone’s thinking that,
Jeremy Parker
00:43:07 – 00:43:35
right? Everyone, everyone, all of my competitors are probably thinking that everyone’s hunkering down. This is probably actually the right time to double down to spend in certain advertising dollars because no one’s spending on advertising. This is actually availability for us to leapfrog some of our competitors and, and find certain keywords and certain seo and certain page like we went all in and then the idea was, but we had this like key insight of, well, everyone’s disconnected, right? No one’s in the office. No, everyone’s at home. Everyone’s scared, everyone’s remote.
Jeremy Parker
00:43:35 – 00:44:03
How can we help keep company culture thriving? Even when no one is in the office? Well, instead of sending swag to their office, why don’t we build a system where you could send swag to remote employees? Right? It’s like all these different things that we just said, we didn’t just like, wait it out. Like everybody in our industry, what happened at the end of 2020 the whole industry dropped 20 I think close to 40% the industry dropped. It was like excessive. I think the only reason why it only dropped 20% is because everyone pivoted to masks.
Jeremy Parker
00:44:03 – 00:44:28
But if you just count real promo stuff that weren’t like production of masks, it was almost 40%. Everyone dropped. We grew over 100%. We went from 7 million to 50 a half million. How do we grow? Over 100%? Everyone’s dropping. It’s because we saw the opportunity and we dove right in. So I think with the, the entrepreneurial mindset, you just got to see where pockets of opportunity are and be OK to go all in and try things that other people aren’t doing. Yeah,
Jeff Bullas
00:44:28 – 00:44:58
I think what you did is just awesome in terms of you zig when everyone else was zagging and the there’s the opportunity in doing things a different way. Um Instead of hand to hand combat, you said let’s build technology even though it’s going to take time. Um Trade shows are shut down, let’s send it to, you know, so incredible. Um What just to wrap this up then, Jeremy is what are some of the biggest learnings as an entrepreneur you’ve learned?
Jeff Bullas
00:44:58 – 00:45:32
I, you know, since you started through both, you know, you’ve had failures. Um But obviously this has been a great success and I’m intrigued by the white labeling of the swag industry which you guys are obviously taking on. Which to me sounds, essentially you’re doing an in this, in an industry that hasn’t been done before, but it has been done in other industries. So essentially you’re just, you’re just putting it into another c your skill and expertise into another industry context. So what are some of the major things that you would like to share that you’ve learned along the way as an entrepreneur?
Jeremy Parker
00:45:34 – 00:46:04
Yeah, I, I say I, I listed before, I would say you have to be open minded to failing. I think that’s the, that’s to me, the, the, the, the key unlock. You know, once I got to the mindset of being OK, being embarrassed, being OK, being proven wrong, removing my ego, I think a lot of entrepreneurs have an ego by nature in many ways, you have to have someone of an ego because you’re doing something that’s not normal and that’s gonna be ridiculed by other people. You know how many times I was starting the business, any of my businesses,
Jeremy Parker
00:46:04 – 00:46:30
people think I was unemployed because I say I’m an entrepreneur. Like that’s the mindset. Unless, unless you actually make it, everyone thinks that you’re just wasting your time and, and their job is the real job, et cetera. So you have to completely remove your ego and be OK with that failure. And and the constant failure. Uh Just knowing that the end goal is where you want to get to. I mean, that’s it for me is like I knew I want to build a really big business and I wanted to help a lot of people and I wanted to streamline it and I felt like
Jeremy Parker
00:46:31 – 00:46:46
I was gonna figure it out. I have all the answers from day one and no one does. And a lot of people think you have to have all the answers. You have to have like a blueprint. But I can guarantee it’s like, what’s that famous? Like Mike Tyson quote? Like everyone has a plan to get punched in the face. And I think that’s the same exact thing with entrepreneurship. It’s like
Jeremy Parker
00:46:46 – 00:47:19
you have to, if you, as long as you have to be in that mindset that that’s gonna happen and you have to be OK to when everyone zags or even just yourself, like how many times I pivot when I thought I was going for the marketing team and I had to realize it was actually the office manager they were going after or I was building this solution just to end up building a industry distribution platform or now that we got to the point with swag.com, now I’m changing it to be swag space to white label the technology and offer it to the other 22,000. You constantly have to be thinking bigger and bigger and bigger and seeing where opportunities, um, you know, display themselves, show themselves.
Jeff Bullas
00:47:20 – 00:47:32
Yeah. And, and what do you think the size of the industry is if you, um, basically you’re trying to expand the industry, you’re trying to basically, uh, take it from 23 billion to maybe making a 50 billion.
Jeremy Parker
00:47:32 – 00:47:48
Totally. I think we want to expand it and just, just put in perspective how big these numbers get. There’s 20,000, if the average promo distributor does a million dollars in sales, just keep around numbers 500,000 to a million a year. And now they start doing all of their swag through us. If we have 1000 of the 22,000, that’s a billion dollars,
Jeremy Parker
00:47:49 – 00:48:16
right? With the revenue, if you get there’s 20 or there’s a 22,000 screen printers that would love to sell swag, they’re already doing apparel. But why can’t now they offer notebooks and pens and mugs. They should. But it’s been complicated. Now, we allow all the screen printers to do it. Designers, there’s 100 and 50,000 designers in the US alone, right? They are helping people with logos and branding. There’s pr agencies that are helping people do events and trade shows. There’s all these promo adjacent industries,
Jeremy Parker
00:48:17 – 00:48:46
you know, are they going to do a million dollars in sales a year? Most likely? No. But can you have like even the work at home mom who, you know, could sell to her local charity or to her, you know, why not to, to local school sell $10,000 to the school. She makes now $3000 in extra money. Anybody, whether you’re in the industry or you want to be in the street or you want to do as a side hustle, we just power the whole industry for swag selling. We become like this universal swag platform. So I, I think it could be immense. I think if it works,
Jeremy Parker
00:48:47 – 00:49:09
um it could really be way bigger than swag that like it could be a massive business. Now, if there’s challenges to it, right? There’s learning, we have to still think we’re still, we just launched 45 days ago. So we’re very new. But I think if we could get it right? And we could take all the technology and all the learnings that we’ve done over the last eight years with swag.com and really take it to this uh new industries. I think we could really, really help a lot of people out.
Jeff Bullas
00:49:10 – 00:49:36
Yeah, it’s um you’re actually, you’re creating a new market in a sense and that’s, that is very exciting. So my final question, Jeremy is I ask everyone is if you had all the money in the world. Um And obviously you’ve done well in the last few years, been acquired. What, what would you do for free? That brings you joy and happiness every day.
Jeremy Parker
00:49:37 – 00:50:17
That’s a great question. I think about this often. Um, for me, my family, I’ve young, I have two young kids, so I’m, I’m excited to when they come home from school. My son is only about 18 months now. Um, just getting to play with my family. You know, I live on the beach. I look at the, I’m looking at the ocean right now. Just, just hang out family and, and get into amazing shape. I think for those two things, if I could be, you know, I’m 38. I wanna stay young. I wanna feel young. I wanna be able to do build businesses, not because I need the money at all, but because I enjoy it and I enjoy the, I enjoy kind of how hard it is, frankly, in many ways I enjoy. Like, that’s a challenge. You know, I,
Jeremy Parker
00:50:17 – 00:50:33
I like to keep my mind sharp. That’s, this is fun for me. So I want, I feel like even if I won the lottery tomorrow, I would still constantly be building and, and trying challenges and trying to work through. So business, fitness and, and, and my kids, I think that’s the most important thing.
Jeff Bullas
00:50:33 – 00:51:11
Yeah, that and, you know, that’s so true. Um I spent time with my grandson the other day and just, we went for a walk through the, you know, little gully nature and I said, let’s go on an adventure path and you should have seen him light up. So this is not just a sidewalk. It’s an adventure path and I just try to see the world through a, a small child’s eyes like we were all born with and to maintain that younger mindset. And apparently the science is showing that keeping a young mindset adds 7.5 years to your a person’s life. So um awesome. Sounds like you can live longer. Jeremy,
Jeremy Parker
00:51:11 – 00:51:12
hope so. Hope so.
Jeff Bullas
00:51:14 – 00:51:28
Jeremy. Thank you very much for your insight, love your energy and, and thank you for sharing your stories to help other people grow and learn and thank you very much. It’s been an absolute blast mate. Really enjoy it.
Jeremy Parker
00:51:29 – 00:51:32
Thank you, Jeff. Thank you so much for having me. Great, great to connect.
Jeff Bullas
00:51:32 – 00:51:33
Thank you.