My Big Idea: Go Swag

‍Hi Conor! What's your elevator pitch? 

Go Swag curates and manages premium corporate gifting for major companies anywhere in the world. On-brand, high-quality corporate gifting is an essential but often overlooked aspect of maintaining brand image, whether in the form of public-facing swag or onboarding programmes and employee gifts. Go Swag combines proprietary technology, logistics infrastructure and a white-glove managed service, and handles the full pipeline from product sourcing and branding to warehousing and global delivery. We manage this complex and time-consuming process for more than 1,000 companies, fitting premium corporate gifting seamlessly into their larger brand strategies.

Why does the market need it?

Corporate gifting is on track to become a $1.1 trillion industry by 2028 despite failing to meaningfully innovate over the past two decades. Most gifting companies still rely on fragmented suppliers, spreadsheets, outdated catalogues and manual processes. It’s much more complicated than it should be to run a global onboarding programme or send gifts to employees and customers across multiple countries. Physical brand moments have only grown in importance in the post-Covid and increasingly distributed work environment. A gift may be one of the few tangible interactions employees, customers and prospects have with a company. Low-quality merchandise creates poor brand perception and environmental waste, with up to 84% of branded gifts either given away or trashed. We saw an opportunity to bring curation, technology, logistics and service together in one platform. We simplify the process, reduce waste and deliver gifts that genuinely reflect the characteristics and quality of their brand.

Where is the business today?

We've come a long way from the days when my co-founder Ben Greenock and I were packing boxes ourselves in the evenings after work. Today, we work with more than 1,000 companies globally, including Meta, Apple, Netflix, ElevenLabs and n8n. We've achieved five consecutive years of triple-digit compound annual growth (112% CAGR), roughly doubling in size every year since launching in 2019, and recently raised a $5 million funding round to support the next stage of expansion. We're a team of around 40 people based in Glasgow, with warehouse operations across the UK, Europe and the US. What I'm also proud of is that we've managed to build a global business while staying extremely lean. We've focused on combining technology with a high-touch service model, which allows us to support some of the world's most recognised brands without needing the huge operational teams that traditionally exist in this industry.

What made you think there was money in this?‍

The biggest signal came from the customers themselves. In the early days, we had major companies bending their own procurement rules to work with us. We were small, unknown and, frankly, not the easiest supplier for a large enterprise to onboard at that point. But they still found ways to make it happen because we were offering something they had been looking for and couldn’t find elsewhere.
That was the moment we realised the opportunity was much bigger than merchandise. If enterprise customers are willing to fight through procurement friction to buy from you, the pain is real. It told us there was serious demand, and that if we could build the right service, technology and operational infrastructure around it, there was a huge commercial upside.

What's your biggest strength?

I think my biggest strength is probably my work ethic, but more specifically my ability to teach myself things quickly and keep going when something is difficult. I’m autistic and dyslexic, and school never really worked for me in the traditional sense, so from a young age I had to find my own ways to learn, understand systems and solve problems. That has shaped a lot of how I work.

I was also lucky to find a co-founder in Ben who is equally stubborn, determined and unwilling to settle for average. Over time, that has become part of the culture at Go Swag. We don’t really wait for someone else to tell us what to do next. If something needs to be solved, we work it out. That mindset has probably been the biggest advantage we’ve had.

What is the secret to making the business work?

The secret is that we have never treated this as just a merchandise business. The products matter, of course, but the real challenge is everything that sits around them. For a global company, gifting touches brand, procurement, HR, finance, logistics, customs, sustainability, stock management and employee experience. If you don’t understand that world properly, you end up just selling products rather than solving the actual problem.
So we spend a lot of time listening to customers and understanding where the friction really is. Then we try to turn that learning into better systems, better service and better technology. From the start, our mindset has been to solve repetitive admin with scripts, automations and algorithms before throwing more people at the problem. The aim is not to replace the team. It is to let the systems do the heavy lifting, so smart people can spend more time talking to customers, thinking creatively and making their lives easier.
That combination is what makes the business work. You need to be close enough to the customer to understand the pain, technical enough to automate the boring parts, and operationally strong enough to make the whole thing feel simple from the outside.

How do you market the company?

Most of our growth has come from a combination of paid marketing and word of mouth. We've invested in our digital channels, but referrals and recommendations continue to be incredibly important. In a relationship-driven industry like ours, delivering a great customer experience is often the most effective marketing you can do.

What funding do you have? Is it enough?

We’ve raised $6.2 million to date, including a recent $5 million round led by Mercia Ventures, alongside Techstart Ventures. Is it enough? For the plan we are executing now, yes. It gives us the capital to expand, grow the team and continue investing in the technology behind the business.

That said, if you are building a strong business, there will always be opportunities to raise more capital. The important thing is being disciplined about when and why you do it. We don’t believe in raising huge amounts of money just for the sake of it. We are trying to build a robust, high-growth business in an industry that genuinely needs fixed. For us, that means using capital carefully, growing with intent and avoiding the boom-and-bust mindset that can creep into venture-backed companies.

Tell us about the business model

Our model is built around premium gifting at global scale. That is the gap we fill in the market. Most of the industry either offers basic products and poor service at scale, or high-quality, considered gifting through smaller providers that struggle with enterprise complexity.

We combine both. We offer premium gifting for every kind of working relationship, from prospects and customers to employees, new starters, event delegates and internal teams, and we support that with the infrastructure needed to deliver globally.

The business model is to become the central gifting partner for a company. We work across one-off projects and long-term programmes, handling product selection, branding, warehousing, stock management, customs and fulfilment. The client gets high-quality brand moments without having to carry the operational complexity behind them.

What were you doing before?

Before Go Swag, I worked in software design and research. After dropping out of photography school, I started my career as a freelance website designer and videographer before moving into product and design roles. Eventually, I joined the software company Waracle, where I became Head of Design Research and worked on projects for organisations such as Virgin Money, Sainsbury's Bank and Roche. That’s where I met my co-founder, Ben Greenock. We worked closely together for several years before starting Go Swag in 2019.

Are there any technologies you've found useful?

Before the generative AI boom, the honest answer would have been spreadsheets. That was where I lived. I’m a spreadsheet addict, and I still think there are few better tools for understanding a business quickly than a good pivot table and some clever formulas.

The most exciting shift recently has been tools like Claude Code. My career has always sat somewhere between engineering and design. I was never just one or the other. I liked building things, designing systems and playing around with code. As Go Swag grew and I moved deeper into leading the company, I naturally became a bit more distant from the tools. Generative AI has brought a lot of that back. It has made it exciting again to hack together products, prototypes and solutions without having to worry constantly about keeping up with every new framework or syntax change. You can focus much more on the problem you are trying to solve.

I also use Whisper Flow for a lot of text input now. I speak much faster than I type, so being able to get thoughts down quickly by voice has been really useful.

What is the future vision?

The long-term vision is to become the default gifting partner for global enterprises. We believe the traditional catalogue-driven model is outdated. Companies want better products and less operational complexity. They also want gifting programmes that reflect the same standards they apply to every other part of their brand. We’ll continue to invest in technology and expand globally with the ambition of raising the standard across the entire industry. Corporate gifting should be operationally excellent and genuinely valued by the people receiving it. Right now it still feels like an afterthought. We’re going to change that.

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