If you’ve ever worked for a big corporation — or wandered too close to a recruiting fair — you’ve probably accumulated a mix of t-shirts, water bottles, and (if you’re lucky) Patagonias with big honking corporate logos on them.
I thought this was pretty cool when I was 23 — they’re nice sweaters! A S’Well water bottle is great, even with the giant Deloitte logo on it. But these days I’m less interested in wearing a t-shirt from a defunct startup. I’ve even started giving away my pile of branded backpacks, but that sort of sucks! They’re nice backpacks!
Why do we have to let corporate branding ruin perfectly good apparel? Stitching isn’t that hard to remove. Introducing: UnLogo, a service that takes swag and removes the branding for you.
Drowning in swag? Pay a deposit, request a shipping label, mail your stuff in, and UnLogo will use an array of embroidery cutters, dyes, laser removals, and other tools to debrand the item. They mail it back to you and charge some money for it – call it $5 per piece.
The initial setup seems fairly simple. A warehouse, a few machines, and a stamps.com account are enough to get you into business. The real challenge is operations: it’s hard to make sure every order gets completed correctly and quickly. But if sneaker restoration shops can do it, so can you.
There’s plenty of stuff out there to debrand. The swag industry is a little-known behemoth, hitting $26 billion in sales in 2023. The stuff that you might actually want to recycle – apparel, water bottles, bags, hats – make up 51% of the spending, so let’s call it $13b per year in junk. And 40% of it ends up in a landfill! For the hapless senior in college trying to find a job, this could become the basis of their wardrobe — if they can clean it up.
Once brand removal becomes easy, something interesting happens: corporate swag goes from disposable to valuable. Thrift store resellers are going to flood in: the Patagonia vests, Yeti tumblers, and Timbuk2 backpacks currently collecting dust in Goodwills will become a resale goldmine on Poshmark or in boutique stores.
Soon after, a new set of middlemen would pop up, proactively seeking out MBA students and law firm employees with swag to reappropriate. Expect to see internships that pay 21 year olds to run around corporate fairs, pretending to be an interested student while collecting huge bags of swag for recycling.
And the economics actually look great. An unbranded Patagonia sweater retails for up to $150. On Poshmark, they go for $50-$75. A Yeti resells for $25-$35. A Timbuk2? Up to $125. And those are used prices: corporate swag ite
