Ring ring…the 90s are calling, and they want their swag industry back. In this edition of The Swag Street Journal, we’re looking at how the team updated swag and corporate gifting for the present day.
Don’t let this one go to your answering machine.
The Main Event: Avail’s founder on building a swag platform for the modern business
Taking Inventory: Industry links to make you think
Stocking Up: Don’t Panic (A Holiday Tale)
The team at Avail loves a little nostalgia. But can’t we have 90s boy band reunions and a cohesive swag strategy?
That was the question (okay, maybe not the exact question) that Avail CEO Brian Hensen posed when he founded the company. While every other piece of corporate life had digitized, swag and gifting was stuck in the era of mood rings and Michael Jordan. After 16 years in the promotional product space, he knew the $25B+ industry needed to be set to fast-forward.
“People still think it’s okay to get a spreadsheet of their inventory two weeks after they ask for it. That’s clearly not accurate anymore.”
Emotional accessories and the Bulls in the 90s were objectively fantastic. Losing time, money, and physical space on gifting is not.
Here’s how Brian and the Avail team time-warped corporate swag into 2026.
3 Ways Avail Remixed a Dated Industry
⚒️ Giving the Tech Some TLC
Swag is one of the most time-tested tools in the corporate world.
Unfortunately, to manage swag, too many companies are still running on Windows 95 (figuratively speaking).
From offices stuffed with gear to outdated spreadsheets, the ways in which organizations manage gifting felt vintage, and not in a good way. Avail CEO Brian Hensen and his team knew that, in order to build a swag company, they would also have to build a swag platform for the future.
There’s no shortcut to great tech; the team built a proprietary ERP system and customer-facing app from the ground up. Each piece talks directly to the other instead of living in separate silos held together by email chains and crossed fingers.
This is the piece most of the industry skipped, not because it’s optional, but because it’s hard.
| Status update |
You can check your horoscope, 401K, your fantasy line-up, and lab results from your phone. But not how many water bottles you have in stock? You should be able to see your swag inventory in real time from your phone. No janky Excel docs. Virgos, you get it.
🎯 Saying “No, No, No.”
The most effective gifts are personal.
A handwritten note, an engraving, a special touch that says “This is for you,” is what separates the good from the great gifting experiences. And yet, so many swag vendors claim to be one-size-fits-all.
But targeting everyone, from individual Little League teams to large corporations, isn’t a growth strategy. It’s a recipe for mediocrity.
So Avail got specific, scaling to serve companies with real budget and real complexity. The kind of organizations juggling events, onboarding kits, and sales gifting at once. Saying no to some business made room to say yes to a whole lot more.
🤝 Unbreaking the Sales Team Model
Here’s the 90s sales model (not Kate Moss):
Hire a rep.
Let them build a personal book of business.
Pay them a cut of the profit for as long as that customer sticks around.
This system creates reps who sit on their accounts; it’s “my customer” instead of “our customer.” But the swag business is no longer about making individual sales, it’s about building a platform that makes the process more efficient and effective for clients.
You can’t be a data-driven org if sales reps won’t share data with their own team. Hoarding knowledge is as effective as hoarding team hoodies under your office manager’s desk (not effective at all).
Into the Future, Step by Step
Gifting is timeless. But the process shouldn’t feel dated.
Avail built a swag platform, and then built a company designed to simplify the process of giving while retaining the human touch.
| Workplace |
Small Problems, Big Consequences
An April study found that 47% of workers said they lost at least five hours per week to inefficient systems or processes. Hm, inefficient like your Senior Director of Marketing personally gift-wrapping client holiday gifts?
| Shipping |
Ho Ho Hoooold On, Shipping Costs What!?
Back in August (yes, summer), UPS announced price hikes for the holiday season. Would be nice to offset those costs with a swag inventory system designed to save you time and money when sending client holiday gifts. Just sayin’.
| Events |
Swag In the Wild
BookCon is one of the world’s largest events dedicated to the growing book market and last year’s MVP was a merch activation by LaCroix. Gifting cold seltzer to parched readers? A truly… novel idea (sorry, we had to). Tickets just went on sale for this year’s convention; what will be the 2027 marketing MVP?
Halloween is over, but we know some of you are still terrified.
That’s because you put off your end-of-year gifting until now.
We see it every year. Gifting sits quietly on someone’s to-do list from Q2 through August.
Unassuming. The quiet type. Never a problem…until…
It’s somehow November. Thanksgiving is pounding on the door, December is looming in the driveway and the New Year is right behind it.
We hope this isn’t you. We hope your holiday gifting is going well. And if it’s not going at all, don’t panic. You can always book a demo with Avail and learn how we can help.
Avail seamlessly integrates with Salesforce, HubSpot, and a dozen other platforms to make holiday gifting simple, smart and not scary at all.
(no, for real, today. It’s already November!)
By the way, did you catch all the 90s song/band references in this newsletter? Hope they didn’t Slide Away into The Distance leaving you Torn. Ok, we’re done. For now.
Swag simply,
The Avail Team
Swag strategy, gifting news and expert insights,
every other week.