The big idea: A swag recycling service

Branded swag is everywhere—what if it was worth something?

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.

How would it work?

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.

The unbranded ecosystem

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 items are literally brand new! There are huge economic incentives for the hustlers of America to vacuum up branded items and resell them, especially early on before there’s significant competition or supply shock.

And as with all good arbitrage opportunities, expect a wave of gurus and social media stars to start selling courses on how to get rich flipping used Skadden coffee mugs.

But that’s not the only model

UnLogo is the one providing the economic input that turns these branded items from trash into highly valuable apparel. Why do they need to let resellers capture so much value? There’s a natural path to vertical integration: collect the corporate swag, remove the logos, and resell to third parties.

The RealReal already does this by refurbishing and reselling luxury apparel. Instead of charging customers to remove branding, UnLogo could pay a small fee (maybe 10% of resale value?) for people to send in their unused swag. Suddenly, the company has a path to serious scale.

There’s also a strong branding case for this — people don’t like throwing away perfectly good things, even if they don’t use them. The new UnLogo is primed to become an environmentalist favorite, reducing waste and upcycling unused clothing. UnLogo’s shop could end up as one of the most carbon efficient ecommerce stores out there.

There are other business models to consider too. A two-sided marketplace might be a low cost way to start. Customers offer to buy a new Yeti bottle for a set price — say $25. There’s an open bidding process to send in your swag, and UnLogo takes a flat fee + a percentage of the sale to do the brand removal for you. This removes the hassle of managing a resale business — at least until someone sends in a ratty, sweat-stained t-shirt instead of the ‘like new’ one they promised.

What does that mean for the future of swag?

In a world where you can monetize swag, the value of each piece goes up — and that means that companies will be more judicious in who gets it. As less swag goes out, the recipients are limited to the most important targets; the natural next step is to invest more into those pieces. A well-funded startup might offer a Barbour jacket to candidates entering the final round to draw some unexpected applicants — which only works if it’s known they can remove the cheese.ai logo.

On the flipside, swag might get more expensive for the buyer. Patagonia gives bulk discounts to Goldman Sachs because the apparel doesn’t compete with their retail business. Will they cut their 25% per vest discount if they start seeing their clothes go straight to resale? Or would they start to create new sub-brands specifically for the swag market? Swap in a “Patagoonia” label and maybe the market value tanks.

Corporations would react to this

Of course, corporations don’t give you swag as charity – they want you to wear it so people see their brand! They will probably be mad when they see the proliferation of brandless Patagonia vests on Wall Street!

I honestly don’t see how, but companies seem to think that this is cost effective marketing. So when you start reducing the ROI, you’ll see a reaction.

At a minimum, you’re going to get a cease and desist letter. But intuitively, this feels pretty legal! I think you can do whatever you want with the clothing that somebody gives you. But when you hit a million in revenue? Those ‘free’ KPMG baseball caps could start coming with a contract attached.

Another response might be harder to remove branding — think logos woven directly into the fabric instead of slapped on as a patch. Ironically, this could actually make the swag cooler? Maybe this sparks a wave of corporate creativity — give me a vintage jacket with the old-school Microsoft logo and I might actually keep it. This could be a renaissance for in-house graphic designers — or an opportunity for a design studio to carve out a niche designing swag too good to debrand.

But until then, the gift may start to come with some responsibility. On your first day, your HR person tells you “Here’s your Google backpack, but you have to wear it to work every day. An unbranded backpack is grounds for termination.”

For the reader who makes this business happen, the next ancillary product line might be low-cost counterfeit swag to keep the swag police off you.

Official idea rating

4.9/5. I think something like this could be really powerful from an anti-consumerism/environmentalist perspective. It’s also primed to go viral: a charismatic founder will very quickly get on CNBC with the headline “this entrepreneur wants to upcycle the branded swag you never wear.” If you, dear reader, start this business please give me some pity equity – it’s a good idea! Corporate swag is supposed to be free advertising. In the future, it may just be free inventory.

---