SwagUp

Swag, swag, and more swag! Everyone loves swag!

In this episode of Culture Uncovered, Jena Dunay sits down with Michael Martocci, Founder and CEO of SwagUp, to talk about building a people-first company from the ground up and protecting that culture as the business scales, goes remote, and navigates acquisition.

Michael shares the lessons he learned starting SwagUp at 21, how the company grew largely through word of mouth into a global swag and logistics platform, and why he prioritizes autonomy, trust, and responsibility over hierarchy, titles, or rigid processes.

They dive into what culture looks like in practice at SwagUp, from hiring for curiosity and deep accomplishment to giving people real ownership early in their careers. Michael also opens up about navigating growth and change while staying true to the company’s core belief that great people, when supported properly, do their best work.

What you’ll learn:

• What SwagUp does and how it simplifies global swag creation and distribution
• How the company grew through referrals and organic demand
• Why SwagUp hires for character, curiosity, and problem-solving over resumes
• How autonomy and trust show up in day-to-day work
• What it takes to maintain culture through rapid growth and acquisition

SwagUp highlights:

• Founded: 2017
• Team Size: 100–125 employees
• Headquarters: Piscataway, NJ
• Work Model: Distributed across the US and globally
• Culture: High trust, people-first, curious, fast-moving, ownership-driven

To learn more about SwagUp:

Careers Page (They're hiring!)

LinkedIn Page

Michael's LinkedIn Profile

Transcript

Jena Dunay: Hello friends and welcome back to another episode of Culture Uncovered, where we go behind the scenes of the coolest companies to work for at different stages and ages around the country. And we are excited today to have the Founder and CEO, Michael Martocci, here today of SwagUp. So Michael, thank you so much for joining us.​

Michael Martocci: Yeah, thank you so much for having me. It's a topic that I care a lot about.​

Jena Dunay: Culture, you care about culture. Tell me why you care about culture the most.​

Michael Martocci: Well, I just think people are the most important thing in a business. The things I learned over time was that I didn't value the people aspect enough in the early days. And then you just realize that companies are just groups of people trying to get things done. So how do you find the best possible people? How do you build an environment where they can thrive? All those things are just essential to success.​

Jena Dunay: Yeah. Well, why don't we start back at the beginning of the very early stages of your company? You are the founder and now CEO, obviously. So tell us: what is SwagUp, what do you guys do, and what made you want to start the organization?​

Michael Martocci: Yeah. So in the most simple terms, we try to make it as easy as possible for companies to create and distribute their branded merchandise out to employees, customers, community members, whatever that might be. So these are your branded water bottles and backpacks and notebooks and all the high‑quality swag that companies are known for giving out. We try to make that as simple as possible, to create those items but then ultimately, how do you get those into the hands of people around the globe?​

Jena Dunay: Which is the pain, by the way. It is so typically annoying to do as a business owner who tries to send stuff out to our team members or to clients. It is a whole process to try and get that stuff completed. So I loved that when I discovered your organization first as a potential client, and then was like, I'm curious what it looks like to work there. So you're definitely solving a clear need in the marketplace.​

Michael Martocci: Yeah, exactly. That was the idea almost eight and a half years ago now; at this point, time flies. I was 21 or 22 when I started the business. And swag was ubiquitous, companies were doing branded merchandise for many, many years before SwagUp came around. But at the time it was very hard to put all the logistics together. It was mostly like, okay, you go buy the items from some random website like 4imprint or Custom Ink or some local mom‑and‑pop type of company, but as you said, that's only one piece of the puzzle.​

Michael Martocci: There is all the rest of it. First off, what are the best items to be buying? How do I make sure I can get access to retail brands? What about the branding, what is the right way to make this come to life? Then you are storing it. Am I storing it in the closet in my office, am I putting it in my garage, is it a 3PL or something? And then, okay, now I've got an employee I just hired in India or Europe or Canada, or I have clients around the world. It is great that I have this stuff; now I have to get it to them somehow. Especially with COVID and remote work, the need for the logistics part became so much greater. So I saw this opportunity to bring it all together: we are your one‑stop swag solution, create it, store it, send it out. That was very novel eight, eight and a half years ago, and we just used that as a launching pad.​

Jena Dunay: I love that. So you were 21 when you started the company. Was it just you, were there other players involved? How did you decide, “Oh, I'm going to do this thing,” and then also get people to trust you? Because as somebody who has founded a company, it is hard to get buyers and sellers in the same place. You were doing a very big undertaking with the type of project that you were deciding to work on also.​

Michael Martocci: I always tell people it is a very complicated business, because you have this supply chain of all these suppliers that we work with, and actually producing every order is a custom thing. It is almost like running a custom cabinetry business where every single thing is bespoke. That is complicated in and of itself. And then we built a massive warehouse facility; we built a lot of technology to run the business internally and externally. We've got a sales org, we have to build a brand. It was like a crash course in every single type of thing that you need to run a business at scale, both physical and digital.​

It was really just: how do you go to market with a different and better product? That was always the foundation. That was how I thought about how we get the initial customers, honestly being better and being different. There is this book back here called Purple Cow, and the reason it is right behind me is because it is the thing I always think back to from when I was starting: how can we make this business inherently remarkable?​

If somebody came across SwagUp eight years ago, I wanted them to be like, “Wow, that is so different than anything I've seen in this space before,” and make it very easy to remember. You go out to dinner with some other marketers or HR people, I want you talking about SwagUp because you just came across us; this is such an interesting idea; it is perfect for what we need; we are using it, you should be using it too. We did maybe $100 million of aggregate revenue with maybe $300,000 of marketing spend, maybe less, $200,000, because it was inherently viral and word‑of‑mouth. That was how we got past that initial chicken‑and‑egg problem of getting buyers to the table while also building the product.​

Jena Dunay: Wow, because of word of mouth. Right. Yeah. Do you remember who your first client was?​

Michael Martocci: There was an order of water bottles for a company called Apiary Digital. I don't even know what they do, I think they were some sort of marketing company. I have the picture of their Swell‑style water bottles, black ones with a white logo. The way we got the customer was we went to a conference called Hustle Con. There was a newsletter called The Hustle; there still is.​

Sam Parr runs a company called Hampton now; he has the My First Million podcast and all that stuff. We ended up going, and there was a Facebook group: “Hey, leading up to the event, meet the other companies and entrepreneurs that are going.” We just put in there, “Hey, we're this company SwagUp, we are changing the way that swag is created and distributed, we are going to be there.” And one of the companies in attendance was like, “Oh, we actually need swag.” So that was our first order. I think it was maybe $700 worth of water bottles or something like that.​

Jena Dunay: I love that. That's really cool. I love hearing from founders what their first sale was because it is a very memorable one when you get it and super fun. Okay, so that was eight and a half years ago. Fast‑forward to 2025, 2026, here we are today. Tell me how many employees you have, where it first started out with just you, it sounds like.​

Michael Martocci: The crazy thing in the beginning was: how do you even get somebody to want to work for you when you have this idea with no customers and no money? It was mostly just friends and people in the local area that I lived in. Our first office was really just my house. My mom was living with her boyfriend, so I had this house that I could use a bit and there was extra space, and all the packages were coming in every day. Friends from down the street were like, “Yeah, I'll work with you for a few hours a day or something.”​

Over time we started to hire some really incredible people, not to say that they weren't, but the caliber and experience of people increased all the time. At one point, at our peak, we were about 220 people, in the peak of COVID, because there was so much demand and we needed so many people to support it. In a steady state we are at around 120 to 125 people. That is made up of about 50 or so in our warehouse. We've got a big fulfillment center in New Jersey that packages everything, quality‑inspects everything, and ships out packages all around the globe. Then we have another 25 or so on the sales and marketing team, and then we have a large product and tech team. We build all of our own technology, so we have a bunch of engineers and product managers and designers and stuff like that. We've hired all different types of people across all different disciplines, and we really in‑house most things except for the actual production of the items. We have a network of different suppliers that we work with.​

Jena Dunay: Yeah, that's incredible. So about 120 to 130 people that you guys have working for you now. I heard you say New Jersey is a centralized location for the warehouse. But where are the rest of the corporate folks or the software engineers? Do you guys have a headquarters, are you remote? Walk me through that.​

Michael Martocci: At one point we had people in 30 different states. I think today it is still a lot, maybe 15 or 20. We were all in person in New Jersey for the first three or four years, up until 2020 when COVID started. We were all in New Jersey; it was a warehouse–office hybrid building. It was this old building that looked like a fire station but was not; it was brick with red garage doors. It was a photo studio they used to use for commercials. They made a Papa John's commercial in there. There was a kitchen when we first got there, and upstairs they had showers built in because they were doing SoulCycle commercials and they needed the models to take showers and stuff. It was a very cool building and we loved going there.​

We had some people from New York City that would reverse‑commute. It was right by Hoboken, right across the water. It was a fun vibe and a good spot. But at the same time as COVID was happening, we were growing like crazy and it was too hard to be constrained to just that area to hire people, especially because it was hard to hire people during that time. So we had to open the aperture and be willing to hire elsewhere. I also moved down to Miami for those years. We put up an office there too, started hiring people in Miami, and we still have people on the team from Miami; we just do not have the physical space anymore.​

We were split between New York and Florida, but we started hiring people in Ohio and California and Seattle and Texas, so we have people all over. We also have engineers overseas. We've hired a lot of people in India. Our CTO is from India originally but lives in New Jersey; he is back and forth there every few months, he goes there and hires people on the ground. We've got about 15 people there. We've got people in Central America like Colombia and some other areas in the islands; we had somebody in Barbados at one point. I just think that there is great talent everywhere.​

If you have a way to find people, everybody deserves a shot. I'm not, “You have to have this degree” or “You have to have this experience.” I care more about first principles: is this person ambitious, do they think for themselves, are they highly intellectual? So we've hired people all over the world.​

Jena Dunay: Yeah, how does that, so it sounds like that's part of your talent strategy, right? You're kind of location‑agnostic as long as they have some of those qualities you're talking about. As a founder and CEO of a company that's growing and continuing to grow, how do you think about culture? What's your culture strategy when building a culture?​

Michael Martocci: Like you said, it has evolved a lot over time. I think at the root of it, it is: hire the best people possible and set them up for success. If you are really deliberate about the people that you hire, a lot of the rest falls into place. You do not need to have all this scaffolding and regulation and rules to make the company work right. You have to be very specific about the values and the type of people you are trying to get in the door.​

Do they really care about what we are doing? Are they missionary‑driven people, not just here because it is a job, but with a greater connection to what we are doing? Are they very curious, constantly digging in and trying to learn more and asking the “why” questions? Are they listening to podcasts and reading? They have this intrinsic motivation to want to do great work all the time. Do they work well with people, are they collaborative, are they good communicators? These are the fundamental tenets required to do great work. If you are deliberate about finding those people, they can go be stewards of that culture every single day.​

You do not have to worry about micromanaging. Nobody wants to work in an environment where you hire talented people and then you hold them down or tell them how to do their work. I try to be the opposite of that as much as possible. I do not want to be involved in all the details. I want to find great people that care about what they do and let them run with it, and I give them insights and help get blocks out of their way. It is really being deliberate about people, realizing that greatness can come from anywhere, and not being egotistical about backgrounds. People can start in our warehouse and become a software engineer. We just care about the person, what ideas they bring to the table, and how they get work done. It is very much: who cares about the rest of the world, what do we see and what is this person capable of? Then we try to build an environment where people realize that is available to them so that everybody strives to do the best work possible.​

Jena Dunay: Yeah, it sounds like there is an unleashing that happens. In a lot of organizations, if you go to work there, there are constraints almost. I'll give myself as an example: I worked for an organization, and I felt like I was a thoroughbred racehorse being pulled back. Somebody just let me run. It sounds to me like once you find the right people, you let them run.​

Michael Martocci: Yeah, as long as you put the work in upfront to find the right people. If you are going to be lazy about finding the right people, just hire whoever, then you cannot give that level of autonomy because you do not know. But if you spend a little more time upfront and get to know people, then you can trust that if we did our job right on the front end, they can go run in this culture. Nobody wants to be held back like that. It is a very oppressive feeling to be in a company where they do not trust you or give you the reins to make decisions, or you have to run everything through multiple layers of hierarchy and bureaucracy.​

The other thing is creating an environment where people are not so worried about making decisions. In larger organizations, if you are spending meeting after meeting hypothesizing about what you should or should not do, you are in a very defensive world of “we do not want to make a mistake.” I would much rather see people make lots of decisions quickly and then go see what happened. By the time you get it wrong three times and fix it, other people are still talking about what they might do someday. Then you have a culture where nobody wants to do anything or take a risk. It is not about whether you got it right or wrong, it is about whether you did it, whether you learned from it, and whether you can keep evolving. Speed is really important. The hardest thing as you get bigger is: how do you keep having a culture where speed is rewarded and failure is rewarded so that you can learn quickly? As you have more people, you get more people in conversations and it becomes committee‑driven and risk‑averse.​

Jena Dunay: Yeah, how are you combating that as you guys have grown? And it is okay if the answer is, “Don't know, we are still trying to figure it out.”​

Michael Martocci: It is hard because it is human nature. If you do a good job and you have the right people, they are going to be less likely to fall into that trap. You have to give them the space to let them know this is the type of culture we have and make it okay, so they go out in their own meetings and bring, “This is how Michael runs, this is the culture we have.” When you hear people talk about “the SwagUp way,” I think that is a really good sign that they are trying to shepherd the original vision and culture we've had. But it is not easy, especially once you start to introduce, say, an acquisition. You have people of a different ilk and culture, and maybe those are not in sync. If you are in a meeting with them, that might not be how they make decisions. So you really have to actively push against it.​

The sign of a great culture is that it shows up strong in all these different ways. Not to say that we have an ironclad culture, but most of the people here understand the way we try to work and try to defend it.​

Jena Dunay: Yeah. Can you go back for me, because I think this is helpful for people that are listening who are like, “Wow, I like this guy, this seems like a really interesting place to work, I like this idea of being unleashed.” You mentioned you have to make sure you do the work upfront to get the right people. What does that work look like for you and your team as you are in the recruiting process to decide if somebody is a good fit or not? How do you guys think about that? It is also helpful for talent acquisition leaders that are listening.​

Michael Martocci: I think first it starts with: what are we looking for, what does success look like in the role? There is a lot of haphazard hiring that is just, “We just need people.” You say, “Yeah, we are going to call it this, and we just need that person,” but you have not really thought through what you actually need. What is the root problem we are trying to solve here? Okay, this is the root problem; then we need people with these types of skill sets. Then we need to make it clear, when we are advertising to them or talking to them, that this is what we need, this is what success looks like, and these are the skills required.​

If you do that work upfront, you are in a much better spot to attract the right people and to be honest and transparent about what is needed and the problems you are facing. You are not trying to sell somebody; you are trying to get the right person for the job. Obviously there is a point where you might need to sell because they are great talent and you have to convince them, but the initial part should not be about selling them with “this is the greatest company” and all that. It should be, “These are the problems we are trying to solve. Are you excited about these problems? Have you solved these types of problems before? Great, then let us talk.”​

Then you have to take it a step further. Sometimes this is polarizing, but a case study just helps. I need to know that you can think through this the right way. These are the real problems you are going to be facing; this is what is happening in the business every day, what do you think about it? Walk me through your thought process. We've filtered out many people we thought were really good in a talking conversation, because there are a lot of people that are fun to talk to, and you get this belief they are probably good at the job. It does not always correlate to being good at the job. So you have to put that in front of them and see how they react. That is going to be the best thing you can see, alongside past success you can look at and references from people that worked with them.​

Hiring well is hard and requires a disciplined process and being willing to say no many more times than you say yes. These are all hard‑fought lessons. We were very undisciplined, we did not have a process, we overhired. It is not good for the person either. You do not want to hire someone and then in six months they are not a fit and you have to get rid of them. You are better off trying to get it right up front for everyone's sake.​

Jena Dunay: Yeah. We have a recruiting arm to our business, and we had a client where they basically just wanted to show only the shiny parts, in an unhealthy way for the candidate. The candidate, which I knew was going to happen, ended up leaving in six months because they did not want to share one crucial bit of information, which we only have so much control over, but it really hurt the individual and the organization long‑term because they were not willing to be honest. I used to joke that I do not think job descriptions should be written by HR people; I think they should be written by copywriters.​ Copywriters know how to write for the specific person and repel everybody else. Those are the people that need to be writing job descriptions, because they are going to get much closer to attracting the ideal person with all of the good stuff and the bad stuff.​

Michael Martocci: From a culture standpoint, one of the related things is we just try to be human as much as possible. Even if you are writing a job description, it should feel very conversational, like I am talking to you on the other side. It should feel like, “Yes, I understand, of course, I remember that part too.” It should not be corporate speak or some white paper; it should be emotional and empathetic and draw people to your company as a very specific thing they feel deeply connected to.​

Jena Dunay: Yeah, I totally agree. It sounds like your team does a lot of upfront work to think through: who is our ideal person, what problems are they going to solve, which I also think is helpful for a job seeker to think through. We always recommend that job seekers think through what problems they solve so they can share that with an employer versus, “Here is my laundry list of accomplishments.” That only goes so far. If you do not know how to solve problems, they are not hiring for their health; they are hiring you to solve a problem, so you should know what problems you are good at solving.​

Michael Martocci: The thing you want to look for in talent is some sort of deep accomplishment, deep levels of accomplishment. It means they have gone far in something meaningful. It does not need to be in a job; it could be anything. They took something very seriously and were disciplined enough to become world‑class in it. That is much more indicative of success in any field than that they worked at a company that is similar.​

There are a bunch of people who worked at software companies or swag companies. I would much rather hire the farmer who created a new way of getting better yields and did something nobody else has done before, because they are going to come into this environment and do the same thing, because they are just that type of person. So we care a lot more about the tenets of the person and their character and the type of work they get done, versus the exact things they did. I do not care that you worked at a swag company; we usually do not hire people who worked at swag companies. We want people with high standards who go into things that are hard in general.​

Jena Dunay: Yeah. Michael, you and I are on the same wavelength on a lot of those things. We think very similarly about that, which is not always common for founders or people leaders. As you guys have grown and you are thinking about, you mentioned that you got acquired recently within the past year or so, how has that transition gone for you as you are trying to meld two cultures together? How has that gone for you?​

Michael Martocci: It is really tough. You hear it all the time: most founders leave their companies when they get acquired because it is so different from the company they built. Business is hard enough to run on your own, and then to do it where you also have to deal with another vector of complexity, processes and people and bureaucracy, or just learning about each other and your differences, it is not easy.​

I am playing more of a role of trying to mediate for a lot of our leaders, helping them be successful. What do they need out of the larger organization, how do they need to be communicated with, and bringing this feedback back to the larger company? For the larger company, as they think about future acquisitions, I am trying to be helpful too in how to think about those things: what do you think about in terms of the people on the other side and how to integrate businesses well and set everyone up for success so each side is better off?​

In areas where I think the larger organization is going to be value‑add, purchasing power or some infrastructure and capability we can leverage, I am all for it. Let us jump on that. But do not integrate just for integration’s sake. “You need to be on this system just because,” or “We want this person to manage this person just because,” or “We set up our teams this way, so you need to set up your teams this way.” Everything needs to be from first principles: what is the best way to do it? It does not mean you integrate everything.​

So I am just trying to navigate those things. A hammer sees everything as a nail sometimes. You have to bifurcate: these things, yes, let us do that; these things, maybe not. It is more nuanced than that. Our business is different, and I am trying to protect those areas.​

Jena Dunay: Yeah, that is good. I mean, it is hard making those transitions. I have had friends who sold their companies and, to your point, a lot of them have a certain timeline where they are like, “Okay, I gotta get out of here.” I love hearing how you are thinking through it logically: do we need to integrate in this way, how do I make sure our team is taken care of in the process, it sounds like.​

Michael Martocci: The reality is, it is just the way I am: I am never going to sugarcoat it for our team to create this veil that everything is amazing and I love all the decisions we are making. I am always going to tell them how I feel and try to advocate for the best outcome. I think that is what our team really appreciates about our culture and how I work with them. I am going to be honest and try to make things the best situations we can.​ It goes two ways. I am also very honest with the acquiring company: “Hey, this is what people are saying, this is what we need, we are not just going to sit back and accept different things.”​

Jena Dunay: Yeah, that is good. If someone is listening to this and thinks, “This seems like a really cool company to work for, I'm excited about the next phase of the organization,” if they are an A‑player with that curiosity you are talking about, hungry and driven, what makes you guys a great company to work for? Why do you think those A‑players want to come work for SwagUp?​

Michael Martocci: In general, it is giving those people a lot of responsibility in a way that maybe they do not “deserve” at other companies. I do not care how old you are, where you went to school, any of that. I do not even care what you did a month before you started here; you could have been scooping ice cream. But if you have the raw determination and skill set to go tackle this problem, and you raise your hand with confidence, “I want to take this on,” I do not know many companies, there are some but not a ton, that will say, “Sure, you have got it, go for it, and I will be there to support you, here is all the knowledge you need, happy to give you mentors and training, but go for it.”​

I think that is very liberating because there are a lot of really talented people stuck inside organizations that do not allow them to reach their potential. If you are one of those people sitting in an organization thinking, “I wish people would listen to me,” then come look at what we have and reach out to me. Most talented people do not find themselves stuck in those situations for that long because they are so determined they eventually leave, because they know their worth, but that is not everybody's situation. We are willing to bet on people a lot earlier than most.​

Jena Dunay: Yeah, that is good. Tell us about what growth looks like or what SwagUp's goals are for the next 12 to 18 months. Where are you guys headed and what does hiring potentially look like over those next 12 to 18 months?​

Michael Martocci: The whole reason we did the acquisition is because we wanted the resources and infrastructure to focus on growth, not survival. We were pretty much a bootstrap business for much of our history, and it is not a massively high‑margin industry. It is not 90% software margins; you have physical goods, some inventory, a lot of staff, a fulfillment center. To do that at the scale we've done it without real capital means every month is kind of month‑to‑month, based on the sales you are getting in and cash flows.​

We were in that state for over seven years, where you never know what the future is going to look like, and it is very hard to think out further than six months. We did this move because we wanted to be in a position where we can think longer‑term, give our team stability, and start to really invest in the marketing and brand side, which is a little less clear. You do not know for sure if you spend this, you get that money back right away, so we were always more hesitant about that.​

We really want to go heavily aggressive on the customer‑acquisition side over the coming years, and we've already started. We spent the last six months building out the marketing team, with a new marketing leader, and scaling budgets. We've doubled the amount of new customers we are bringing in in a given month over the last few months, and we want to double that again over the next four to six months. We really want to get the brand out there in a bigger way: events, conferences, more ad spend across digital channels. If you can get the new‑business flywheel going, your account base grows. We have a pretty predictable level of repeat orders from existing customers once we get them in; it is really how quickly you can get the top of the funnel flowing and new business in the door. So there are a lot of investments around that, and it is not just marketing: it is the product and the experience when you go into the platform, the onboarding, how you get people to refer other business in, and all that.​

Jena Dunay: Yeah, which I can say is really easy to use. As somebody who has been in your platform, it is easy to use and makes it a lot easier than the typical, as you mentioned at the very beginning of our conversation, the mom‑and‑pop shop down the street. I'm like, I do not have time for that. So I love that. What does hiring look like over those next 12 to 18 months? Where do you think you might be hiring, and where are you hiring now, so people who are listening can check out your careers page?​

Michael Martocci: There are two sides to hiring. There is the necessary hiring based on scale, what you need to support the volume. That is in the warehouse, the people who deal with vendors and purchase orders, the sales reps, the BDRs who do initial intake meetings. All of those have to scale with revenue. If we are doing our job on the new‑business side, we are going to be hiring, say, four to six more account executives, two to four more purchase‑order specialists, and other roles.​

Then there are the roles that are more investments in the future, almost like CapEx. We are building out technology in hopes these things will happen, or marketers for new channels and opportunities we were not doing. So we will be hiring on the product and engineering side. We just hired our first ever engineering manager. We've always had our CTO, but never that middle layer, engineering management, product managers, all over the place. I would say in the next six months, maybe eight to ten roles, and then the rest will depend on how fast we grow.​

Jena Dunay: Awesome. Well, Michael, I love what you guys are doing. Thank you so much for joining us and sharing a little bit about SwagUp's culture, the way that you envision it, and the growth you are experiencing. I appreciate your transparency. You are a really cool company, and I love what you guys are doing. I'm excited to share this with people who have the qualities that you are looking for and hopefully get you some people in the door. So thanks for joining us.​

Michael Martocci: Awesome, Jena.​