Objective

Build a self-service swag management system for enterprise customers spending $10K+ annually, enabling global distribution at their preferred pace and scale. Achieve this through backend integrations with Swag.com and Printfection, and enhancements to Custom Ink’s e-commerce funnel within 12 months. Drive growth across acquisition, activation, engagement, and retention through new fulfillment and subscription offerings.

Key Results

Acquisition:‍

Increase marketing exposure for Custom Ink's swag management solution—tailored for enterprise customers with complex ordering needs—on Custom Ink's website. Generate sales contacts and drive visiting traffic through the e-commerce funnel to build orders.‍

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Activation:‍

Increase cart additions of multiple designs across categories (apparel and promotional products) that have high value—either expensive blank items like backpacks or large quantities of 50 or more. The successor of activation includes views of the "Learn more" about the option to store and distribute products from inventory (i.e., "Store with us, ship over time"), as well as selecting "Ship to multiple addresses" as the shipping option (in which Custom Ink will distribute orders to recipients as soon as the print is ready).

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Conversion:

Convert customers who place bulk orders through the e-commerce funnel to ship their orders to Custom Ink's warehouse (including both self-service and chat-assisted orders).‍

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Engagement:‍
Help customers distribute their first order from inventory to one or multiple addresses within a 28-day window from the purchase date. This minimizes operational costs by avoiding additional storage fees and ensures the fastest delivery time (i.e., time-to-door) and a satisfying unboxing experience.

Signals

📈 Increased monthly sales on bulk orders attributed to the site channel, with shipping destination set as “Ship to warehouse”, classified under the new order type “inventory orders.”
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📦 Monthly distributed orders from total “ready for distribution orders”, segmented by “to one address” and “to multiple addresses.”
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🛒 Improved cart conversion rate for orders containing multiple items (e.g., a hat and a backpack), segmented by bulk orders and inventory orders.
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💰 Additional revenue gains from inventory orders using branded swag boxes.

Outcome

Grew monthly sales from $0 to $377K in inventory orders within 3 months of release, generating $1.56M in annual sales.

Problem Statement

For the past 23 years, Custom Ink has relied on an e-commerce funnel as its primary sales channel, taking customers' print orders for custom apparel. This point solution has fallen behind competitors in fast-growing markets ($25B in promotional products, $150B in corporate gifting) due to service limitations in storage, distribution, shared accounts, and replenishment automation. These limitations have resulted in unmet needs from enterprise customers like Netflix, Google, Salesforce, Gusto, and Box, and forced Custom Ink to spend over $30M acquiring platforms like swag.com and Printfection to keep up with the market.

Research Insights

Market research reveals a strong correlation between revenue and annual swag spend among enterprise customers, with swag spending typically ranging from 0.01% to 0.5% of revenue. High-market customers like Zendesk, with $1.3B in revenue, spend $1.1M (0.08%) on swag. Similarly, mid-market customers like Gusto, with $200M in revenue, allocate $441K (0.2%) to swag. Enterprise customers commonly use swag for welcome kits, employee rewards, customer appreciation, and events. Their print orders typically combine custom apparel (hats, shirts) and promotional products (backpacks, pens, and tumblers), exemplified by both sample and recurring orders. This indicates that Custom Ink needed to bridge gaps in its swag experience with integrated platforms to effectively gain market share in promotional and corporate gifting markets.

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Competitive Analysis

Compared to other promotional distributors like 4imprint, swag.com and Walmart, Custom Ink has a free and easy-to-use "Design Lab" service embedded in their e-commerce funnel that effectively attracts customers and converts on sales. It offers a variety of decoration methods, clip art, and color matching options that enable customers to create custom swag showcasing their brand's quality and uniqueness. There is high potential to expand existing customer behaviors around order building to serve new use cases like gifting.

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Growth Levers

Acquisition lever:

Bulk discount - Customers who buy 6 or more items (across categories) can enjoy tier-based pricing discounts. This makes "buy now, distribute later" more enticing than placing orders every quarter, which take longer and cost more.

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Engagement lever:

Shared inventory: Customers from different departments in the same organization often share and reuse swag. For example, unused swag from conference events gets repurposed for employee welcome kits. Through integration with swag.com's roles and permissions system, each existing Custom Ink account can intuitively trigger network effects for one user to invite more users.

Design Strategy

I led 3 designers from Custom Ink & Printfection to define a phased approach that delivers value across the customer journey. Phase 1: Enable bulk discounts & storage options at the point of initial buying intent (quoting sizes & quantities in Design Lab & Cart). Provide cost forecasts & estimated timelines before checkout for transparent pricing and ensuring high customer confidence. Phase 2: Guide customers to activate distribution capabilities post-order with streamlined account workflows, enabling first distribution events and making last-minute actions compatible within print & delivery timelines. Phase 3: Introduce swag box offerings through a new marketing page to capture interest, add upsell kitting options in Cart to convert orders, and explore one-step Checkout leading to subscriptions.

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Features

Inventory Activation & Post-purchase Redirection to Account
Distribute Swag from Account & Replenish Inventory
Fee Calculator
Build a Swag Box & Distribute Boxes from Account
CI Pro Subscription

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Experiment Plan

A/B testing for mid-funnel user activation in Lab

A/B testing for end-funnel cart conversion

Iterations for site navigation to showcase Swag Boxes in Solutions

Roadmap

Given that this initiative spanned multiple organizations post-acquisition, clarifying ownership, establishing working styles, and consolidating tools became crucial to our success. I collaborated with product leadership (Head of Product and several ICs) to break down projects on a quarterly timeline, and partnered with engineering teams (Head of Engineering and FE/BE teams from swag.com and printfection.com) to align sprint planning boards. My key achievement from this process was working with UX leadership to integrate UX projects across multiple product boards, consolidating our workflow from Trello and Jira into a single platform on monday.com.

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Risks & Tradeoffs

With only three quarters to accomplish what had previously taken 23 years, pre-market customer research and experiments were limited. Though I conducted unmoderated studies through Maze & User Testing for discovery and validation, plus focus-group interviews with early adopters for iteration insights, the research depth could have been greater. This would have allowed me to focus more on crafting the experience rather than juggling multiple responsibilities.

Custom Ink Swag Management

Objective

Key Results

Signals

Outcome

Problem Statement

Research Insights

Competitive Analysis

Growth Levers

Design Strategy

Features

Experiment Plan

Roadmap

Risks & Tradeoffs