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Soft launch. Reid Hoffman

Z-Swag
About

We’re obsessed with swag.
But not just any swag. Your swag.

Inside this story

10-minute read · 5 chapters

Our history

From an $800 idea to a global merch studio.

Five eras. Fourteen chapters. Scroll the page top to bottom for the arc; scroll each era left to right for the details.

Era 01

Origins.

Around 2000 · 1 chapter

Madison & Pulaski. Ten years old. The corner was the classroom.

Madison & Pulaski corner, dad's restaurant, young Zee on the West Side

Age 10

Ten years old. First business.

Madison and Pulaski. West Side of Chicago. Zee's father had opened a fast-food restaurant on the corner, and Zee grew up inside the operation. By ten, he had a side business running outside the door: selling gum off the corner, and cigarettes when the block asked. The economics worked in third-grade math.

Era 02

The hustle.

2004 to 2009 · 5 chapters

High school nights, BPA weekends, Wrigley's on the W-2, eBay PowerSeller at 17.

BPA conference photo, Glenbrook South yearbook, young Zee in a suit

2004-2008

Glenbrook South. Business Professionals of America.

Glenbrook South sat in Glenview, a quiet North Shore suburb. Zee got there from the West Side. Varsity basketball senior year. Night shifts at the Hyatt. BPA competitions on the weekends. A side hustle running through all of it.

Wrigley HQ Chicago skyline, gum sample lineup, lab setting

Age 16

Wrigley's hired the gum hustler. Officially as a chewer.

Sixteen. Wrigley's, the actual gum company, paid Zee to be a taste-tester. Title on the W-2 might as well have said 'professional gum chewer.' You chew. They take notes. The pay was solid. The jaw was sore. The 10-year-old gum hustler ending up on Wrigley's payroll was not lost on anyone.

Phone headset, NuConcepts office or signage, scripts on a notepad

Telemarketer

Cold-calling for windows in Deerfield.

Also in high school: telemarketer for NuConcepts Window Company out of Deerfield, a north suburb of Chicago. Selling replacement windows over the phone, one rejection at a time, until somebody said yes. Land a hot prospect that would actually move forward and the office sprung for a pizza party. How exciting. The script changes. The discipline doesn't.

Vicky Whittaker's book cover, conference stage, signed copy

BPA Nationals

Met Vicky Whittaker.

BPA Nationals. A keynote that changed everything. Vicky was a self-made eBay PowerSeller who had written a book on how she actually did it. Zee bought the book that day. That book is the reason Z-Swag exists. (Thank you, Vicky.)

Bedroom-stockroom, eBay PowerSeller badge, early packing photos

2007-2009

PowerSeller status at 17.

The book worked. Within months, Zee was sourcing anything that would move on eBay, listing it, shipping it, and reinvesting every dollar. The bedroom in Glenview turned into a stockroom. The Hyatt paycheck kept the lights on.

Era 03

The foundation.

2008 to 2010 · 5 chapters

Triton on scholarship. Chef coats from a flea market. Mom on the ironing board.

Zee in chef whites, Triton campus, scholarship paperwork or graduation

2008

Full scholarship to Triton.

Triton College. Culinary arts and restaurant management. Hotel and restaurant management. Two associate degrees in three years (normally four), paid for entirely by scholarship.

Mom ironing chef coats, flea market scene, kitchen-table packing

2009

A classmate's idea. A flea market. Mom on the ironing board.

A classmate floated the idea: why don't we sell chef uniforms to our classmates? That weekend, Zee was at the Chicago flea market buying defective coats by the bag. His mom washed and ironed every one at home. The kitchen table was the warehouse. The garage was logistics.

Original flyer, clipboard with handwritten orders, chef coats in the trunk

2009-2010

Door-to-door. Two sample sizes. A clipboard.

The Triton bookstore charged $80 for a chef coat. Zee printed a flyer, walked into every classroom, brought two sample sizes for fit, and took the orders on paper. Delivered the following week for $25. The bookstore lost about 90% of their uniform business. Nobody warned them.

Juice bottles, MLM swag, the lingerie catalog spread

Side hustles

Juice. MLM. A lingerie catalog. All on the side.

While building the chef-coat operation at Triton, Zee was also: selling $100 bottles of juice through a multi-level network marketing setup (made it five deep), and working from a wholesale catalog of women's push-up bras, butt pads, and corsets. The lingerie business was not, in retrospect, very fruitful. If somebody handed you a catalog, you went to work.

Catalog spread, range of early products, growing inventory shelves

2009-2010

Chef uniforms. Aprons. Knife sets. Pastry sets. Then everything else.

The catalog grew in that exact order. Chef uniforms first. Then aprons. Then knife sets. Then pastry sets. Then everything else: t-shirts, pens, mugs, drinkware, full promotional product suite.

Era 04

The launch.

2010 to 2015 · 2 chapters

$800, six credit cards, a studio apartment, and a name on the door.

Original Z-Swag logo sketch, first invoice, founding day photo

June 2010

Z-Swag, officially.

$800 in savings. Six credit cards with modest limits. No investors. Zero outside money. A logo, a domain, a Chicago address, and the same playbook scaled up. Z-Swag was open for business.

Studio apartment piled with boxes, packing tape, hallway shipments

2010-2015

Hundreds of packages out of a studio apartment.

Downtown Chicago. A studio apartment that doubled as a warehouse. Hundreds of packages going out every week, stacked floor to ceiling, kicked into the hallway when the carrier showed up. The neighbors had opinions. The growth was real.

Era 05

Today.

2015 to present · 1 chapter

Million-SKU catalog. In-house warehouses. The same playbook, scaled.

Current Chicago warehouse, team photo, products on the press

Today

Million-SKU catalog. Multiple warehouses. Same playbook.

Today the catalog covers over a million products. A team runs decoration, kitting, warehousing, and fulfillment out of in-house facilities on both coasts. The platform handles inventory, instant shipping quotes, customs, and per-recipient tracking. Most agencies our size outsource that stack. We don't. Zee lives in Miami now with his wife and daughter, running the company alongside the people who built it with him. Every client is still treated like a friend, because most of them are.

Same scrappy. Same ironing board. Just a bigger warehouse.

The platform

We don’t just sell merch. We built the software that runs it.

Most agencies our size live on stitched-together SaaS: a CRM, a shipping aggregator, a separate customs broker, QuickBooks bolted on with rubber bands. At scale, that stack silently destroys quality. So we built our own.

The platform is proprietary. It runs every Z-Swag order end to end, from quote to label to invoice to recipient tracking. It’s the operational moat. It’s also the line item that turns a merch agency into a technology company.

Client portal

Real-time inventory, order tracking, per-recipient shipments, brand asset library, and a live quote queue. Clients and project managers work in the same system.

Instant shipping quotes

Domestic rates returned in seconds across UPS, FedEx, and USPS. One-click label-buy. Markup, insurance, and signature add-ons handled at the platform layer.

Customs pipeline

HTS codes, country-of-origin, declared value, and broker paperwork generated automatically for international shipments. No manual customs work per order.

Auto-invoicing

QuickBooks integration with payment links sent the moment a kit ships. Card and ACH supported. Avalara handles tax. Operations and accounting stay in sync.

Recipient tracking

Per-recipient tracking links, address validation, and lifecycle notifications. Built for B2B programs with hundreds of individual destinations.

Operations layer

Warehouse pick-pack, multi-box parcel splitting, billing state, internal review queues, and an admin audit trail. Every state transition logged.

What it replaces

The stack most agencies our size still buy.

  • A separate RFP-to-cash CRM
  • A third-party shipping-rate aggregator
  • Customs brokerage chasing for every international order
  • A QuickBooks integration project for every new client
  • Spreadsheets for recipient lists, address validation, and tracking
  • Manual reconciliation between operations and accounting

Built and operated in-house since 2018. Clients log in at login.zswag.com.

The team

Five functions. One company.

Zee built the first version of Z-Swag out of a studio apartment. The company that runs today is a team. These are the five functions that ship every order, build every system, and own every client relationship.

Operations

Decoration, kitting, warehousing, fulfillment.

In-house pick-pack across both coasts. Quality control on every run. The team that physically makes and ships every order.

Engineering

The platform that runs the business.

A continuous-deployment engineering team building the portal, the customs pipeline, the shipping engine, and the auto-invoicing layer. Production all day.

Design

Brand-to-product, end to end.

Creative leads who translate brand guidelines into garment, kit, and packaging. Every proof rendered before it ships. Color matching is the table stakes.

Client services

Real humans who answer in hours, not days.

Project managers and account leads who own the relationship. Most clients have one point of contact for the life of the program. Most relationships outlive the program.

Sourcing

A million-SKU catalog, curated.

Buyers and category leads who maintain vendor relationships across apparel, drinkware, tech accessories, and seasonal lines. The catalog is the asset.

We’re hiring.

Open roles across sales, design, and operations. See open roles.

Clients we’ve helped

Programs that outlive their first PO.

Most Z-Swag relationships are measured in years, not orders. These are companies that have trusted us with onboarding kits, recurring brand fulfillment, conference activations, and warehouse-and-ship programs at scale.

Meta

Meta

Global onboarding and event kits

Sony

Sony

Branded merchandise programs

Chick-fil-A

Chick-fil-A

Recurring brand fulfillment

Northwestern Mutual

Northwestern Mutual

Advisor recruitment and client gifting

Instagram

Instagram

Conference and team gear

MTV

MTV

Talent and campaign activations

LinkedIn

LinkedIn

Recipient-level recognition shipping

Dunkin'

Dunkin'

Field-marketing fulfillment

Also: AppSumo, Cricket Wireless, MaintainX, and dozens of growth-stage companies running monthly programs through the Z-Swag portal.

Specific scope, volumes, and outcomes are shared under NDA with qualified inbound. Ask for the case-studies packet.

What we believe

Two convictions. One culture.

On the work

Swag isn’t free stuff. It’s your brand made physical.

When you invest in your own products, your brand becomes real in ways it can’t be online. Color-matched. Hand-held. Worn. That weight is the point. We take it seriously because our clients do.

On the culture

Five letters. Internal operating manual since 2010.

Z-Swag operates on SPICE. It’s how the team hires, reviews, ships, and recovers. The acronym is real. The practice is daily.

Service

Punctual, reliable, follow-through.

Personal Accountability

An it’s-my-fault posture.

Initiative

Own your role. Move with urgency.

Communication

Tough conversations. Empathetic delivery.

Explore

Daily improvement. Outcomes over effort.

Work with us.

Start a projectSee open roles