Living about 3,000 miles from the Valley in a small east coast college town, as I do, I rarely get a chance to score any fun schwag from the web sites I love to use and write about. Many geeks across the world are in a similar situation: we want our share of schwag, but we just don’t have access. It was with that in mind that last year saw the launch of ValleySchwag, a company that collected free stuff from companies (t-shirts, stickers, pens, buttons, and some stuff I have yet to identify), packaged it all up, and sent it out to web 2.0-heads worldwide for $15/month.
Unfortunately, ValleySchwag’s model wasn’t sustainable and it was just too much work to pull together that much quality promotional material each month. After about four shipments, VS moved away from the subscription model to a traditional shop, but without the cachet of not knowing what was coming, the service lost appeal and eventually closed up shop. Enter
, a new schwag distribution hub from Chicago that launches today with a slightly different model.
Startup Schwag more or less emulates ValleySchwag in terms of distribution: $14.95/month gets you a surprise web 2.0 company t-shirt (and possibly other promo materials). Where it differs is that instead of gathering schwag from companies, founder Roddy Richards will license logos from various startups and print schwag himself specifically for each mailing.
According to Richards, this will allow him to scale the service up without putting a strain on resources, and let him make sure mailings go out monthly (something that ValleySchwag had a lot of trouble with). “I see where VS made mistakes and IÄôve made some changes so that weÄôre not going to end up naked and schwagless ever again,” he wrote on the Startup Schwag website.
By only printing the shirts he has orders for, and by not expending energy tracking down schwag, Richards may have an easier time keeping the service on track, but it remains to be seen whether “licensed” schwag is as appealing as the real thing. Shipments of t-shirts will start going on in mid-October.
Via TechCrunch.
