By Abhishek Agarwal, CMO, DesignNBuy
Ask any CMO what their biggest operational headache is, and they will probably say something about pipeline, attribution, or team bandwidth. Very few will say branded merchandise.
But they should.
The global promotional products market sits at $26.55 billion in 2025 and is projected to grow to nearly $37 billion by 2033. Companies are spending more on branded swag than ever. And yet the internal process behind most branded merchandise programs looks exactly the same as it did 15 years ago — chaotic, manual, and eating up marketing team time that should be going elsewhere.
I have worked with hundreds of marketing and operations teams in print businesses through my work at DesignNBuy Web to Print. The mess I see is almost always the same. Sales needs branded polos before a client visit next week. HR wants onboarding kits for 30 new hires next month. A regional office wants to reorder the event banner they lost. Ea`ch request lands in a different inbox, goes through a different person, and somehow ends up on a marketing coordinator’s plate who already has too much to do.
The result:
- Brand inconsistency across teams and regions
- Budget leakage from duplicate and untracked orders
- Marketing team bandwidth wasted on logistics instead of growth
This is not a small problem. It is a structural one. And most CMOs have not found the fix yet.
Why the Old Way Keeps Breaking Down
The core issue is how companies categorise branded merchandise. Most treat it as a procurement task. Someone needs something, they request it, someone else sources it and orders it. Repeat indefinitely.
When there is no central system in place, here is what typically happens:
Brand standards slip. Different teams order from whoever is cheapest or most convenient. You end up with four different shades of your brand blue across markets and events, and nobody catches it until it is too late.
Costs balloon. Without a centralised process, you lose volume pricing, duplicate orders happen regularly, and you accumulate unused inventory that nobody planned for. Finance starts asking questions marketing cannot answer cleanly.
Marketing becomes the bottleneck. Every one-off request from sales, HR, or a regional office lands on a marketing coordinator’s to-do list. These are tasks that do not move the needle on pipeline or revenue, but they consume hours every week.
The data backs this up. 73% of workers say company branded products boost their sense of belonging and pride. 88% of people research a company after receiving branded merchandise. The potential value is real. But most companies are losing it to a broken internal process.
The Fix: Building a Self-Serve Branded Merchandise Portal
The solution has existed inside the print and packaging industry for years. It is called a company store or a branded merchandise portal — built on what the industry calls web-to-print technology.
Here is how it works in practice:
- Marketing builds a self-serve online storefront where approved teams can browse, personalise, and order branded products
- Every product is pre-configured with approved logos, colours, and design options — so nobody can go off-brand
- Pricing is fixed, approvals are automated, and orders go directly to production and fulfilment
- The marketing team sets it up once. After that, the system runs itself.
The result is that brand consistency goes up, manual overhead goes down, and costs become predictable because centralised ordering unlocks volume pricing and removes duplicate spend.
The swag management platform market, which powers this infrastructure, is currently valued at $835 million and growing at 8.5% annually. That growth is being driven by exactly this shift: companies moving from reactive, manual swag management to proactive, self-serve infrastructure.
What Leading Marketing Teams Are Doing Differently
The most effective marketing operations teams are not just fixing the ordering process. They are integrating branded merchandise into their broader go-to-market strategy.
Here is what that looks like in practice:
Field sales enablement. Regional sales teams can order locally relevant branded collateral on demand, without going through headquarters. Reps get what they need fast, and marketing does not have to be involved in every transaction.
Client gifting at key pipeline moments. Account managers can send personalised branded products directly to prospects at critical stages in the sales cycle. 85% of people say they are more likely to choose a brand after receiving a useful promotional item. This kind of touchpoint, executed consistently, has real commercial impact.
Event kits on demand. Regional teams can order pre-branded event collateral whenever they need it, without pulling in the central marketing team. Everything is print-ready and within brand standards before it ever gets ordered.
Budget visibility for finance. By connecting merchandise portals to existing approval and procurement workflows, marketing finally has a clean audit trail. Finance gets visibility, compliance is built in, and there are no more surprise invoices at the end of the quarter.
How to Get Started Without Overhauling Everything
You do not need to replace every merchandise process at once. Here is a practical way to start:
Step 1: Map the current mess. Spend one month tracking every branded merchandise request that touches your team. Who is asking, what they need, how long it takes to fulfil, and what it costs. Most marketing leaders are surprised by how much time is being absorbed and how inconsistent the results are.
Step 2: Define your brand guardrails. What products do you want to standardise? What design options are acceptable? What should teams never be able to change? These decisions become the rules your company store enforces automatically.
Step 3: Pick one high-friction use case and build for that first. The best candidates are usually employee onboarding kits or event collateral. These are high-volume, high-frequency, and currently managed manually. Build a self-serve portal for that one thing, prove the model, then expand.
Modern platforms like DesignNBuy make it possible to launch a branded merchandise portal without custom development, connecting directly to your existing eCommerce setup or running as a standalone company store. The barrier to starting is lower than most CMOs expect.
The Reframe That Changes Everything
Branded merchandise is not a procurement line item. It is a brand distribution channel.
And like every other distribution channel your team manages, it deserves proper infrastructure behind it.
The CMOs who get this right are treating their company store the same way they treat their website or email programme: as a system that needs to be built properly, governed clearly, and improved over time. They are not managing swag. They are managing a scalable, consistent brand experience that shows up at every moment that matters.
The ones still doing it manually are paying the hidden cost. In budget overruns, brand inconsistency, and marketing team hours that should be going somewhere else.
The fix is not complicated. But it does require treating the problem as infrastructure, not admin.
Abhishek Agarwal is the CMO of DesignNBuy, a web-to-print platform that helps enterprise marketing teams and print businesses build self-serve branded merchandise portals and product personalisation experiences. DesignNBuy works with over 2,000 businesses across 80 countries.
