How to Create a Successful Corporate Online Merch Store

Everyone at some point thinks about starting an online branded merch store for their company at some point but comes to a point where they get stumped! The idea sounds fantastic, especially as you think about the brand awareness that comes with it and how easy it would be for both employees and clients to use, but getting it started can be some heavy lifting! Where do you start? How do you get the merchandise? Who designs the items? And suddenly, the idea of starting a corporate merch store just gets kicked back into the backlog. But it doesn’t have to and with some tips from this article hopefully, you and your team can feel empowered to say it’s not that bad! 

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Why You Should Start a Corporate Merch Store  

Let’s start with the “why” you should actually move forward with starting an online swag store. While yes, creating an online corporate store will help with brand awareness and create some excitement throughout the company and clients, it doesn’t mean it’s a strategy for everyone. 

If your company is small and just getting started, creating an online store can be a lot of work and you may not see the full benefits of creating one. If you are planning to really create a “brand” and your company is a DTC brand that naturally fits what you are trying to do, then yes go for it! If your business is solely B2B and still doesn’t have the brand recognition for people who actually want to buy it and don’t have a large team yet, you are probably better off buying branded swag directly and ditching the store idea for now. 

If your company is growing fast and you're quickly approaching 200 plus employees with plans to see that double, an online merch store would work best! You would be able to buy items in bulk if needed and actually have the demand for it. The worst thing you can do is buy a bunch of branded merch and have it sit. So having volume to support an online store is needed to be really successful. 

So while you are thinking about why you should start one, consider who you are doing this merch store for? Is it for clients, employees, promotions, or for sales teams? Starting an online store has a ton of benefits such as ease of getting your brand into your customer's hands, raising brand awareness, and you can really get creative with marketing campaigns and culture-building once you have one created. Having an online store, is one of those things that once you have one step up your mind will go wild thinking about fun ways to promote it. The sky is the limit and there are a ton of apps out there to help make the experience even better. 

How To Get Started 

Think about the main purpose of your corporate merch store. Is it for employees, clients, or your sales team? Will it be open to the public or private for internal use only? Understanding your goals for the online store will help navigate you to the right tools and apps you will need to make this a hit! Also, consider if this store is meant to generate revenue or simply break even. Depending on your business your finance team might not want to declare another revenue line that is wildly different than what you already do. Getting an idea of how you want the financials to work can change how you go about an online store as well. 

Cool Ways to Use Your Corporate Online Store 

While starting a corporate online merch store, there are so many fun ways to get this set up! I’m sure once your team starts using it, the sky's the limit of what you want to use it for. Here are our favorite ideas we have seen customers use swag stores for:

New hire & Onboarding 

Sales Teams To Send Gifts To Clients 

Rewards & Anniversaries 

Customers & Loyalty Programs 

Employee Store With Points Towards Buying Swag 

If you are going to go through the effort of building out a corporate store, you might as well make the experience special. There are so many opportunities to really help with building your brand not just externally but within your company culture. Having branded swag is a great tool to create unity throughout your company. Especially with employees & clients being remote, having exposure to the brand is important. Without people being in the office they are not seeing the logo all the time, this is a great way to change that. 

Best Tools For Corporate Merch Store 

Now that you have your plans for what you want to do for your corporate swag store, here’s how to get you started! 

SwagUp Shops

Creating a store is now easier than ever. Shops will have their own tab right on the customer platform. Users will simply add their basic details such as store name, company name and upload an image. Similar to SwagUp Redeem Pages, the form will walk you through selecting from various themes and layouts and settings. From there it is super easy to select which products you’d like to sell, how you’d like those products to be displayed in your store, and how much you’d like to charge. 

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On top of hosting the shop itself, SwagUp completely owns all warehouse services of customer inventory. These services include inventory management, storage, fulfillment, quality control, drop shipping and worldwide logistics. 

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Psst: Get in touch with a Swag Expert to start building your custom corporate merch store!

Summary

At this point, you should be an expert at getting your company store up and running! Soon your brand will benefit from the awareness and exposure your team will get from having an online company swag store. Once you have one set up, trust us, you will be using it for more use cases than you originally thought!

To recap:

• Think about your company size and brand stage, it’s not for everyone 
• Map out your use cases and the main goal of the store 
• Make the experience special and unique 
• Get tools that align with what you are trying to do 

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