Startup employees will know: Swag can be a nightmare.
Say you buy T-shirts, reusable straws and stickers to give away to potential clients at a conference. There's so much room for error. You might overestimate the number of XL shirts you need and end up with dozens left over by the end of the day. A vendor might make a mistake branding straws or stickers, leaving you with 1,000 metal straws that you can no longer use.
Alyce, a startup based in Boston's Financial District, wants to change all that.
The company is rethinking corporate swag. To founder and CEO Greg Segall, most swag is meaningless—not only does it result in plenty of waste, but it is also difficult to track whether it actually advances the goal of getting a potential client interested in your company or product.
"When I go to a table right now, people just buy boatloads of inventory, and they always have a closet of crap that they don't want—it's a huge sink," Segall said. "[As a customer,] you like swag if you have a brand affinity and the thing is actually utilizable. That's it."
To end this waste, Alyce is instead trying to hone in on what it calls "mass personalization." The startup has created a corporate gifting software platform that uses AI to help identify the "perfect gift" by analyzing the recipient’s social media accounts and other publicly available data. By looking at text and images from these sources, the AI can pick up on behaviors to determine gift preferences.
To give a gift via Alyce, users can either send a code to be redeemed for a specific item on Alyce's online marketplace, or they can give an actual, physical gift, typically a box made of cedar wood and recyclable materials. Many of the boxes incorporate artworks from one of Alyce's two nonprofit partners, Artists For Humanity and ArtLifting, which both work with local artists. All proceeds from the artwork go back to the individual artists.
"The outside packaging is fully recyclable, we're always thinking about the types of inks we're using, we use pull tabs to avoid using tape," Segall said. "It's that kind of level of detail that we're trying to go to, to be able to make sure that every single thing that we're doing is this as sustainable as possible. People can also just email the code so you don't have to even use a piece of paper."
If someone tries to gift me, for example, a backpack using Alyce, I have several options: I can accept the backpack, decline it and choose another gift from Alyce's online marketplace, or decline it in favor of donating to a charity in Alyce's list. Currently, the options include the top Charity Navigator-ranked organizations, but Alyce's team plans to expand the list to include other 501(c)(3) nonprofits as well.
Alyce now works with some 60 companies, most of them upper-middle-market enterprise companies, Segall said. Adobe, Lenovo, Fuze and a division of Google are just a handful of its current clients.
In addition to its marketplace, Alyce also has a program it calls "swagback." If your startup is one of the money that has unwanted T-shirts or straws left over, Alyce will take those off your hands in exchange for credit that can be used on its marketplace.
"Many, many companies go very, very wide in the beginning of their journeys," Segall said. "We're going super deep in now."
Segall is wary of spreading himself too thin—and getting sidetracked from Alyce's core mission. A veteran of the startup world, Segall founded and led two companies before Alyce: One Pica, which was acquired in 2012, and See Fit.
This year, Alyce is on track to grow by 1,200 percent. It has gone from a small, scrappy team to a workforce of more than 120 people; by year's end, Segall estimates Alyce will have 150 employees. Much of that growth is fueled by an $11.5 million Series A round the startup closed in June led by Manifest with participation from General Catalyst, Boston Seed Capital, Golden Ventures, Morningside and Victress Capital. Alyce had previously closed a $5.3 million seed round in October 2017.
Over the next nine months, Segall said Alyce plans to focus on marketing and sales, focusing first on trade shows and expanding from there.
"I wanted something that focused on sustainability and also social mission, so being able to give back," Segall said. "We figured out a business model that was super unique, especially in the e-commerce realm, that would allow us to have the entire business built around that. Without having to say, 'We're coming up with a program to give back,' it's like, literally, our entire business model is built into that."
