How a Glasgow-based entrepreneur aims to turn £100 gift boxes into a billion-dollar business

“The ambition is to be the next Scottish ‘unicorn’, no question.”

He is now behind Go Swag, which specialises in putting together and sending out high-end gift packs for staff, including new starts, for a high-profile

roster of clients such as Unilever, Accenture, Burberry, and Ticketmaster.

But for Ben Greenock, being a serial entrepreneur is a path he believes he has been on from the get-go rather than having veered into.

He explains that from a young age he was selling cigar boxes to his neighbours, later shifting phone cases and teapots, which enabled him to start his next venture selling attention-grabbing Christmas jumpers. That in turn bankrolled setting up a dating app that led to him appearing on Dragons’ Den, before spying a gap in the market for Go Swag to inhabit.

Entrepreneurship is his lifelong hobby, he says. “Some people play football. I never played football… I was always focusing on [running my own businesses], I just find it fun. I'll always be doing something like this.”

Glasgow-based Go Swag was created in 2019 with less than £200 after co-founders Greenock and Conor McKenna (who sport its chief customer officer and chief executive badges respectively) were working together in software design. They were given some “standard” company swag to present to new starts, but felt this could be done better, and packaged everything up in a nice box with a note.

“All of a sudden it was a gift, it was a thoughtful thing that was given to them by their new colleagues. And it was really impactful. We thought, ‘there has to be a service that arranges these employee welcome packs, and just does the whole end-to-end experience for you’. And there wasn't anything.”

Go Swag’s boxes include, say, t-shirts in high-calibre organic cotton, and high-end branded reusable coffee cups, sent to the employee’s home in the case of new starts. “It’s the first physical touchpoint with the company's brand, so they already feel part of the organisation before they even have their first day,” says Greenock. It is operating, alongside many peers, as a cog in the broader corporate gifting machine projected to reach $365.16 billion (£286.14bn) by 2032, according to Introspective Market Research.

'We're just scratching the surface with this, so the potential for growth is there,' says Greenock of Go Swag. Picture: contributed.

And Greenock stresses that Go Swag is focused on sustainability and quality (“yes, there are cheaper tote bags, yes, there are cheaper T shirts, but we don't do them”), plus utility. That means out with stress balls and teddy bears, and in with, say, reusable water bottles by Ocean that funds the collection of sea-bound plastic.

The entrepreneur adds that the gifting specialist works with each client to come up with a bespoke offering suitable for its staff in the relevant global location, and has been introducing software that allows recipients to personalise aspects, eg choose the size of a t-shirt.

Its boxes come in at an average of £70 to £100 of swag each, but Greenock says this is creeping up to about £100 to £110 and rising as it secures more big tech clients with deep pockets. Tech giants it has worked with include recent addition Meta, providing welcome packs for its London employees, plus Amazon, Shopify, and Deliveroo.

“We've really put a lot of work into being able to deliver a global employee welcome pack programme. Because pretty much all of our companies that we work with have people all over the world… you name a country, we've probably sent something to them.”

Greenock with co-founder Conor McKenna, left, who holds the chief executive title. Picture: contributed.

It was announced in November 2023 that Go Swag had signed a global partnership to become the sole supplier of corporate branded gifts to the 4,500-odd international customers of London-based rewards and benefits platform Perkbox.

And the Scottish firm has had a £10 million turnover target in its sights, and received a $1m investment in November last year from Techstart Ventures, which invests seed capital across Scotland and Northern Ireland. That has enabled Go Swag to move to a bigger warehouse in Hillington in Glasgow, and beef up the ranks, with senior hires including Craig Robertson, formerly retail marketing boss for the UK and Europe at pizza oven company Ooni. Go Swag currently has 25 staff, up from 11 in November 2023, with the target about 50 by the end of 2024, scaling its product and software capability, as it increasingly harnesses tech, and then beyond.

In terms of business leaders Greenock admires, rather than choose a high-profile name, he says: “I find more comfort in surrounding yourself with similar people in similar positions, speaking to people who are one step ahead of us in terms of their [entrepreneurial] journey.”

One high-profile interaction he had with fellow entrepreneurs came when he appeared on Dragons’ Den in 2015 seeking investment in dating app Double, focused on double dates, with its co-founders Gary MacDonough and Loren Gould.

The trio walked into the Den in eye-catching suits printed with love hearts, and left with a £75,000 investment from Moonpig founder Nick Jenkins. That is just some of the pre-Go Swag experience Greenock is bringing to his current venture, also including needing to understand the cost of a customer acquisition and how much profit that would bring in when he was selling teapots, for example.

“Every single thing has led to where we're at now, so many lessons, so many mistakes,” he says. “If you're scared of failure, or making mistakes, you're going to play it safe, you're not going to make bold decisions, you're not going to innovate anything.

“We're just scratching the surface with this, so the potential for growth is there,” he says of Go Swag. “The ambition is to be the next Scottish ‘unicorn’ [a privately owned start-up valued at £1bn or more], no question. And it's absolutely possible. We are ultimately a Scottish organisation, but from an outside perspective, we can deliver globally for global enterprises, that's pretty much what we're focusing on. We’re at a really interesting and exciting stage, for sure.”