When you live in Silicon Valley or go to a lot of conferences about startups, the schwag tends to pile up. T-shirts, stickers, pens, etc. with corporate logos litter my house, and sometimes it’s easy to forget that a lot of people out there don’t have the opportunity to get schwag from their favorite startups.
Valleyschwag will send you a monthly package for $15 that includes schwag from silicon valley startups (these companies are happy to donate it). Get it here. The first package is out, and people are loving it. Note that Valleyschwag will ship internationally for an additional charge.
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Someone should create a site that allows blog owners to list schwag in the sidebard that they would accept for reviews or for coverage.
If companies were smart they’d send their stuff out to any blogger that covered them, even if they were critical.
True. Have to get covered first though. Baseball tickets anyone?
Cool - I’m signing up for this!
P.S. 50K subscribers in under 1 year - congrats, Mike! That’s amazing.
Thanks George. Glad you noticed.
I just hope they stick around.
hehe - very amusing.
And I second my congrats - inspiring stuff
This is so tempting.
thats what I am looking for - I think we now need to print some shirts too.
Is it $14.95 per month, or $14.95 total?
Mike,
Does that mean if I mention edgeio or techcrunch you’ll send some schwag?
Cameron,
Well, no. But I did tell the edgeio team they should get their stuff in to valleyschwag.
Bob - $15 per month.
Michael, we’d love some Edgeio schwag. We promise to ship it to the most “edge” places possible, including (as of this evening) a small occupied village in Iraq. Politics aside, we’re happy to bring the joy of schwag to all corners of the earth.
It would be better to accept the major credit cards for those of us that don’e use Paypal.
I saw this article, checked out the Valleyschwag site, and immediately signed up. What I really want to know is why I hadn’t heard of this sooner…
I’m also wondering how long it might take for the package to get to me once I order it. But I’m psyched up either way.
Thanks for the tip!
Laurie: Paypal accepts all the major credit cards.
Laurie, Paypal accepts credit cards and you don’t have to be a user. Unless they didn’t set that up.
Did anyone notice that the feedburner count went down in the past day. That was weird it was well over 51k
Congrats.
very cool, im a big junk collector of this sort of stuff, i still have bags and bags of crap from interop and infosec this past winter in ny
i’m going to give it a try!
congrats on the readers as well..im not a web guy (network/security guy) but i found your site and have been loving it, and a new interest was born
Thanks and keep up the great work, even gave you a mention the other day -http://www.limited-exposure.org/2006/05/04/sites-of-interest-2/
Cool beans, I work for a tech company also but in Silicon Valley and lately not getting sent to any trade shows. I signed up lets see what i get.
Laurie: Good point about adding generic credit card processing to the checkout. We’re adding this now.
And Jonathan’s right, we’re getting a trickle of subscribers from the mid-east. Perhaps the best way to win hearts and minds is with…logo’d tees and stickers!
My new bumper sticker: “Make Schwag Not Bombs.”
Nothing personal, but—
Once I stopped laughing, I started thinking that there was something definitely *wrong* about all this:
With that $15 per month, how many children in Darfur could you save?
With 50% of the schwag budget of all the startups, how many could you save?
I still fondly remember my heating-oil dealer, because every January he would send me a postcard that said “In lieu of distributing calendars, we have made an equivalent donation to Childrens’ Hospital.”
Wake up and smell the coffee!
Or the cordite.
Ok, I got that off my chest. Gotta go get my latte now
Mitch, I agree that we should all help the people of Darfur, and that all of our pursuits are pretty frivolous when compared to saving starving children. That’s why, even as a small company, we’re dedicated to charitable giving and pro-bono projects. You can email us if you want more info.
That said, doesn’t this comment really belong on the post about billionaires trading drive time in their race cars?
I signed up this morning… now if I could ever get a website up and running maybe I could send out some schwag myself.
Schwag is bad pot…
Swag is the appropriate word here: bounty accquired through looting.
Pretty cool example of very direct marketing; people paying to be deliberately advertised to.
I’ve heard of a couple services like this, just clicked through to a site called http://www.schwackages.com, which looks to be more ‘band schwag’ oriented.
For some reason the word schwag really annoys me.
Chris: Except that both uses are common…
http://www.urbandictionary.com.....erm=schwag
As promised I’ve posted my encounter with the schwag bag which arrived just this morning (on doomsday 06/06/06). Check out what I wrote and see what I received here http://www.techcastuk.co.uk/?p=88
An excerpt of what I wrote…
//This morning I was awoken by mr postman. To my delight when opening the U.S Postal Service bag, inside contained the highly awaited Valleyschwag bag.
I’ve posted pictures on my Flickr site as to what exactly I got. For those who ended up with the same or a similar package then I suggest you visit this link for an explanation.
My initial reaction to what I saw was a little bit of disappointment but I think all can be forgiven considering the pressures that Valleyschwag were under to deliver to so many people…..//