Behind the oil industry, fashion is the second leading global polluter. As part of the decorated apparel industry, this is something that we should be concerned about.
One person who cares is our guest today on the Success Stories podcast. His name is Ben Grossman, and he’s leading the charge at SwagCycle. Their mission is to help companies repurpose, recycle, and donate their obsolete branded apparel merchandise in a sustainable way. They do this with a network of charitable and recycling partners.
We’ll learn all about that and more on today’s show, so get ready to get a hand cramp taking some notes on how you can get involved and thinking about how to make a sustainable difference.
Behind the oil industry, fashion is the second leading global polluter. As part of the decorated apparel industry, this is something that we should be concerned about.
One person who cares is our guest today on the Success Stories podcast. His name is Ben Grossman, and he’s leading the charge at SwagCycle. Their mission is to help companies repurpose, recycle, and donate their obsolete branded apparel merchandise in a sustainable way. They do this with a network of charitable and recycling partners.
We’ll learn all about that and more on today’s show, so get ready to get a hand cramp taking some notes on how you can get involved and thinking about how to make a sustainable difference.
Marshall Atkinson
Welcome to Success Stories brought to you by S&S activewear. I'm your host, Marshall Atkinson. And this is the podcast that focuses on what's working so you can have success to. Behind the wall industry fashion is the second leading global polluter. As part of the decorated apparel industry. This is something that we all should be concerned about. One person who cares is our guest today on the Success Stories podcast. His name is Ben Grossman, and he's leading the charge at swag cycle. Their mission is to help companies repurpose, recycle and donate their obsolete branded apparel merchandise in a sustainable way. They do this with a network of charitable and recycling partners. We'll learn all about that and more on today's show. So get ready to get a hand cramp taking some notes and how you can get involved and thinking about how to make a sustainable difference. So Ben, welcome to the Success Stories podcast.
Ben Grossman
Marshall, thanks for having me today. I really appreciate it.
Marshall Atkinson
Yeah, and you guys are in the Boston area. Right? That's right. But your reach isn't just in New England. You guys do stuff all over?
Ben Grossman
We do we operate nationally as well as in some other countries like Europe. Oh, that's
Marshall Atkinson
fantastic. So let's begin the show really just talking about your origin story on how you started swag cycle. Let's get down to the skinny what's going on here. For the last
Ben Grossman
decade or so my brother David and I have run a fourth generation family business Grossman Marketing Group. The vast majority of our revenue comes from branded merchandise where promotional products distributor, and we run a number of large inventory management programs for enterprise clients and online stores. And we've seen the challenge of goods becoming obsolete virtually overnight, when companies change their brand when an acquisition happens when they change their marketing messaging. And as someone who has been deeply involved in sustainability causes for many years, seeing good quality items go in a landfill was personally painful to me. And I wanted to try to build a platform with my team to try to address this challenge of what to do with obsolete apparel and branded merchandise and try to divert those items from landfills either in a charitable way, or a recycling upcycling capacity. So we launched swag cycle back in 2019. We went to platform to help promotional products, distributors, suppliers decorators, as well as end user organizations divest of their goods in a responsible way. We try first and foremost to make a social impact in the community by sending those goods to worthy charitable partners like the YMCA, Boys and Girls Clubs, dress for success and a whole host of others. But oftentimes, companies don't want those goods to float around in the marketplace when their brand goes away for brand guidelines or other compliance reasons. And in those situations, we have a network of recycling partners that can take goods and keep them out of landfills. The most common request we get is to recycle apparel, either because the company doesn't want those goods to float around. Or there might have even been a misprint, and they certainly don't want their brand represented incorrectly in the marketplace. And we've built a number of recycling partnerships around the country to help take these textiles and recycle them. They can be shredded and turned into things like industrial wiping claws, carpet pad, fill insulation materials and a whole host of other products. And it's been really fun to build this program since we launched in 2018. And through the end of 2022 We've kept more than 1.4 million units of things out of landfills and we facilitated more than two and a half million dollars in charitable donations.
Marshall Atkinson
Wow that's incredible. So you're doing our program for a client that and maybe you're doing their for their HR department so they get new employees and and maybe it's a bank or maybe it's a credit card company and right you're doing all their merchandise for that. So when they onboard their employees, they get the box with all the stuff in it right? And because they do a logo update, which is pretty common, you know, every, like, probably five to 10 years, a lot of major companies do that. Now all this stuff isn't relevant any longer. And we've got all this stuff on the inventory shelves that we need to do something with. And we don't want to just donate it because now the brand is very conscious about that logo getting out there, because it's not correct. And who actually is wearing it. So there's a lot of conversation about that. So we could either donate it or recycle it, and they get to pick and choose what they want. That's how it works, right?
Ben Grossman
Exactly where it's very transparent process where we put all the control in the brand owners hands, if they want the goods, if they're comfortable with the goods living on in the community, by going to a charity of their choice. That's wonderful. And we're happy to help facilitate that. But if they want the goods to go away, and like I said, the most common request to have the goods recycled is apparel. One of the reasons that companies site that they want their apparel recycled and not donated, is if they do in home visits, there are telecommunications company in home health care, and a number of other organizations visit people's homes. And they will never want someone to impersonate one of their workers.
Marshall Atkinson
So security reason also is at play here.
Ben Grossman
Exactly, it's actually a request that we get quite a lot when there's a rebrand that it's for security and compliance. But then also just the fear from the brand owner that someone could pick up one of their garments and do something bad in it and create a negative PR for their organization. However, they still turn to swag cycle to make a environmentally responsible choice. So keep those goods out of landfills and recycle them or upcycle those materials in a responsible way.
Marshall Atkinson
Okay, so let's say that I'm a potential customer for slag cycle, walked me through how it works.
Ben Grossman
If you are a promotional products distributor as an example, and we support a number of distributors around the country, they are often acting on behalf of their clients, the end user companies who are their customers, they will have a specific use case where one of their clients had a rebrand. And they're looking to divest of their goods. And the first question we ask is, can the goods live on in the marketplace through a charitable donation? If the answer is yes, then we find out a little bit more information. Where did the goods reside? Do they want those goods to be donated outside of that territory? Or is that not a concern? Then once we have that information, and a little bit of information on what the products are and the quantities, we will find an appropriate match in our charitable network, we have partnerships with several 100 organizations around the United States as well as around the world. Once we have a good match, we come back to them with the organization will say as an example the YMCA in Greater Houston is interested in these goods. They are working to resettle refugees from Afghanistan on Special Immigrant Visas, and they have a use for the items that you have. Do you approve that donation? If they say yes, then we don't charge a fee for that donation facilitation. The only cost to them is the shipping cost to get the goods from their warehouse or their client's home office to the charity. And if they ship it on their number or their clients number, no dollars change hands with swag cycle, where we do charge fees is if they want those goods recycled, so they don't want them to be donated to charity. For example, We just helped a promotional products distributor on behalf of one of their clients who had a change in marketing messaging. And they had a number of boxes of T shirts. And they didn't want those to be donated to charity. And we're having them sent to one of our textile recycling partners in the United States to be shredded and turned into things like carpet pad fill, industrial wiping claws, insulation materials, the types of fill that goes into boxing bags, things like that. And there is a cost associated with that recycling service. We've worked with a number of end user organizations as well, where they've come to us with significant quantities of goods and we again give them that choice, charity, and if so we work on that angle. If they don't want the goods to live on then we pursue the recycling angle as well.
Marshall Atkinson
So is the fee based on the material content the weights or chart you can look up to see What the fee might be, how does it work?
Ben Grossman
In the case of apparel, it's generally based on either the quantity of garments or the poundage of those garments. Some complicating factors might include if they have zippers, or if they have some more exotic synthetics fibers, the easiest apparel to recycle are either 100% Cotton, or cotton poly blend. But when you make apparel with materials like viscose, they can be a little bit more challenging and fewer recycling partners in our network are able to handle those types of garments.
Marshall Atkinson
So imagine a t shirt 100% Cotton T shirts, probably easier to recycle, then a zip up hoodie with a zipper. That's exactly
Ben Grossman
right. And we find that they're more desirable for the recycling partners as well, because there may be more industrial applications for some of those materials.
Marshall Atkinson
Okay. All right. So why don't you describe your typical partner out there, that's using swag cycle, you know, walk us through a couple examples. Maybe somebody who's got leftover inventory, or maybe somebody that's got three years where the misprints or something, you know, we want to do something with this stuff, because there's clutter in our warehouse. Give us a couple of examples of people who might use you guys.
Ben Grossman
When we when we started swag cycle. Our main focus was when companies would rebrand and done a lot of work and content generation in that arena. And we heard from Facebook, went around their rebrand to Mata, which I think most of us would agree was probably the most prominent rebranding effort in recent business history. We heard directly from their marketing team, and they were looking to donate nearly 20,000 items that they had in their US based distributors warehouse, as well as a UK based distributors warehouse. The value of these garments predominantly apparel, but some drinkware and other items as well, was around $100,000. And we made the project a bit complicated was that they wanted to donate these goods, like I said, both in the United States as well as in the UK, and the US based items rather vendors warehouse in Georgia. And an additional stated goal from Facebook was they wanted to get these items in the hands of those who needed the most but ideally as close as possible to the vendors warehouse so as not to generate unnecessary carbon emissions. And we are able to facilitate those items to charity based in Atlanta, called caring for others via our partners at delivering good and caring for others. They're an international human services organization that provides food, clothing and other services to families struggling from natural disasters or poverty or temporary misfortune. And then in the UK, we donated those goods to giving world which we've done a number of projects with. And some of those items actually went to Ukrainian refugees, both close to the warfront and Poland, as well as in the UK. So that was an example we heard directly from Facebook. And they had those goods that they wanted to donate. Subsequently, we also heard from different distributor that also supported Facebook that was sitting on more than 6000 pairs of baby toddler and youth socks. And they wanted to divest of them. And they wanted again to facilitate a charitable donation, and we donate and those were sitting in California. And so we actually facilitated a donation to one California based charitable partner of ours, which was a really exciting project that we worked on. Now around to recycling. We heard from a major technology company last year, they were sitting on more than 20 pallets of metal water bottles with an outdated brand. And they wanted to turn to us to have those recycled. And so we worked with a metal recycling partner of swag cycles to have those taken out of circulation. But also, they didn't go into the waste stream. There's significant industrial demand for the metal that went into those bottles. So it was a good outcome for everyone. We've also recycled several truckloads of out of date, consumer stationery items and tech accessories for a retail brand that came to us where they were sitting on outdated items that fit old iPhones and iPads and things like that. And we were able to work with a recycling partner of ours to have those ground up. And they actually get recycled in this really interesting process where They become asphalt mix. So there's use for those items, and they don't go into a landfill. And then we did a lot of apparel recycling for a large alcohol and beverage company. And the specifically why they were recycled and not donated was because they had alcohol messaging on them. And you can't really give those to charity. So if we're
Marshall Atkinson
sending stuff, either for recycling or for a repurposing, like in refugee stuff, or maybe there's a huge natural disaster caused by weather or something, is there a certificate are anything that you provide the original owner of the goods, so they know it was handled properly, also, that they can use for tax reasons later.
Ben Grossman
Yes, so for all charitable projects that we're involved with, we don't view those as complete until we receive a charitable donation received from the nonprofit that is the recipient of those goods, naming the donor and specifying the donation that was made. And we get that back to the donor, you know, or the distributor who's working on behalf of the donor or the decorators working on behalf of the you know, the end client donor. So we don't view those projects as complete until we get that charitable proof that those goods were actually donated and made it to the recipient that we said that they would. And then certain companies mimic tax may provide them tax benefits to to make those donations when it comes to recycling. And we're very transparent about this, a number of our recycling plant partners generate certificates of recycling or certificates of destruction. They're often regulated in the states that they operate in. And so we get those certificates and letters back to the clients that we support. So it's a very transparent process, we disclose that these recycling partners, they don't sit under a roof where a platform, just like Yelp is a platform that helps people helps match up with restaurants and, and local businesses. We're a platform that helps companies get matched up with recycling partners, as well as charitable partners.
Marshall Atkinson
So you guys are more of a matchmaker than anything.
Ben Grossman
Exactly. When it comes to the recycling. It's more of a consulting service where we're trying to make sure we match those items with the appropriate partners. So in my distributor life, we're all about making things in swag cycle. We're all about taking them apart in the most responsible and environmentally friendly way.
Marshall Atkinson
Right. That's great. And typically, the process is what couple of weeks? I mean, I'm sure there's parameters in there, logistically, but it's a couple of weeks.
Ben Grossman
Yeah. And it's generally rate limited by the donor or the client, when they're gathering up information, I find that the most time intensive part of it is them doing their audit internally of what they have, where do the goods reside? Are they sitting in a warehouse, or they're sitting in a supply closet, and then getting approval from management on which direction they want to go in? If they want to donate the goods to charity, if they want to have them recycled? And then once we have that information, we make the best recommendations we can make based on our several years of going at this.
Marshall Atkinson
Is there anything that you won't take? That's like, I'm not touching that? What are the limits here? Yeah, I'd
Ben Grossman
say that when it comes to recycling, we are able to recycle roughly 80 to 85% of branded merchandise, there are certain items that can be most challenging, like silicone straws and items like that. But the largest product category, overwhelmingly in the promotional products business in the brand new merchandise space is apparel that probably makes up close to 40% of spend in our industry, and we are generally able to recycle the vast majority of apparel that we come in contact with. And then of course, you go on from there bags drinkware, you know, rounds it out. We've recycled metal lapel pins, we've recycled bound notebooks, and like I mentioned iPhone cases and iPad cases and a number of other items as well. So we continually work to build our recycling footprint as well as our charitable footprint. Our goal here is to just to make the largest impact possible. When we started swag cycle. We weren't necessarily sure which direction we would go in. We thought it could certainly be an interesting angle for us to explore sustainability, which it has been. We thought it could become a resource to the ad specialty industry which is certainly has been, and we love working with other distributors and suppliers and decorators. And then we thought it could end up becoming a bespoke Waste Management Service, which it also has been. And we really like this space, we think that there's a lot we can bring to the space to keep items out of landfills. The term is landfill divergence. That's the key term here, and trying to work towards more of a circular economy, and helping organizations make the most responsible choices with their goods, whether or not that's helping facilitate charitable donations, which we are deeply passionate about, but also helping them dispose of their items in a responsible way. So those goods don't necessarily end up in landfills, but we find higher and better uses for those raw materials.
Marshall Atkinson
Like what you hear so far, be sure to subscribe so you can get the latest from Success Stories. And now here's Zack shortly with the SMS spotlight
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Marshall Atkinson
Recently, there's been some proposed legislation in California to start requiring apparel manufacturers to help recycle and avoid landfills with their product, which is what you guys do. Right? So what's your take on that? It's gotta be like, Man, we're ready to help people out. Like, what do you? What are you guys thinking?
Ben Grossman
It's really interesting, I'm looking forward to seeing how it takes shape. I have done some work in the in the producer responsibility space and sort of the stewardship work that this is this is focused on. I've for a number of years, I was on a corporate advisory board for a national nonprofit that's headquartered in in Boston, called the product stewardship Institute. And they're focused on enforcing producer responsibility through legislation. So it's been interesting to explore that, and what the what the proposed legislation in California is focused on, it would make California the first state to require its 1000s of fashion manufacturers to help set up free collection sites in every county where consumers can drop off unwanted items, we find that more recycling happens, where less friction exists, and less roadblocks exists to recycle goods. So I'm looking forward to seeing the debate in California. My, my hope is that they can figure out a way to do it, that doesn't crush the little guy, you know, little decorators little manufacturers, where it would just add too much regulation red tape, so that they can't focus on their day jobs, hopefully, there's a way to do it, that can satisfy all parties and can be good for the environment, and good for, you know, but also not not crushing to the manufacturers who are really valued employers. However, we've seen in other states, like in Massachusetts, for example, there's legislation that requires manufacturers to be to take some responsibility for paint at the end of their lifecycle. And it hasn't been crushing to the paint manufacturers. Similarly, mattress recycling. There's even now legislation that was passed in Massachusetts in 2022, which prevents clothing and other textiles from being thrown away and landfills. So it's, you know, it's really important. There's a lot of value in these textiles. And hopefully, by working strategically with these manufacturers, and with folks who are really focused on sustainability, they can create positive outcomes that don't do too much damage to the business community because you know, there are a lot of these folks are just too trying to make ends meet in a challenging business climate.
Marshall Atkinson
Right? I know, you know, they're thinking he's like, Well, you know, you can, when you buy a car battery, you can give your old car battery back or you think about how people use recycled milk bottles or coke bottles or something. And there's other products out there, then the history of that product, people have figured out how to do the recycling stream, and you see collection boxes, sometimes in difference the areas for clothing, right, and the usually they're about the size of a half a dumpster or something, or people just throw them in there, and they can do something with them. And I think as if it's just built out a little more, I think maybe it could be, it could be effective. It just really depends on and you're right, how to make it. So it's frictionless where we can adopt it. And it isn't a huge burden on anybody, we just we just take it in, it just works. Right. So I think it's something that we're all going to keep our eye on.
Ben Grossman
Yeah, and just from a practical perspective, in Massachusetts, there's a there's a company that's headquartered I believe, in Pennsylvania called helps a, and they operate in Massachusetts, and they're focused on clothing and textile recycling. And they actually have partnerships with municipalities, like, you know, like some municipalities in Massachusetts where they, you can schedule waste collection at your home. But in addition, at my children's public schools, there are help see collection bins now, when they're all at all the schools in our in our hometown, where you actually can drop off a bag of, of clothing and other textiles right there to be recycled. And, you know, they might resell them, they might recycle them, they might facilitate donations. But in that, you know, that's a nice way where they're partnered with a municipality, and remove some of the friction from the process. People are dropping their kids off at school every day. So they're driving by these, these, these drop off sites and makes the process much smoother. I mean, there's some there's some interesting stats here, clothing and household textiles make up more than 6% of the waste stream in the United States, which is the equivalent of 81 pounds per person thrown away annually in the United States. And nearly 95% of us clothing and textiles can actually be reused and recycled. And so that's where swag cycle comes in, where we help companies find ways to divest of these goods in reasonably easy ways to keep those goods out of landfills and help facilitate reuse and recycling, which, which makes it easier on the decorators the distributors and suppliers, and most importantly, in their clients, you know, to try to manage their brands properly, and treat the environment as responsibly as we all can.
Marshall Atkinson
So how are these items graded? So how does like, you know, like, you just got a warehouse full of stuff, and you're gonna give it away to either be repurposed, hopefully, or maybe recycled? How are you sorting and grading these because maybe some things can be used, maybe they can't, What's the process like?
Ben Grossman
So most items that we come in contact with are clean, because they're coming in or they're coming from a warehouse, where they were decorated, they're put on the shelf, and they're sitting there waiting for distribution. So all we never have issues with those items being able to be recycled, with the exceptions of maybe if there's some exotic materials in those items. But what we found and this is a stat actually from one of our partners, they're called smart, which is secondary materials and recycled textiles Association. They're headquartered in Maryland. And they're kind of like an industry trade group overseeing a lot of textile recyclers around the country. Only about according to them, only about 5% of these clothing and textiles are unusable generally due to mildew or other contamination. So most of the time, these items are overwhelmingly they can be used either through you know, being shredded and turned into fill or insulation materials or carpet pad fill, things like that. There could be some exceptions, if they're used in chemical processes, but those are addressed on a case by case basis.
Marshall Atkinson
Okay. So I want you to fast forward a couple years three to five years from now like what are you in visioning for our industry in sustainability. And then what do we need to do to make that happen?
Ben Grossman
There's no doubt that sustainability is more top of mind than ever before. People acknowledge generally acknowledged that climate change is a fact and that we need to be more responsible stewards of our of our finite resources on this planet, if we want to have a planet to be habitable years from now, so companies generally acknowledge this as, as something that that they need to address. In addition, I mean, some of the data is actually really compelling that, you know, the people want to overwhelmingly want to work for socially responsible companies, and they want to buy from environmentally friendly companies. So you take all that data that people want to work for responsible companies, and they want to buy from environmentally friendly companies. So as a result, our industry has to react because we're providing organizations and end users tools to help extend their brands in the marketplace connect better with their customers connect better their employees connect better with their stakeholders. So you need to factor sustainability in to those marketing efforts, not in a greenwashing way. So a company can't be a pollute a big time polluter, and slap a recycled logo on something and address it, you need to incorporate sustainability into everything you do less waste, more environmental responsibility. Being involved in worthy causes all of that. But when it comes to our industry, we need to be offering more environmentally friendly products printed and decorated using more environmentally friendly inks and other materials. And then, and also, when we're in the product design phase, not just slapping logos on single use plastic, things like that. But hopefully making tasteful recommendations to our clients to make things that are useful, practical, have a high perceived value and a long shelf life. So they get used for a long time. Brand new merchandise creates a lot of goodwill between a company and the recipient. But the goal is that these goods get used and not just thrown away.
Marshall Atkinson
So do you think there's gonna be more discussion about end of life and the lifecycle of products?
Ben Grossman
I do. I think that we may be a little a little ways away from that. But it's certainly something that we talk about in swag at swag cycle, where products should be thought about at the at the outset, you should think about the end of life and the whole product lifecycle. But and I do think that if, if that legislation actually did pass in California, I mean, they're the fifth largest economy in the world, that would overnight create a ton of awareness for producer responsibility. And the full thing about items from the full lifecycle, not just when you put the logo on something, but the whole lifecycle of those items. I think that over time in general, consumers are going to be more aware and more mindful of the circularity of their products and the lifecycle of their products. But I think we're a little ways away from it, impacting the industry in a significant way.
Marshall Atkinson
Okay, well, that's fair. All right. Well, hey, well, thanks so much. For your time sharing your stories of success today. What's the best way to contact you as someone wants to learn more about what you do or swag cycle or maybe how you can help
Ben Grossman
them? Again, thank you, Marshall, so much for having me on here. I really have a ton of respect for the work you do and the content you put out there. And I'm honored to be part of your app, and I have this conversation with you and your listeners. The best way for people to reach us is to visit our website. It's swag cycle.net. So that's SW AGCY, CL e.net. They can fill out a contact us form and a member of our team will be back to them. Same day. You can also find me on LinkedIn, Twitter at Bi Grossman. I'd be happy to communicate over those platforms as well.
Marshall Atkinson
Awesome. Well, thanks, Ben. I really appreciate you and everything you're doing and good luck, man.
Ben Grossman
Thank you really, really appreciate it.
Marshall Atkinson
Well, that's our show today. Thanks for listening and Don't forget to subscribe so you can stay up to date on the latest Success Stories episodes. have any suggestions for future guests or topics? send them my way and Marshall and Marshall atkinson.com And we'll see you next time.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai