Cover Brand: Carve Out a Smaller Pond
Nobody wants your logo on their stuff, and why that should change how you think about every piece of branded merch you order. Swire Ho runs Garuda Promo in LA, printing and producing promotional product for companies. The episode suggests you ditch the logo-first instinct, find the unsexy market nobody else wants, and let the product itself do the talking.
Swire's been quietly building a niche in construction, while every other promo shop in LA chases entertainment and Hollywood clients. Construction companies are flush with infrastructure money right now, thanks to the World Cup and the incoming LA Olympics, and almost nobody markets to them. Ethan compares it to Melanie Perkins building Canva on the back of Australian high school yearbooks before she ever touched Photoshop's turf — pick the boring pond nobody's fishing in, and you get to be the only boat on it.
The conversation keeps coming back to one idea: people don't want your logo, they want something fun. Swire's Hollywood event clients order color-coded party cups that say I'm available, I'm taken, it's complicated instead of a brand mark, and the cups end up all over Instagram and TikTok, which is free reach no logo ever earned on its own. Ethan's response is to push the same logic onto Swire's least glamorous accounts — construction recruiters handing out neck fans at job fairs, hard hats, tumblers, vests. Slap a tagline on the fan instead of just a logo, and suddenly the guy on the job site filming a selfie video becomes an unpaid brand ambassador.
Ethan brings in his Lazy Boy story, socks that said Go away, I'm lazying, as a case for mocking up the fun version of merch before a client can even imagine wanting it. People don't buy from inspiration boards. They buy from a giggle. Show them the funny shirt, the cool tagline running down a sleeve, and they stop thinking of you as a vendor and start thinking of you as the guy who gets it.
The episode closes on retention, not acquisition. Branded merch that makes employees feel good, on a job site, at a company barbecue, in a recruitment photo, becomes a quiet recruiting tool in industries where turnover is expensive and training takes months. Garuda's job isn't selling promotional product. It's making boring industries feel like they have a personality worth showing up for.
This week's cover song: Sandy Lam's 1996 Cantonese cover of All-4-One's I Swear, a karaoke staple across Asia that, in Hong Kong, eclipsed the original entirely.
Garuda Promo: garudapromo.com Cover Brand Covers Playlist on Spotify Subscribe to Cover Brand, explore the frameworks at appliedbrandscience.com, and come back next week for more of this.
