molly.com
Saturday 12 August 2006
Best Schwag Ever
I’ve been organizing things around the house and office and ran across some great schwag I’ve picked up over the years. Among the expected t-shirts, cheap pens and oft-nice conference bags, I found a sturdy, wirebound, hardcover notebook and a silver fine point refillable cartridge pen. Ooh, great schwag, especially this pen, which is one of those pens that you start out writing with then find yourself doodling, then drawing because it’s just that cool a pen.
This schwag courtesy of Macromedia Government. I guess at one time Macromedia must have been doing some educational outreach to one of my government clients because I can’t for the life of me remember where I got this! But I’m sure glad I found it in the schwag pile, and seeing the old Macromedia logo put a smile on my face for sure.
Tell me your schwag stories! Worst schwag, funny schwag, but especially the best schwag. My favorite top three schwag stories as of the weekend’s close my time will win the author either some schwag, or a book (you’ll get a choice) from the Molly archives here.
Filed under: giveaways and fun, humor, professional
Posted by: Molly | 03:10 | Comments (31)
It’s funny you mention Macromedia, most of the good stuff I’ve been given came from them too. While they were trying to get people developing stuff using Central they sent me a nice t-shirt (in a rather fetching powder blue color), a memory stick with the central SDK on it, some posters and I think some CDs with resources from Devnet.
Also I don’t know if this counts as “schwag” but out of the blue one day becta sent our office an iPod Nano. That was pretty cool
You’ve brought back great memories of the free schwag I used to get when I worked for Nihon Keizai Shimbum in the mid-90s. My Japanese clients would give me really cool and quirky promo stuff. The wierdest was a vibrator with the company’s logo stamped on it. I kid you not! They “claimed” it was a neck massager. It looked like a plastic fried egg and when you pressed the domed yellow yoke part the whole goddam thing would vibrate. Molly – if I ever find it again you can have it… honestly, it’s never been used!! x
I remember “Java Loves You” coffee mug from Sun Microsystems or a weird Sun toy. Some corporate sombrero, branded condoms, designer toothbrush… Wacky.
When I was in high school the Consumer Electronic Show was open to the public one year in Chicago. It was like a dream come true for a video game geek. They had a playable version of Mortal Kombat for the Sega Genesis, but only two people got to play it at a time – one battle, best of three. Whomever won got a black tee-shirt with a giant Mortal Kombat logo on it. The guy I played against had no idea what he was doing. I let him win the first match and then came back and won the next two before finally removing his head and spine and raising it in the air victoriously while the rest of his body slumped to the ground. In the game, that is.
Best. Shirt. Ever.
I have a ton of Macromedia schwag including several backpacks (till recently, the DW messenger bag was my favorite), tons of t-shirts (love my gotoAndPlay() shirt and the MM Labs shirt — since they bought “girl styles”), pens and notebooks (yes, they’re my favorite — the pens are smooth as silk and the notebooks have wonderful thick stock — I’m dreading the day the little miniature leather one I keep in my purse is filled!)… they also gave me a really cute MM zip drive, travel coffee mugs, water containers, energy bars, coffee candy and energy water — all branded with MM. Oh yea, Hot Sauce too!
I really like the brown jackets they gave us (with blue MM logo on the back — though my 14 year old wears it more than me) and recently, showing the switch in ownership, I got a super nice Adobe backpack — lots of pockets/compartments and very well-made… high quality — my new favorite. Oh heck, there’s a whole list as of last summer when the schwag baton passed – http://communitymx.com/blog/index.cfm?newsid=561&blogger=15
Seems shirts are the most common schwag since I have a bunch of those with microformats, technorati, Community MX, InterAKT, Yahoo!, and more… Sadly, I’ve missed out on the branded condoms and vibrators… I did get these 80’s-like pins with all the MM product logos, bright and fun and MM mardi gras beads that had a little flashing lucite hang tag. But that’s as good as it gets!
In my case, of course, it’s this– and honestly, trying to tell the story would just cheapen it.
At a Plone sprint, I got two blue pens from Cignex that are among the finest writing instruments I’ve ever used. If you look through my sketches, all the blue ones were done with one of those pens in a moleskine sketchbook. The particular combination of those pens and those notebooks seems to produce a unique quality that I can’t quite get any other way. When those pens finally dry up, I don’t know what I’ll do.
I feel so left out, I don’t think I’ve ever received free schwag before, or any other kind of schwag come to think of it.
To me, the best Schwag ever had to be something I saw some time ago. It happened to re-affirm my belief at the time (though possibly incorrect) that you Americans just do not “do irony”.
In 1987 I visited the Novell HQ in Orem, Utah. The promo materials floating around the office at the time were corporate coloured 10 gallon hats. Bright red with the Novell name / brand right across the front. People seemed quite happy to don these without any apparent thought to suggesting maybe that there were already too many cowboys in the IT business !!
Not that I could ever have thought that of Novell. At the time they had an innovative product, of which they could be truly proud, and the folks themselves were fine people and very hospitable. We Brits on the trip thought the cowboy hats to be highly inappropraite, hence amusing, yet the Novell staffers were happy to give them out to customers and wear them with pride.
Two nations, so close yet divided by both language and culture. It never ceases to amaze me
I think the funniest schwag I’ve ever gotten was either:
- A bouncing superball that, when it impacted something, would blink all these crazy lights and set off a little siren that would come from inside the ball. – Totally useless, but fun.
- These plastic clappers that looked like hands. The two hands would clap together when you would shake the clapper device. It was extreamly loud and very annoying. Maybe good for New Years.
The best way to explain what these clappers were is with this picture (I just found this on flickr):
Ah, HTML not only doesn’t parse here, but it just doesn’t display at all.
Oh well, you can find a picture of the clappers here:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/mulberrystreet/125967158/
Ok this is one of my all time favorite stories to tell.
I was at a developer session once and it was cold outside so I had put on a jacket I had that had the sun Java logo embroidered on the back that was like 1 foot square (it was huge) and I was carrying my laptop in a bag I had gotten with the old pre-cow Gateway logo on it.
Durin the morning session there was an alpha-geek that was trying to dominate the teacher in knowledge and annoying everyone there. So I began to speak up a bit and shoot down some of the things he was saying which was really getting to him you could tell.
As we broke for lunch me, him and about 10 other people were standing in the hallway trying to figure out where to eat and he looks at me and says “Nice jacket and bag you seem to be a real industry whore.” And without thinking I turn to him and say “You should see my Pentium underwear.” at that point I pull the top edge of my boxers from my pants to reveal the Intel logo around the band. Everyone began to laugh out loud as this guy turned beet red and walked off.
He didn’t say nearly another word for the rest of the day.
Sadly the underwear are long since thrown away or I would post a picture. I was working part time as a sales rep. at CompUSA at the time and they were given to me by a Intel marketing guy that used to come in all the time. I always tried to figure out where they got the idea to make Pentium boxer shorts.
My daughter (age 9) is an expert at picking up schwag. We took her to the Mac Expo in London last year and kept losing her among the stands, she would then reappear with yet another pen/bouncy ball/mug etc. and a big grin. Her technique was to wander up to the person on the desk, look cute and tell them that she had a Mac. At which point they would hand her a pile of stuff. Worked every time.
No schwag for me. I guess it would probably help if I attended conferences and expos…
Anyway, re. Collin’s ponderance: “I always tried to figure out where they got the idea to make Pentium boxer shorts.”
I’m sure it’s so they can claim “Intel inside!” (unless you’re a superhero in which case it’s “Intel outside”).
Molly Holzschwag?
Last xmas, Google (UK) gave me and my boss a black google rug each. I’m not sure what the thiking behind the rug was, but my girlfriend loved it.
8 months down the line and that rug has seen us through plenty of cold nights on the setee and a few nice days in the park. Cheers Google.
Silicon Graphics used to have some weird and wonderful giveaways.
My favortite had to be a wind-up, walking, Origin server (not to scale).
Favortite? Dear God, I need my morning caffeine!
Hmm, well, my most-used shwag is – funny you you ask – my Macromedia laptop backpack. I’ve been using it for a couple of years now, ever since I ‘won’ it at a Macromedia info session. I asked tough questions about Flash Paper’s accessibility and got the backpack. Rarely has a laptop in it, since I don’t have one of my own. But it’s incredibly useful to have that capability in my daily carrier. My WE05 satchel nearly took over, but not quite.
The WE05 shwag bag gets and honourable mention
Other cool stuff… An intel puzzle/clock. One of those cube things that flips around into other shapes (hard to describe). It was our kitchen clock and thing-to-fiddle-with-while-waiting-for-the-toaster. Used it until the battery died.
My dad’s an architect and gets some cool stuff too – my favourite was a small metal hardhat which was actually a bottle opener. That gets extra points for being a perfect thing to give out in the target industry – all the tradies kept theirs!
Forgot to mention…. during university I raided my brother in law’s design firm. They get gorgeous sample stuff from the stock paper companies, I guess it’s show how awesome their paper can make you look.
Anyway, it was so good I nicked lots of it and decorated my college room wall (plus a couple of posters, of course – but most of it was paper stock stuff).
LOL @ the Intel Inside story
Me? I’ve only got a Macromedia stressball (tennisball-sized and good for throwing around in the office).
Ah Rob, you must remember that Utah is a “culture” apart from mainstream US, and then you go off to Orem, even more… remote!
My best schwag, not that higher ed folks get much (snif) is my Google rocket pen, which not only lights up but bubbles. Well, it used to anyway.
I was at an expo in South Africa once and Epson were giving out chocolates, coloured to sh*t, with all sorts of artificial colourants and additives to mark the launch of their printers using independant colour cartridges. – There were red chocolates, cyan ones, magenta, black, and yellow, you get the picture, Anyway being the ShwagTart ™ I am, I ate loads! and I mean LOADS!!
For the most part of that afternoon and the night I spent a glorious multi coloured session on the toilet displaying a cyan, magenta, yellow, and black EXTRAVAGANZA! Well done Epson!
Most of my schwag seems kind of lame by comparison, but I’m rather fond of the shark toy with moveable jaws that I got from Intercon, who made a long-forgotten browser called NetShark. I also quite like the inflatable flying toaster I got from Berkeley Systems at Macworld Expo some time in the early or mid 1990s. I had that hanging from the ceiling in my office for several years. Now it’s sitting in a closet here at home.
Hmmmm… have gotten a lot of the same shwag as many other people over the years. The nicest gift I ever got was a copy of the MM suite from a rep who was at our company… not sure why she did that, she wasn’t even there to see me.
The coolest shwag I ever got though:
1. My own company at the time, Headlight.com – a now defunct eLearning content seller – handed out branded Leatherman Tools… so cool… was supposed to be a nod to Headlight being the best tool at your disposal.
2. At the same conference where we were handing those out, we all got a monitor rear-view mirror from another company. I can’t remember who it was from, but for the next 3 months, just about everyone in IT had this little purple mirrors haning from the top of their monitors, and probably wasted a good deal of development time playing Freecell while keeping one eye behind them. =)
A painted boomerang from a company that I assisted while on a help desk. It still sits above my desk.
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