Episode 54: Fearlessly Build Your Business with Jeremy Parker Part 1
Jeremy Parker is the son of an entrepreneur, so that creative and daring spirit was engrained in him from an early age. So when he found himself winning a film festival with his documentary in college and still feeling unfulfilled, his logical next step was to finish his degree and then start his own business. He jumped into the high-end t-shirt industry with very few concrete plans, but through a very innovative marketing strategy, he caught the eye of Mark Cuban and got an immediate sales bump that allowed him to remain in the business long enough to get a good handle on the various aspects of the business: production, distribution, marketing, and customer service.
Also early in his career, Jeremy was given the opportunity to spearhead a new division of Envy Sport that ended up facilitating design contests for over 100 colleges and universities that created new licensed designs that were sold in the schools’ bookstores. After this, he went into business with his brother essentially serving as agents for the first YouTube influencers. They would secure sponsorships from big name companies and sign YouTube stars to product placement deals. This eventually expanded to the same type of advertising deals with celebrities on Twitter before anyone else had thought of leveraging their platforms in this way.
Jeremy’s current business endeavor, along with his partner Josh, is Swag.com. Jeremy and Josh noticed a gap in the market for promotional apparel and items and decided to do something about it. They acquired the domain name and set out to be traveling salesmen in order to determine what types of products customers wanted and how they should structure the business to accommodate customer needs. They went after Facebook to be their first customer because they figured that if they had Facebook on board, they could get basically anyone else: big or small. Their pitch was successful, and the rest is history. In 5 years, their revenue went from $350,000 in 2016 to $15.5 million in 2020. For the rest of the conversation, come back next week!
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