You know the letdown of a bad swag bag—the branded stress ball, the pen that quits on day two, the tote you’ll never carry. Chloe Sapienza built Telescope Studio, the corporate gifting studio she co-founded with her husband, as the antidote to that.
A graphic designer by training, Chloe treats gifting as a design problem: How do you turn a company’s values into an object people actually keep? Telescope answers that by sourcing from local makers and small brands—which makes it a genuine distribution channel for exactly the kind of early-stage founders who read Shopify Masters. Here, Chloe shares her method for choosing gifts that land, and a practical numbers-backed path for makers who want their products in the mix.
On what separates a gift people keep from one that ends up in the trash:
The difference comes down to not choosing out of fear. When you’re giving to a whole group, there’s this pull toward the universal thing—the item you’re sure everyone will want. But that safe choice is actually the hardest one to get right. It’s hard for people to solve, and honestly it’s hard for us to solve sometimes too.
When a company comes to us, there are so many variables. There’s the budget, the existing brand guidelines, the timeline, everybody’s preferences, and this desire for everything to be uniformly liked. That’s what makes it fun for us, though—figuring out how to creatively problem solve within those parameters. That’s what makes any creative endeavor interesting.
And a lot of the depth can come through who you’ve chosen to be the purveyor. It might still be a water bottle or a candle or a yoga mat, but the story you tell around it, the way you source it, the makers you work with—that’s what makes it land for people.
On using metaphor to turn a brand value into an object:
There are different approaches, but one of the best ways to translate a brand or a philosophy into a product is to think in metaphor. You use it to pull out the elements of what’s being communicated through the branding, then translate that into the objects you’re sourcing.
So say a company’s brand value is transparency. We might choose a water bottle that’s transparent, made out of glass—something that calls to action the value being presented. It’s an easy example, but that’s the idea. The object itself reinforces what the brand is trying to say.
On the Hawaii offsite that proved local sourcing keeps gifts in people’s hands:
We just did a company offsite for a team in Hawaii—600 employees—and we sourced everything from local makers on the island. They ran a survey after the event, and so many people talked about how meaningful it was, and how that was a reason they kept the products afterward. The items were genuinely useful during the event, but people loved that it connected to the local economy and to brands from the region we were celebrating.
Those are kind of classic items on their own. It’s the story you tell around them and the makers you choose that make them things people actually want.
Drawing more of this industry toward our local economy is one of our main goals. I have such a passion for product and product design, and I get a lot of joy out of knowing we’re helping bring those brands into the fold. There are big suppliers that source from overseas, and that’s what catapulted the industry to where it is—no negative feelings there. But I don’t think that’s where it’s going. More intention behind gifting is going to mean sourcing locally, and I think that’s what most people are looking for now.
On how a small maker gets on a distributor’s radar:
We’re constantly doing research and reaching out to brands. We use marketplaces, we find people on Instagram, and brands reach out to us too. There’s a way on our website to contact us and get involved.
Generally, the thing that matters is making sure you’re set up for wholesale and open to slightly larger orders. There are a lot of distributors in our industry who’d be interested in working with a small maker, so it’s really about finding the right ones to partner with.
On the order sizes that make a small brand pitchable:
Anywhere from about 25 units per item up to 2,500 is the general range. Some orders are much bigger, but for a smaller maker, even having 500 units of a certain colorway or SKU on hand makes you a much more appealing thing for us to pitch.
We’re often throwing a bunch of ideas in front of a customer to figure out what they’ll get excited about, so there’s a lot of sourcing happening behind the scenes. Knowing a brand actually has the inventory matters. If a customer decides to buy and then it’s not available, that’s a problem.
On treating corporate gifting as a distribution channel for your product:
I talk about this with makers a lot: Gifting is another way wholesaling can become a real strategy for you. It gets your product into the hands of future qualified customers, and it does it in a really delightful setting, because they’re receiving it as a gift.
It comes to them in a way that feels accessible. For a new product or a new brand, getting involved in gifting is a smart way to get yourself out there.
On what a good gift is actually supposed to do:
A really great gift has an outcome, and that outcome should be the intended purpose from the start. Sometimes it’s retention—employees feeling more supported and more a part of the team. Sometimes it’s recognition, or celebrating a milestone. For sales and marketing teams, it can lead to conversion or to a better relationship with a customer, because it feels personal. It’s not just an email. It’s a physical object that reminds you of that person, that company, that reason. If a gift doesn’t do that, it’s missed the mark.
That’s the big misconception, too. Companies think they need lots of different things all the time. You don’t. It can just be one really thoughtful thing.
Hear Chloe’s full conversation on Shopify Masters for more on why Telescope brought warehousing and fulfillment in-house, the tote bags that showed up handbag-sized, and the soccer career she walked away from at 20.
