Key Takeaways
• Military veterans Brian Vella and Don Swope credit their service with giving them the leadership, integrity and perspective that have shaped their success in the promotional products industry.
• Both leaders emphasize that honesty, teamwork and preparation are the foundations of strong customer relationships, especially when challenges arise.
• Their unconventional paths into promo demonstrate how military skills like strategic planning, adaptability and servant leadership can translate into building thriving businesses.
A high-pressure situation is relative.
Some business challenges in this industry might feel like life-or-death scenarios for a promotional products distributor – like products arriving misprinted the day before the in-hands date. But, when you look at it from a different perspective, it’s not that big of a deal. That’s the sort of thing that both Brian Vella, president of United Image Group (asi/322224), and Don Swope, CEO of Sway Collective (asi/470927), appreciate about the promotional products industry after years in the military.
“I don’t mean to cheapen or demean what we do in the promo industry, but if we mess up an order, it’s just a T-shirt,” Swope says with a bit of a laugh. “Nobody’s shooting at us today. No nations are falling. It’s going to be OK. I will replace your T-shirts and we can move on from here.”
Both Swope and Vella are U.S. military veterans who found their way to the promotional products industry following their retirements from active duty. Like so many others in the industry, it sort of happened by happenstance, and both have taken the lessons they learned from their military careers and applied them to where they are now.
Swope spent more than 15 years in the U.S. Navy, working as a cryptologist for the SEAL teams. Vella, whose family was in the steel industry, joined the U.S. Marine Corps following the September 11th terrorist attacks. He spent six years in the Marines as a machine gun operator and was deployed overseas, where 23 Marines in his unit were killed in action.
“It was horrible, but it gave me such an appreciation of everything,” Vella says. “Everything that I do, every single thing that I do day in and day out, gets 100% of my effort because I’m so grateful that I get an opportunity to do it. So many men and women have given the ultimate sacrifice, so I try not to waste any other days.”
The Path to Promo
For both Vella and Swope, the promo industry sort of found them.
While still in the Navy, Swope was tasked with buying branded merchandise for his command like T-shirts, beach towels and challenge coins.
“I bought probably how a lot of people who are not in business-to-business buy,” he says. “I would Google ‘Who sells cups? Who sells hats? Who sells T-shirts?’ and I would order from several different vendors. And then we’d have to find someone who could do the custom artwork. It was always extravagant.”
Swope’s wife is in the fashion design world, so he could lean on her for some of the artwork details, and his aunt was in promo already, so he went to her for some of his command’s requests. Rather than just placing the small-quantity order, which Swope says was probably not worth her professional time, she instead showed him how he could do it himself. Swope and his wife became affiliated with Counselor Top 40 distributor Kaeser & Blair (asi/238600), allowing them to outsource some of the tasks like processing orders and financing while Swope was still active duty in the Navy. This was only supposed to be an opportunity to make a little scratch on the side to fund vacations.
“Nobody’s shooting at us today. No nations are falling. It’s going to be OK. I will replace your T-shirts and we can move on from here.”
Don Swope, CEO, Sway Collective (asi/470927)
When COVID hit, Swope’s wife was furloughed from her full-time job, and she fully committed to their fledgling business, which by that point had started to grow beyond its initial military end-buyer niche.
“As we say, we accidentally grew this thing into a real boy,” Swope says. “At this point in my career, I was about 16 years in or so, and I was going to go into retirement. I was still full-time active duty, my wife was still a full-time fashion designer, but the off-ramp became very clear that when I was going to retire, I was going to do this full-time. So, in order to do that, I really needed to start scaling the business and grow it into something that could support our livelihood after I retired.”
Swope retired from the Navy in July of 2025.
Vella, meanwhile, upon leaving the Marines, went back to school and got his MBA. He was working on figuring out what he wanted to do next. He found himself in Louisville, KY, working in the steel industry, which he enjoyed, but when someone approached a friend and mentioned he was looking to sell his custom sign business, Vella’s leadership instinct kicked in.
“I’ve always felt comfortable in my ability to lead a team and grow a team,” he says. “So I started talking to the guy, and next thing you know I’ve got a deal done with him. So I went from being a machine gunner in the Marine Corps to being in a steel factory to owning a sign company. Kind of a weird way to get into it, but that was seven-and-a-half years ago.”
Vella admits that it’s an unorthodox career path, but calls it a blessing that has changed his and his family’s life.
Military Ideals
Having spent so much formative time in the military, both Swope and Vella have brought aspects of their former lives to their new careers in the promotional products industry.
“I would say that for me, one of the biggest things is just leading with integrity,” Vella says. “Even when it’s not the news the customer wants to hear, I’m still going to deliver the news. And if we make a mistake, we’re going to fix it. I always talk about partnership, which is a word a lot of people use and is tossed around a lot when things are going really well, but you really see a partnership in bad times. When something goes haywire, who’s going to be there and be supportive with you? That’s the kind of commitment that we give our customers.”
That commitment to customer service and integrity has allowed Vella’s business to flourish, having recently moved into a new facility and expanded from a customer base around Ann Arbor, MI, to hiring dedicated California staff to handle West Coast orders.
Despite all of this success, Vella jokingly calls himself “the worst marketing person in the world.”
“Everything that I do, every single thing that I do day in and day out, gets 100% of my effort because I’m so grateful that I get an opportunity to do it. So many men and women have given the ultimate sacrifice, so I try not to waste any other days.”
Brian Vella, president, United Image Group (asi/322224)
Just like in his military days, Vella says that having all the information, even the bad news, as soon as possible allows him and his customers to find an actionable strategy and work together.
“If things aren’t going right, I’d rather you give it to me straight than kind of beat around the bush,” he says. “Because the sooner I know the truth, the better I can plan and act and come up with a contingency plan. A ton of that goes back to my military training and planning. And I’m very grateful for it.”
Swope also uses the commitment to teamwork honed in the Navy. He now appreciates the skills of those around him to fill in the gaps and grow the business.
“Me, combined with my wife’s attention to detail with her being a fashion designer, it’s one of those things where I tend to focus on the business details – maybe that’s pricing or negotiating with suppliers or something along those lines – whereas my wife is like, ‘This Pantone is wrong,’” he says. “And I’m like, ‘How can you see that?’ But she says, ‘No, it’s off. This is a 186C and it should be a 185.’ We just happen to have that magic between us where she was able to really focus on building us up artistically, and I was able to focus on building systems and scaling the business.”
Swope says he really didn’t consciously think about leadership in this new role. It just came naturally, because in the military it had to.
“When you’re in the military, you lead people,” he says. “From the minute you enter to the time you retire, you’re built to run teams and be replaceable. So, when we decided to run this business full-time and make it a real job and not vacation money, it was really about how do we build something that is repeatable, sustainable and doesn’t always require me to be there to solve the problem? How do we bring someone in and make them a successful salesperson or production manager or finance person who understands the industry as well as we do?”
People like Swope and Vella may think they found themselves in the promo industry almost by accident. Really, it’s more like the promo industry found them because they were uniquely suited for it. They possessed all the skills they never knew they would need in that capacity, honed through rigorous training and a commitment to a greater cause. So, when the industry came calling, they were ready to answer. And boy, were they prepared.
