How Big Frog Custom Became Less About T-shirts and Expanded Into ‘& More’ By Adding Hard Goods

Big Frog Custom T-shirts & More, a retail-facing custom apparel company that does decoration services like direct-to-garment, direct-to-film, embroidery, screen printing and more, recently started expanding to other promotional products like drinkware and other hard goods in order to grow its business and give their customers even more branding opportunities.

It’s leaning into the “and more” part of its name.

With its more than 75 locations across the country, Big Frog is hoping that the addition of products like pens, drinkware and tech items will appeal to its customers in the nonprofit space, such as animal advocacy groups, homeless relief groups, and more. Overall, the company is joining the many others who see the value in the “one-stop shop” or “single-supplier source” model, where all of the products involved in a promotional campaign can come from one place.

Tina Bacon-DeFrece, president and CEO of Big Frog, says that her company relied on its existing partnerships with industry suppliers, and found influence in its long-time supplier partner alphabroder’s expansion into the hard goods sector through Prime Line.

Even with a role model, Bacon DeFrece still called the move “daunting.”

“We really just focused on launching DTG and DTF over the last 15 years, so we weren’t sure how to handle hard goods and promo products,” she told Print & Promo Marketing. “It just wasn’t something we were used to. But [with] that partnership with alpha[broder], we were like, ‘OK, they’re going to help us get into the market, figure out how to sell it, and how to do the corporate clients.’ So that’s really what we did.”

She added that Big Frog’s jump into promo was “feet-first,” rather than adding products to the lines a little at a time.

“We’ve primarily ben focused more on the high-end items,” she says. “Not necessarily pens and stress balls, but more of the drinkware and that type of products that have seemed to make more sense with a lot of our clients. Not that we haven’t done just general convention swag.”

Learning Curves

While Big Frog was relatively brave with its addition of promo, Bacon-DeFrece still says that it took a period of adjustment. Namely, the company had to learn the new logistics of physically getting products into the customers’ hands.

“I think what threw us all for the biggest loop was actually shipping,” she says. “We’re used to garment shipping, and so it’s really a whole different product that we found on the first few orders we did. If we didn’t account for shipping costs, that would get into a lot of our margin.”

Where They’ve Found Success

In terms of decorated promotional products, Bacon-DeFrece says that Big Frog’s hottest sellers since adding promo to its repertoire have been drinkware with UV-printed labels.

A lot of that, in her opinion, has to do with the way people have been latching onto the drinkware product du jour thanks to TikTok and social media.

“It’s such that everyone’s carrying their water bottles around the office,” she says. “I think that has been the big thing. Especially schools have jumped on that, providing the bottles to the students.”

In-House Education

While Big Frog’s business model is a little different than some distributors being that they’re customer-facing, the way Bacon-DeFrece’s team can still influence distributors looking to add hard goods to an apparel business, or apparel to a print business.

She says that it took a bit of time for the team to learn exactly how to market and sell these new products. While the clients are more than familiar with drinkware and pens, the products don’t sell themselves, especially if the customers don’t know that Big Frog has them in the first place.

“Everything comes down to training and systems,” Bacon-DeFrece says. “It’s been very critical for us from the top down to provide price lists and collateral and materials and training on how to sell it. So that’s been where it’s kind of tough for us, and where ASI might come in and other conferences and trade shows to learn how to do it ourselves, so we can train our stores on how to do it easily. That’s really been the challenge this year.”