So, I saw this picture online, some guy lugging around a Red Bull golf bag. Bright blue, yellow, red logo plastered all over it. Looked kinda wild, you know? Took me right back, not to golf – haven’t swung a club properly in years – but way back to my first real job out of college.
I landed this gig at a marketing agency. Sounded fancy, right? Mostly it was grunt work. We handled promotions for all sorts of brands, big and small. And let me tell you, the amount of branded stuff we had to deal with was insane. Just mountains of it.
My main task for a while was managing the ‘swag inventory’. That meant counting, sorting, and sometimes assembling the weirdest promotional items you can imagine. We had stuff like:
- Singing bottle openers (always slightly off-key).
- USB drives shaped like the company mascot (usually held about 128MB, totally useless).
- Stress balls that were way too hard to actually squeeze.
- Thousands of pens that stopped working after writing your name once.
And the effort! We’d spend weeks planning a campaign just to give away cheap plastic keychains made in some factory overseas. We had endless meetings about the exact pantone color for a logo on a t-shirt nobody would wear outside their house.
That Red Bull Bag Vibe
Seeing that golf bag just reminded me of the sheer energy (pun intended, I guess) companies pour into these things. They really believe sticking their logo on something, anything, makes people loyal. That bag, it’s probably decent quality, golf bags aren’t cheap. But it’s still just a giant walking advertisement.
I remember one specific project. A client wanted branded “executive desk toys”. We sourced these little metal puzzle things. Looked cool in the catalog. When they arrived? Half were broken, the other half were impossible to solve. We spent two days trying to fix them before a big conference. Total nightmare. My boss at the time just shrugged, said “Ship ’em anyway, they look good.” That was kind of the attitude.
I didn’t stay at that job too long. Got tired of peddling junk, even if it had a fancy logo on it. Moved into something completely different eventually. But yeah, that Red Bull golf bag? It’s not just a bag. It’s a whole memory of cheap plastic, endless spreadsheets, and slightly off-key singing bottle openers. Funny what triggers a memory, right?
