Hot tech company trend: Branded fruit as conference swag

In an article published Wednesday, Fast Company revealed that logoed fruits and vegetables are a hot trend with tech companies, beating out the usual swag like stress balls or notebooks. Serial artrepreneur Danielle Baskin (who you may remember from the Your Boss app or Drone Sweaters) is behind this trend. It all started in 2015 after being asked to bring some avocados to a barbecue celebrating the sale of a friend's startup. She thought it would be funny to put the startup's logo on the avocados as a joke. They were a big hit.

In 2017, she started BrandedFruit.com and orders have been coming in steadily ever since.

She has now made branded fruit for everyone from Pizza Hut to Heroku to AT&T. Baskin has also had personal requests: One man ordered several avocados for a wedding proposal. Orders are as small as 10 pieces of fruit that will be centerpieces at an event to 500 pieces that will be handed to out to guests. Each fruit costs, on average, $5 to make. That's not cheap in the world of swag, which is known for churning out products at rock-bottom prices, like $1 T-shirts or 50 tote bags. But it is reasonable to larger companies. "Large companies seem to have enormous budgets for swag," she says. "I sometimes think I should increase my prices, but I also think it is crazy to spend more than $5 on a piece of fruit."

Since the article published, Baskin's phone and inbox has been full of requests for branded fruit from around the globe.

Fast Company: The hot new conference swag favored by Lyft, WordPress, and Twitter

Image via Branded Fruit