How This Studio Became the Secret Weapon Behind Fortune 500 Gifting

0:00Chloe Sapienza:A really great gift has an outcome. That should be the intended purpose. Chloe Sapienza doesn't chase individual sales. The stuff we do behind the scenes is really crazy. She builds Shopify stores for corporations, then designs their merch, stocks her own warehouse, and ships every single order. Creativity, no matter what your job function is or what role you're playing, I think is a really key part of collaboration. Today, Chloe's breaking down exactly how her company, Telescope Studio, cracked the corporate gifting space and how she turned company swag into a design-forward business. How do you solve it within the parameters that you're given?

0:35Chloe, thanks so much for being here today. Thank you for having me. We have all been at parties or company events where you're like so stoked to get the swag bag and then you open it up and it is just like disappointingly awful.

0:50Chloe Sapienza:Is Telescope essentially like the antidote to that? I hope so. I think that that's what we're going for. And that was definitely the original inspiration, right? Like it's very easy to come across these products in parties or in daily life or at company events. And they're not always the best gifts that you could give someone. It's a lot of things have already been done. And yeah, we're really trying to help people think critically about why they're choosing that product type and what they're doing with design and gearing people towards better choices in general. I'd imagine that like in moments that can be a little bit of an uphill battle.

1:26You're dealing with either like a larger corporation or a smaller company. They've got a bunch of other priorities on their plate and you have to convince them like that this gifting component is actually really important.

1:39Chloe Sapienza:Yeah, there are a lot of variables. There's the budget, there's their existing branding and staying really close to their brand guidelines. There are timeline parameters and then preferences that people have. And then the outcome is often that there's a desire for everything to be very uniformly liked, right? Because you're giving to a group and not to an individual. So all of those things come into play. It's what makes it really fun and exciting though, at least for us, to creatively problem solve within those guidelines. I think that's what makes any creative endeavor really interesting is how do you solve it within the parameters that you're given.

2:13Totally.

2:13Chloe Sapienza:And convincing people is just giving them unique and inspiring ideas that they maybe hadn't thought of or finding new ways to showcase their idea on a product that is within what they wanted but maybe has a bit of your influence in it as well. How do you take a company's brand or their voice or their philosophy and translate it into a physical object? Like, is there a framework that you follow? Yeah, there are different approaches for how you can translate different brands or different philosophies or different ideas into products. I think that one of the best ways to do it is to think about metaphor and use metaphor as a way to pull out elements of what is being communicated through the branding and translating it into the objects that you're sourcing.

3:02Chloe Sapienza:So an example might be if a company has brand values that are to be transparent, we may choose a transparent water bottle that's made out of glass or something like that that really calls to action the value that's being presented. What ultimately do you think is the difference between a gift that really lands within this context versus one that ends up in the back of our closets or worse yet, as so often happens, the trash? I think it's a hard thing for people to solve and even for us to solve sometimes. But an example comes to mind. We just did a company offsite with a team in Hawaii and it was 600 employees and we sourced from local makers in Hawaii and they did a survey after the event.

3:47Chloe Sapienza:And so many people talked about how that was meaningful for them and that it was a reason they kept the products afterwards. So they were like, this towel and this tote bag are great. They were super useful during the event. And we loved that it connected to like the local economy and to brands from the area that we were celebrating in. And so even though those are kind of classic items, it's the story that you tell around it and the way that you source it. And the makers that you work with, I think, and the brands that really make products land for people and make them things that people want to keep.

4:18Right. Like it might still be a water bottle or a candle or a yoga mat or whatever. But the depth can sort of come through who you've chosen to be the purveyor. I mean, and I think the assumption would probably be that with like a lot of corporate gifting that you're just like going to these sort of big behemoth suppliers, right?

4:37Chloe Sapienza:Yeah. That can just easily churn things out. It sounds like you're trying to lean into more local artisanal options wherever possible. Yeah, definitely. It's one of our main goals with the business is to draw more of this industry toward local economy and to smaller brands and to makers and local manufacturers. I have such a passion for product and product design, and I get a lot of joy out of knowing that we're helping to bring those brands into the fold of this world. Because like you're saying, there are so many larger suppliers in the industry that source from overseas. And it's really been what's catapulted this industry to where it is.

5:18Chloe Sapienza:But it's not the way I think that it's going to go in the future. I think that a lot more of these projects and a lot more intention behind the gifting is going to mean that we're going to want to source locally. And I think that's what most consumers and most people are looking for. Then it becomes beneficial on multiple levels, right? Your clients are happy with you. They're happy because their employees have gotten a gift that they're stoked about. But you're also potentially making a really meaningful difference for these smaller scale suppliers for whom a big order like that can make a big difference.

5:51Chloe Sapienza:Yeah, definitely. And I think about that a lot. And we try to communicate that with makers too, that this is another way that their wholesale line can really boost revenue for them. And it gets their products into the hands of future qualified customers, right? Who get it in a really delightful setting, right? They're getting it as a gift. It's coming to them in a way that makes it accessible for them. So if it's like a new product or a new brand, I think it's really smart to get involved in corporate gifting as a way to get your product out there and your brand out there. A lot of our audience is either smaller scale entrepreneurs or early stage or aspiring.

6:28So for those people, like how do they get their products onto the radar of a company like Telescope?

6:36Chloe Sapienza:We constantly do research and reach out to brands. We use like wholesale marketplaces. We use Instagram. Brands do reach out to us as well. From the last time that we spoke with Shopify, we had a lot of brands reaching out to us, trying to get involved in working with us, which was amazing. We have a way on our website to contact us and get involved with our business. I think generally speaking, making sure that they're set up for wholesale and open to kind of slightly larger scale orders. What do they need to be able to turn out? Anywhere from maybe 25 units per item up to 2 ,500 units per item is sort of the general range.

7:15Chloe Sapienza:Some orders are much larger, but I think for smaller makers, that would be kind of the upper end. And even just having 500 units of a certain colorway in a certain SKU is really useful and makes it a much more appealing thing for people in our industry to pitch. Just because we're often kind of throwing a bunch of ideas out in front of customers to try to figure out what they're going to be excited about and how they're going to sort of cater the gift that they're trying to put together. You're somewhat vertically integrated. You're not just doing the design process. You also have a warehouse.

7:47and so you're warehousing at least some product, you're fulfilling orders and you're shipping them, right? Why was it strategically important for Telescope to own those parts of the process?

7:59Chloe Sapienza:For us, quality and customer experience are two of our major pillars of what really differentiates our business over other distributors. And keeping those things in-house really allows us to make that unified experience across each step of the process. It was also kind of table stakes within our industry. There are a lot of brands out there selling in a self-serve way with like standard customer service and like you're just ordering this online and getting it to a place. Whereas having those additional parts of our business for fulfillment and warehousing and setting up stores for our customers ends up being a much more holistic service that they can then lean on.

8:37Chloe Sapienza:and then it brings in different parts of their business too. So we then end up working with like their HR team and their marketing team and, you know, all their smaller teams. We do like ERG gifting and a lot of different smaller initiatives too within the company because we offer those services. So keeping them in-house was important to create a consistent, I think just a consistent experience for our customers. Was it that way from jump? Yeah, we started the business from home. It is one that you can do from home, which is nice. and the pandemic hit. And so we very quickly needed to find a way to service our customers who were now working from home instead of in their office or going to an event.

9:18Chloe Sapienza:And so a lot of the orders in sort of that first year of our business were to distribute packages for virtual events or holiday gifts to remind everyone that they were part of a company that was now distributed. Right. So we very quickly had to figure out the fulfillment and warehousing component. And And honestly, at the scale that we were at at that point, it can sometimes be hard to find the right partner if you're kind of smaller, but you need high touch, like really quality presentation with a lot of variability. And so we took it on ourselves and ended up finding a great space downtown that we moved into for our studio warehouse and have been building it out from there ever since.

9:55Do I have this right that you have your warehouse and also like the office that your team works from? They're all kind of in the same place?

10:03Chloe Sapienza:Yeah. Yeah. And we have it so that we also have like our photo studios there. We have a stage for live music and we put on events and like community is very important to us and the arts in general. And so we wanted to make sure that the space had a cohesive but multidisciplinary feel to it. And again, to lean into that element of really high customer service and quality, it felt important for us to have the designers and people who are sourcing products in the same space as the products when they came in. And having that quick connection to between different departments and people being able to just walk over and talk to each other ends up being really valuable for problem solving when inevitably problems arise.

10:44God, it sounds like almost romantic in this day and age. Everyone in a physical space together? I know.

10:53Chloe Sapienza:Yeah, it's nice. We have a great team. We have a really great energy in the space. We hire a lot of creatives, too, in our warehouse team. So a lot of the people on our team are full-time staff, but they're also musicians and writers. And so it's been a great experience. What do you think are some of the lesser known contributors to customer satisfaction that we as founders and entrepreneurs might not consider when it comes to not just design, but things like fulfillment and shipping? What are the details that you've seen actually move the needle? It's a little bit amorphous as all customer experiences, but it feels like obviously timing, like as long as you're getting things to where they're supposed to be on time, that's number one.

11:44Chloe Sapienza:Cost is a big concern. People are used to Amazon and free shipping and it's not quite that way with our industry. And so finding the right like cost effective methods that also get them there reliably. We often ship globally or we'll have teams that have like, you know, 500 people in the U.S. and 500 people all over the world. And so we have to kind of time things as well. So orchestration on timing and cost, I think, are the major factors for delivery. But I do think that the product itself is what really ends up delivering. Because if we got everything there and it ends up not being liked or it looks wrong, it kind of defeats the whole purpose.

12:23Chloe Sapienza:So we really focus on quality. really focus on trying to make sure that what we have shown our customers is what we end up making and hopefully it's better than they expect. Okay. You have to tell me about like an early misstep or panic moment where a product didn't turn out as anticipated and how you worked through it. Oh man. Yeah. The stuff we do behind the scenes is really crazy. I'm sure we keep it completely hidden from our customers, but there are so many, so many mistakes that happen in this industry. scale is a funny one right like sometimes things look a certain way on your screen and then it comes out and it doesn't look like that same way we made these tote bags that I you know I knew what size they were but the customer got them and was like oh my god these are tiny you know and they were they were small they were a very small tote bag it was sort of maybe like handbag size they're really cute and it seemed intentional that they wanted this small tote bag turned out they did not so that was kind of an issue we had to handle delicately because we did everything right technically, except the perception of the scale was off.

13:24What did you do?

13:25Chloe Sapienza:We ended up letting them make new tote bags for their next order, but they ended up choosing the same bag for the next order. Stop it. We were like, we'll get a different bag for you and we'll make it, we'll cover some of the cost. And they ended up liking the tiny tote bags. They had a conversion experience? They had a conversion experience. Yeah. So that was great. You never know. You never know. But other mistakes that like, you know, candles have melted in transit or like chocolates have melted. And we've, you know, we've had to deal with those types of things where we just have to get things remade quickly.

13:56Chloe Sapienza:And that often I think is the biggest strain on like our operations team is like the sales team and the creative team building in enough time for those like things that happen that are out of our control. If you're developing a brand and you're developing a product line, you're often getting tons of, you know, samples along the way and making renderings and like getting it perfect. And because of the sort of short timelines that we're working with, we're relying on brands to do a lot of that work and the makers and the production teams that we work with to do a lot of that work for us up front.

14:24Chloe Sapienza:We see a lot of the products that we sell before they go to customers, but we don't always get to see all of them. And so there's a bit of risk there of, you know, making sure that it meets our standards and the customer's standards. Right. Like if you have a CPG brand, you have to figure out the particularities of, you know, For instance, shipping a jar of pickles so that they don't break theoretically once. Right. And then you've got it, right? But with you, it's like there's a whole litany of issues that could pop up at any given time because you're dealing with different clients in different places and all kinds of different products.

15:01Yeah.

15:02Chloe Sapienza:And when we're doing gift boxes, it's really a creative problem-solving puzzle because the customer wants to pick whatever they'd like to pick. And then it really changes what kind of box those things can go into and how you need to pack them safely. And so there's a lot of kind of ebb and flow of like issue handling there of making sure that and testing, making sure that we're packing things the right way to be presented beautifully while also not breaking in transit or getting, you know, crinkle paper dust on a white T-shirt. Or, you know, there are so many small details when you're putting together products that have never been together in a box that we sell for.

15:38The devil is in the details. My God.

15:41Chloe Sapienza:Are you a perfectionist? In some ways. In other ways, no, not at all. I think that I obsess over design details and I have particular things that I like to go a certain way. But I come from a family of artists and so I have a lot more flexibility, I think, than some people. You came to this via graphic design, right? Yeah. Prior to that, you were actually pursuing being potentially a professional soccer player. Is that true? That's true. Yeah. I grew up playing soccer since I was four years old and played until I was about 20. Had a very strong career and trajectory and was recruited to play in college and loved the sport.

16:27Chloe Sapienza:But when I got there and was in the sort of final home stretch, it was not aligning with, I think, my own expectations and what I needed mentally and physically for myself at that time. And so I had to make a pretty hard pivot at an early age. And I think that that taught me a lot about what I'm capable of and what kind of strain and change can do for you, too. And I knew that I waited until it was sort of a forced decision to make that change for myself. What I eventually realized when I got into developing telescope is that, you know, if something's not working right or not feeling right to kind of just try to make the change sooner before you're forced to make a change.

17:09Chloe Sapienza:It's always better to do something else and try something new than to keep trying to do the same thing and it not quite working. It's excellent advice. And I think the answer to this is often kind of intuitive and nebulous. But like, do you have any kind of like internal process for assessing when it might be time to move on from something or make a change? I do a lot of imagining and I do a lot of like future thinking. And so I try my best to kind of future plan anything that I'm considering changing. It's never, never turns out the way that you imagine it. Best laid plans. Yeah, yeah. There are really no right answers until you've done it.

17:49Chloe Sapienza:And you may have made the wrong choice by changing, but at the very least you've known that at that point and you can kind of then iterate from there. I don't know. I think it's, for me, I take a much more fluid approach to change and I'm luckily less fearful of it now since that early change. Are there times in the trajectory of telescope where you have been forced with a decision like that and you've had to make a big change? taking on like the fulfillment and warehousing and really like getting the space to do that was a change that felt a little bit out of our control. Like it was sort of just happening and we had to make a decision like, were we going to outsource this or were we going to do it ourselves?

18:33Chloe Sapienza:And ended up choosing to do it ourselves for the reasons we talked about. But I think that anytime a decision like that comes up and it's a big decision, I still feel in my mind that there's a way to try the other thing if that didn't work out. Like it's not a straight line, one direction. Like if we absolutely needed to, we can always try something else. It's like it's serious, but it's not that serious. Yeah. I mean, it could be. No. I mean, it makes me think of the fact that you run this company with your husband. He's your co-founder. I also work with my husband sometimes. And so I know like when it works, it can be really beautiful.

19:15When it doesn't work, it's like a recipe for disaster. It also means that like the boundaries between work and life and love become like really porous. How do you manage it?

19:29Chloe Sapienza:We get asked this question so frequently and there isn't, I don't know. I think that we're a little unusual in that we intended this to be the outcome. Like when we first met, we liked working on projects together. I was still in school. We did things like we made music videos together. We did photo shoots together. We built our apartment together. Like we really liked working on projects and we then had to enter the workforce and we were kind of bummed out that you got separated. Yeah, we were like, this is not as fun. So we, our goal was to be able to start a business together and have that experience.