This is an exclusive 9amBusiness interview with Conor McKenna – CEO and co-founder of Go Swag.
Can you tell us about your background before setting up the business?
Before Go Swag, I worked in software design and research. I dropped out of photography college to work as a freelance website designer and videographer, then moved into UX and service design. Eventually I joined the software agency Waracle, where I became Head of Design Research and worked with organisations like Virgin Money, Sainsbury’s Bank and Roche. That’s where I met my co-founder, Ben Greenock. Our job was helping large organisations redesign products and solve complex operational problems through technology, which had a huge influence on how we approached building Go Swag.
What inspired you to set up Go Swag?
The idea came from a very ordinary problem. While working at Waracle, Ben and I were asked to organise an onboarding pack for a new colleague. We figured it would be easy. Instead we discovered that most of the products were low-quality and the overall fulfillment process was fragmented. No company managed everything end-to-end. We ended up repackaging everything ourselves to make a positive first impression.
When we suggested making that the standard experience, our HR team explained it would be a logistical nightmare to juggle multiple suppliers and global shipping on top of their regular work. Coming from a product and service design background, we couldn’t fathom why an industry of this size still relied on spreadsheets, catalogues and manual processes. We also realised that companies who cared deeply about their digital brand experience were inadvertently overlooking the precious few physical interactions people had with their brand. That felt like a genuine opportunity to build something better.
You started with £200 – can you share how you grew the business organically?
From day one, we were ruthless about capital efficiency and focus, that discipline is really the story, more than the £200. At the start Ben and I were still working full-time, so every evening after work we’d pack orders ourselves out of a tiny office in Glasgow rather than spend money we didn’t have on fulfillment. We were, and still are, completely locked in on solving the customer problem properly. It’s easy to get caught up in “playing founder” on LinkedIn, chasing vanity metrics and initiatives, most of the time that’s a complete waste of money and time.
For the first three years or so, we kept our heads down, and the only thing on our to-do list was learning and understanding the customer’s world and solving for that. When you do that right, and you talk to customers as much as we do, they talk, they tell their friends and colleagues about you. That’s how we built a business where the biggest enterprises in the world come knocking on our door wanting to work with us.
What have been the main challenges that first come to mind on your business journey?
A few stand out. The first is Brexit and the general instability in geopolitics and trade, building a company that ships internationally through years of shifting trade rules and unpredictable markets hasn’t been straightforward.
The second is hiring. Finding the right people to scale a company is genuinely hard, you’re not just filling seats, you’re trying to find people who can operate at the pace a high-growth business demands, and that’s a much smaller pool than people think.
The third is keeping up with demand without letting service quality drop. It’s easy to scale a business by cutting corners; it’s much harder to grow fast and keep the standard of service exactly where it needs to be for every single customer, every single time. That tension between growth and quality has probably been the constant challenge underneath everything else.
Can you tell us more about your role as a leader and how your past has shaped how you lead the business?
I’ve always been someone who likes understanding how systems work and then finding ways to improve them. I see business as, fundamentally, a big system, or equation, to solve: lots of moving parts that need to fit together in the right way. Being autistic and dyslexic means I don’t learn in the same way as most people and had to learn how to teach myself. I grew to love experimenting and solving problems independently. That mindset has everything to do with how I lead today.
Most of my job within that system is finding and powering the right people. I believe in hiring great people and then getting out of their way. Leadership by brute force has never made sense to me, if you find yourself having to push people that hard, you’ve probably hired the wrong person. Not everyone is built for a high-growth startup, and that’s fine. But when you find the people who are, your job is to empower them, not manage every move they make. I see my role as pointing smart people in the right direction and then trusting them to get there.
What are the plans for the business?
Our long-term ambition is to become the default corporate gifting partner for global enterprises. We just raised $5 million to accelerate that process. Over the next few years we’re investing heavily in our technology, expanding further into the US, to grow our engineering and commercial teams, and strengthen our global warehouse network, complete with a new warehouse in Southeast Asia. All told, we’re raising the standard in an industry that hasn’t meaningfully evolved in decades. We want corporate gifting to become something companies see as a strategic extension of their overall brand experience, not just some procurement exercise.
How are you finding being an entrepreneur in the UK at the moment?
Honestly, I don’t think the UK is a great place to build a business right now, if you live in the centre of London, and are building a business that doesn’t require shipping goods over borders then it’s a good location. However, if you’re based outside the M25 then things get much harder. Capital is still overwhelmingly concentrated in London, which captures something like two-thirds of all UK venture funding.
I believe it’s better for the country to have multiple hubs of economic growth rather than everything pooling into one region. London’s GDP per capita is more than double some parts of the North, and that gap only widens when investment, jobs and skilled people keep flowing to the same place. We want to create jobs and opportunities where we’re from, not just add to a pile that’s already stacked high in one corner of the country.
My own story is almost the exact template the Scottish Government points to when it talks about vocational routes to success. I dropped out of higher education, I was a Modern Apprentice, and I’ve ended up building a company that’s raised millions and now employs a large workforce. And yet we’ve had no real support from the Scottish Government.
It mainly feels like surface-level policy, plenty of events and programmes, but not enough people who’ve actually built and scaled something sitting down with founders to work out how to build big businesses in Scotland. Scale-ups need capital and hiring support. Scottish Enterprise and similar initiatives’ best offering tends to be a generic course on “how to do social media”.
On top of that, building over the last five years has been like the extreme sport of startups, Brexit, Covid, interest rate shocks, a cost-of-living crisis, all stacked on top of each other. It’s made us more robust, but it hasn’t been easy.