Prior to March 2020, Shaunak Amin and his team ran a fairly successful lunch-delivery service for companies in Manhattan. The company allowed workers to choose items from multiple restaurants’ menus, which would then be billed and delivered in a single order. It was a winning concept until the coronavirus pandemic shut down offices across the city.

“We had to come up with an idea to pivot the business to something else. That’s how SnackMagic was born,” says Amin, CEO and founder.

Shaunak Amin, CEO and founder of SnackMagic and SwagMagic

SnackMagic is a build-your-own snack box service that enables the recipients to choose the items they want. Essentially, people are given a specific spending limit by their company – or whoever is sending the gift – and they can choose whatever they want from SnackMagic’s menu, or from a smaller array of items that the sending company has created and branded.

The pivot has been wildly successful. SnackMagic’s business is “10 times what the food-delivery business was at its peak,” Amin says. SnackMagic hit a $20 million revenue run rate in eight months, turning profitable in December 2020, according to TechCrunch. In April 2021, SnackMagic raised $15 million in venture capital funding. Amin has said the funding will be used to grow and expand the business.

SnackMagic, a build-your-own snack box service that launched during the pandemic, is expanding into swag.

One of the main ways SnackMagic is growing? By expanding into promotional products. This summer, the company launched SwagMagic, which follows a similar concept as SnackMagic, though it features logoed hard goods rather than food items. “We didn’t start out thinking we wanted to do swag and snacks,” Amin says. “But swag continued to be a bigger and bigger portion of what we do. Early this year, people would come and ask if they could send a swag box and let people pick the items they want.”

SwagMagic came after Amin and his team analyzed the market and saw there was room for a simplified, technology-driven approach to corporate gifting. “The products are fantastic, but the process of deciding what you want to order and which vendor to use is very, very long,” Amin says. “We’re big believers in simplicity.”

SwagMagic lets clients set a budget so that recipients can choose the items they want to receive in their custom swag boxes.

With SwagMagic, people are able to choose the items they want in the sizes and colors they prefer. The company also allows its clients to mix in surprise items for recipients and throw in a few snacks to finish off a custom box. “We do both ends of the spectrum,” Amin says. “That’s our differentiation.”

SwagMagic handles inventory tracking, personalization and distribution for its clients. The data Snack and SwagMagic amasses about consumer interest in various products has been key, particularly for the brands it works with, according to Amin. The company is also able to help clients track ROI for custom boxes they send out, particularly when the swag is being used for prospecting. “People are using swag and snacks as a way to get people to call,” Amin says.

Even as events and offices reopen, Amin isn’t worried about the future of his company. SwagMagic recently launched an in-person component to deliver custom products and snacks. A recent example: SwagMagic put together 1,000 goodie bags for a big event in Las Vegas. Each bag was personalized and sent to the hotel where attendees were staying so it could be handed out personally.

Amin refers to his company as “scalable gifting,” and notes that he has a feeling the swag portion will continue to grow, eventually overtaking the snack portion of the business.

“Since day one, it’s been full speed ahead,” Amin says.