Executive Summary
HubSpot runs merch campaigns for 7,000+ employees across Europe. They used to manage it manually. Then they outsourced the whole operation to Sunday and cut shipping costs by 60% while getting deliveries from five weeks down to two days.
About the Client
HubSpot is one of the world's leading CRM and marketing automation platforms. With thousands of employees across Europe and a culture built around employee experience, merch isn't a nice-to-have for them. It's a deliberate tool for connection. Their Customer Success Management team runs multiple campaigns each year: onboarding kits, tenure celebrations, seasonal gifts, even baby boxes for new parents. The logistics of doing this at scale, across borders, with consistent quality? That's where most companies quietly give up.
HubSpot didn't give up. They just stopped trying to do it themselves.
The Challenge
The problem with global employee merch isn't the merchandise. It's everything around it.
HubSpot's People team had a clear vision: mark the moments that matter. Three-year anniversaries. Five-year milestones. The annual Week of Rest. New babies. End of year. Each of these campaigns required sourcing products, aligning on design, collecting employee sizes and addresses across multiple countries, managing customs clearance, and then actually tracking whether packages arrived.
Multiply that across several campaigns per year, dozens of markets, and thousands of employees, and you've built yourself a part-time logistics job that nobody signed up for. Packages shipped from outside Europe meant three-week lead times. International customs added unpredictability. The operational overhead was real and invisible in the budget until someone sat down and added it up.
Most companies in this position do one of two things: they simplify the program (fewer campaigns, lower quality) or they absorb the chaos (more time, more cost, more error). HubSpot chose a third path.
The Sunday Solution
HubSpot handed Sunday a list of employees, names, sizes, locations and stepped back.
Sunday handled design, production, packaging, customs clearance, global shipping, and delivery tracking through their Wardrobe platform. HubSpot's team stayed in the loop without managing the details. That shift, from operator to approver, is what changes the math on these programs.
By localizing production and fulfillment within Europe, Sunday cut HubSpot's shipping costs by 60%. Delivery times dropped from five weeks to two to three days. Packages that used to travel across the globe now moved within the continent, with fewer customs complications, faster tracking, and a smaller carbon footprint.
The design work matched HubSpot's standards precisely. Everything carried their signature orange. Even the sticker sealing the silk tissue paper inside each box was branded. The unboxing experience, the moment an employee opens a package, was treated as part of the campaign, not an afterthought.
The Campaigns
Week of rest. HubSpot's annual employee reset became a coordinated gifting moment. Custom boxes went out to employees across the EMEA region, each containing branded sliders, blankets, and socks. The goal was simple: make people feel like the company meant it. The execution, shipping to multiple countries in a tight timeframe, required the kind of logistics infrastructure that Sunday had already built.
End of year. Custom-branded t-shirts in designed boxes, distributed before year-end. A gift that functions as both appreciation and reinforcement of culture heading into a new year.
Baby boxes. When employees became new parents, they received a personalized box: a beanie, a baby bodysuit, a custom thank-you card. It's a small gesture that lands differently than a Slack message. HubSpot extended their culture of care to employees' families, and Sunday made it operationally feasible at scale.
Tenure gifts. Three-year and five-year milestones received premium packages: hoodies, socks, weekend bags wrapped in custom silk paper with messaging that acknowledged the actual milestone. These aren't generic swag drops. They're designed to feel earned.
Platform & Products
Features used: Wardrobe platform (global distribution, customs clearance, real-time tracking), Redeem Pages (for size and address collection), branded unboxing design.
Products: Branded sliders, blankets, socks, t-shirts, hoodies, weekend bags, baby beanies, baby bodysuits, custom packaging, silk tissue paper, personalized thank-you cards.
All packaging used recycled materials. Carbon offsetting was applied to qualifying shipments.
The Results
| Metric | Before Sunday | After Sunday |
|---|---|---|
| Shipping cost per campaign | Baseline | -60% |
| Average delivery time (EMEA) | 3 weeks | 2-3 days |
| Internal coordination time | High (manual) | Near zero |
| Campaign consistency | Variable | Consistent across markets |
The 60% cost reduction came from a structural change, not a discount. When you source and fulfill within Europe instead of shipping globally, the economics of international merch change entirely. What looked like a cost-efficient approach (buying cheap, shipping direct) was actually the expensive one once you counted lead times, customs delays, internal hours, and the campaigns that quietly got cancelled because they were too complicated.
What This Model Makes Possible
HubSpot's merch program runs consistently because it's been systematized. Campaigns don't depend on one person knowing the right vendor or managing a spreadsheet of addresses. They run because Sunday has the infrastructure and HubSpot has the clarity to hand it off.
That's the actual shift: from treating merch as a series of one-off projects to treating it as an ongoing operational function. One with a platform, a process, and someone accountable for making it work.
Most companies are still in the first phase. They're spending more than they think, getting less than they want, and wondering why merch always feels harder than it should.
It doesn't have to.
