Welcome Wednesday: What's your favorite type of swag?

[Dave LIAO]

👋 Happy Wednesday, Atlassian Community!

Time for another Welcome Wednesday question: What kind of swag do you love?

Caps, pens, t-shirts, mugs, stickers?

Have a favorite?

For me, bag clips - like the red Yelp clip pictured above! - are always useful and appreciated. And very rare to find, at least in my experience.

📢 Comment with your favorite types of swag, and why! Looking forward to your responses!

[Dave LIAO]

I also loved eazyBI's international travel adapter - on brand, as you can hook up lots of different data sources to their tool. 😉

[Minesh Kapadia]

I love t-shirt, pens, Keychain, and travel adapter is also a good idea.

[Dave LIAO]

@Dave Rosenlund _Trundl_ - figured you'd appreciate the photo I posted in this discussion! 🙌

[Dave Rosenlund _Trundl_]

And you would be right about that, too 😎

[Ollie Guan]

My absolute favorite piece of swag right now is an F1-style baseball cap from the Atlassian Williams team – a gift my friend just brought back for me from the Australian F1 Grand Prix.

I’m completely obsessed with it! I especially love swag that I can actually wear, and this cap is perfect:

• It looks great in photos and at events

• It’s super practical on sunny days

• And it has that cool F1 racing vibe, plus the Atlassian × Williams story behind it
  Huge thanks to my friend @Yong Yang - 填空题咨询  for bringing it back from the track! 🧢

[Dave LIAO]

Now that's swag you can wear with swagger!

[Bruno Legeard _Lynqa_]

Has to be a mug for me! Always on my desk with a cup of tea, so it gets used every single day. Practical and comforting at the same time.

[Arkadiusz Wroblewski]

Mugs always 🤭

Coffee needs to land somewhere 😂

[Urmo]

Stickers are still cool even today. But mostly useful is tshirts, mugs. Mostly bags are not good because they are not always think thru.

[Marco Brundel]

I love caps, especially if they are in one color.

[Stephen_Lugton]

I've never seen those bag clips.

And I'm not allowed to collect pens anymore; one of our drawers was getting full and when my girlfriend emptied it to see what was in it, it turned out to be dozens of pens that I'd picked up from exhibitions, etc.

My favourites are hats and little key rings with supermarket trolley tokens, but I always have to consider that if I don't bring something back for my daughter there will be consequences so what I aim for (especially at larger exhibitions) is plushies, plastic ducks, lightsabres (of which my daughter now has 3 and again I'm banned from getting any more!), and fidget toys.

But one thing I always look out for is stickers, keyrings, etc. that show women in technology to give to my daughter to show her that she can be whatever she wants (at least she no longer wants to be a big red London bus when she grows up)

[Teodora V _Warsaw Dynamics_]

I know this is already a bit "old" but I still love water bottles. I try to never buy bottled water, and I always have a bottle with me. The cooler the shape and branding, the better!

[Dave LIAO]

I still have my Refined water bottle! 

[Urmo]

I also have Refined water bottle. Probably most legendary bottle to have!

Also I have 2018 Atlassian Barcelona water bottle but because it's made plastic i have not used it long time.

[Darryl Lee]

Pix? I'm wondering if I ever had this Refined bottle. 

[Dave LIAO]

If I can find it, will snap a shot! 📸 

And if you want it, I'll hand it off to you the next time we're in the same city

[Raj Sehmi]

there may or may not be new designs for the legendary water bottle in production for Anaheim 👀

[Dave LIAO]

@Raj Sehmi - whaaaaaaaat

[Josh]

Generally, T-shirts and beanies (the Atlassian one last year was really nice).

It's also a super nice touch when there are plushies or other kid-focused swag for those with children or young family members. K15t has had some exceptional swag for kiddos.

[Amanda Barber]

My kids loved their shirts from K15T last year!!

[Kris Klima _K15t_]

I'll make sure our Design team sees this :D 

Thanks!

(But yeah, our swag is extremely popular!) 

[Dave LIAO]

Who doesn't love a Taco plushie?

And Gliffy has a cute one too, I wonder what their mascot's name is...

[Justine MacLean - Gliffy Solutions]

The Gliffy mascot is named Djedi!  I am biased, but I must say Djedi is looking extra cute for team '26.  There's even fun Djedi stickers so please swing by our booth!  We would love to meet Gliffy/Djedi fans...not to mention people often love to share the plushies with their kids and dogs too, haha :D

[Dave LIAO]

@Justine MacLean - Gliffy Solutions - Making a note! 🙌

[Amanda Barber]

Oooh love this post as I gear up for TEAM! Haha. We always seem to lose or run out of bag clips in this house, so those are always welcome - especially if they're also a magnet. Good pens, fun stickers, tide pens or wipes, and chapstick are often favorites of mine to keep in my backpack. Basically, I love anything that I will actually use. (I'm too picky to ever want a t-shirt from a conference, I think...) I do like the idea of a beanie or a baseball cap - beanies seem to fit more people more flexibly!

[Barbara Szczesniak]

I'm big on pens, laptop backpacks that can also hold anything else you might need on the plane, and stress balls.

I went to a weeklong training at HP in 1993 and got a triangle-shaped, 3-color highlighter—always good for a tech writer in the days when you printed stuff out. It finally dried up a couple of years ago. I think, at 30 years, this was my longest lasting swag item. Most of the mugs have either broken or were not chosen when packing for a move.

[Natalie Beiler]

I have a tendency to hoard pens so always a big hit for me and easy to pack when traveling home from an event. Anything wearable is also fun. Truthfully, any swag can make my day.

[Bryan Guffey]

Gift cards, gift cards, gift cards!

Absent that, good, solid, metal water bottles, socks, jackets, hoodies, and high-quality shirts. It is frustrating how hard it is to get &Open to support extended sizes for clothing, though. 

[Matt Doar _Adaptavist_]

I keep hoping to see more cat and dog toys, rather than socks. 

Lego is always in fashion. Googly eyes would be great, but too much chaos I suspect.

Stickers, funny post-it notes and good quality notebooks usually catch my eye.

Cards for donating to charities are the best swag I ever see though!

[Josh]

I don't think I've ever seen Lego swag. That'd be awesome!

[Darryl Lee]

@josh :

So, the Vonage and Akamai ones I got going to a free API:World Expo back in September. (It was very very... small, but hey, they had some fun swag!)

Multiplier I think i got last year or the year before at Team.

The Atlassian ones are definitely collectors items, I guess. At Team 2024 in Las Vegas in April, the conference app had a notification that you could get an exclusive Lego model or something if you visited X number of Atlassian booths and got the right scans or whatever.

Only... after visiting several booths, it was looking like the model was nowhere to be found. Something about it being stuck in customs in ... Spain? Huh. (I later found out that buildamoc.com is based in Sevilla, Spain.)

Fast-forward to October 2024, and I had the extreme fortune to get to go to Team 2024 Europe in Barcelona to speak on a panel. (Thanks Appfire!)

Towards the end of the conference, as booths were starting to pack up, I got word that there were Atlassian Lego sets available. And wait, there were two different Lego sets?

Turns out one of the sets were the ones that were supposed to be shipped to Las Vegas that got stuck in customs.

Welp, they made it back to San Jose with me, woot!

Oh, that tiny minifig was from Tempo. You got to build your own self-portrait minifig, complete with cape.

Sidenote: that little thing with pink rocks in front of the minifig was made at a super-fun mosaic magnet workshop at the very cool Philadelphia's Magic Gardens, which was a very cool place to visit after speaking at the Phillies ACE Kickoff last June with @Ed Gaile  @Dave LIAO and @Keira Gallagher!

[Darryl Lee]

So when we say swag, we're talking about freebies, NOT prizes from raffles, right?

Because @Matt Doar _Adaptavist_ mentioned Lego, and @Barbara Szczesniak mentioned a laptop backpack (I mean, I guess one or two of the Summit bags were technically a laptop backpacks but I remeber they were kind of flimsy), but typically I've only seen "real" laptop backpacks and large Lego kits given away as raffle prizes.

(Oh right there are the custom Atlassian Lego kits that they sometimes make you visit multiple booths to get. Yes, those are neat.)

ANYWHO, with that clarification out of the way, despite me taking nearly any kind of swag (with the idea that I'll bring it back to the office), what I really like are charging cables.

I lose/abuse/break charging cables all the time. So the more spares, the merrier.

Here's some recent ones that I liked:

(Thanks Clearpath!) 

(On a keychain! From Catworkx)

And of course there's this classic from K15t:

 

I think my unicorn version of this broke. :-{

So yeah, boring. Useful. Charging cables. :-}

[Natalie Beiler]

@Darryl Lee YES! I didn't think of this because none of the shows I've attended have offered them. Cool.

[Tayler Mendoza]

I love a good mug for my morning coffee 😎

[Kris Klima _K15t_]

Has anyone ever had bandanas as swag? 

[Stephen_Lugton]

No, but until I read this for a second time I was intrigued by the idea of Bananas as swag!

[Arkadiusz Wroblewski]

@Stephen_Lugton @Kris Klima _K15t_ 

I seen Bananas as swag on Frankfurt am Main Marathon 🤣

I even grabbed couple of them because without them it will be hard to make it done 🤣

[Dave LIAO]

@Arkadiusz Wroblewski - I love the idea of edible swag!

Adaptavist did this at a conference, they had chocolate bars with custom Adaptavist branding on it. 🍫🍫🍫

[Matt Doar _Adaptavist_]

And I missed out on them. Probably for the best :)

[Darryl Lee]

OMG, the Adaptavist Tony's Chocolonely bars were So. Damn. Good. I think these were a Barcelona-only thing? Easier to import there. (See also: custom Atlassian Lego sets caught in customs)

OH! And I almost forgot that Champions ALSO got Tony's:

I swear, I waited at least until the award ceremony was over and everybody had a chance to hit up the table during the Community Champions dinner before I threw a few more in my bag.

(Was everybody perhaps distracted by the MCB photo op that I regularly skip? Maaaaybe. :-)

It's not a lie that a lot of what motivates me is swag.

[Darryl Lee]

OH, so it wasn't swag at an Atlassian conference, nor was it even from the folks who put on the Atlassian Builders' Summit but I think as part of some LA Dodgers promotion at the hotel, Tito's Vodka was giving out free samples (tiny tiny samples) of drinks and.... bandanas!

[Dave LIAO]

@Darryl Lee - whoa, I missed out on the ACC-branded Tony's! 🍫

Nice scoring that bandana!

[Darryl Lee]

See @Dave LIAO that's what happens when you always BAIL on the Community Leaders Champions dinners. :-P