At a recent Lyft event, the brand decided to move away from the usual swag. Frisbees or stress balls or notebooks or pens that pile up in your closets and drawers. Instead, in a large bowl, there was a pile of ripe green avocados, each printed with the Lyft logo. They were a hit.
Not to be outdone, AT&T sent out branded pineapples to VIP clients. And then Twitter gave out peaches at an event, each one featuring the iconic bird mascot on them. Soundcloud’s branded radishes were a particularly unexpected highlight of a party, and tasted good in salads.
The woman behind this trend is Danielle Baskin, a San Francisco-based designer and visual artist best known for her work designing bicycle helmets. Branded fruit is a fun and exciting thing for a consumer to receive at a corporate event.
The origins of Baskin’s company, Branded Fruit, began as a bit of a joke. In 2015, Baskin had a friend whose start-up Scroll Kit was acquired by WordPress. She was invited to a barbecue and the host told her to bring some avocados. “I thought it would be kind of funny to bring avocados with the Scroll Kit logo on them,” she says.
Baskin tinkered around with some machines in her basement to find a way to emblazon the brand’s logo onto the avocados, and when she brought them to the party, she remembers people being very excited about them. “People were taking pictures of them and talking about how they were such good swag,” Baskin remembers. “But they are also so easy to toss into your backpack for dinner later. And who doesn’t love an avocado?”
She has now made branded fruit for everyone from Pizza Hut to Heroku to AT&T. Baskin has also had personal requests: One man ordered several avocados for a wedding proposal. Orders are as small as 10 pieces of fruit that will be centerpieces at an event to 500 pieces that will be handed to out to guests. Each fruit costs, on average, $5 to make. That’s not cheap in the world of swag, which is known for churning out products at rock-bottom prices, like $1 T-shirts or 50¢ tote bags. But it is reasonable to larger companies.
