How Corporate Gifts Can Strengthen Relationships with Tom Romine

Tom Romine [00:00:00]:

We've been doing this now over a decade, and our mission is to help our clients appreciate appreciation. We're obviously passionate about appreciation, and we want to help clients inform them about the best practices to really appreciate those that matter most. They could be employees, clients, partners, that help move their business forward, and we really want to try to maybe call out what are the best ways to do it and help them execute on that.

Alyssa Peltier [00:00:33]:

Great events create great brands, but pulling off an event that engages, excites and connects audiences, well, that takes a village, and we're that village. My name is Alyssa.

Rachel Andrews [00:00:45]:

I'm Rachel.

Felicia Asiedu [00:00:46]:

And I'm Felicia.

Alyssa Peltier [00:00:47]:

And you are listening to Great Events, the podcast for all event enthusiasts and innovators in the world of events and marketing. Hello, everyone. What has been going on in this wide, wide world of events? My name is Alyssa and I will be your host for this week's episode of Great Events, a podcast by Cvent. 

Alyssa Peltier [00:01:09]:

Today, we're going to take things out of the virtual and the hybrid world and really hone in onto the physical world of events. With that topic and theme in mind, we're going to really dive into the gifting and appreciation space. We have brought a amazing expert to talk to you about that gifting and appreciation experience. We have Tom Romine, who is the president and founder of Cultivate, a premium corporate gifts brand. With that, I want to talk a little bit about Tom's background and why we brought Tom to talk to you all today.

Tom started his background in the gifting and experience space at Callaway Golf where he was part of the corporate sales division. Learned a lot about gifting and golf for that matter. 

Alyssa Peltier [00:01:54]:

I'm a little bit jealous. Golf is synonymous with the tournaments and the corporate events and gifting space. Tom spent 11 years honing in on the craft. He then moved on to Maui Jim. Many of you may be familiar with Maui Jim's gifting experience, whether you've been a recipient or worked with them as a gifting and experience provider for your own events.

They're really one of the first, if not the first, and Tom can correct me on that, companies to do the on-site gifting experience the way that you know it today.

Alyssa Peltier [00:02:25]:

 It's a big pillar of the business for Maui Jim and the corporate events side, which got Tom thinking about what more could be done in the gifting and experiences and appreciation for customers. That led him to found and is now the president and founder of Cultivate. Extending that gifting experience beyond just the solo Maui Jim brand, but to bring more to the table, more to your events, more ways to appreciate and deliver a gifting experience for that instant gratification at your own corporate events. Without further ado, let's welcome Tom Romine to the show. Hey, Tom.

Tom Romine [00:03:03]:

Hi, Alyssa. Thanks so much for having me. Really appreciate it.

Alyssa Peltier [00:03:06]:

Yeah, of course. I talked a little bit about Cultivate, but I'd like to dive into a little bit more about the mission of the experience that you provide today for your customers, how you're different and just more about Cultivate as a business.

Tom Romine [00:03:18]:

Yeah, thanks. We've been doing this now over a decade, and our mission is to help our clients appreciate appreciation. We're obviously passionate about appreciation and we want to help clients inform them about the best practices to really appreciate those that matter most. They could be employees, clients, partners, that help move their business forward. We really want to try to maybe call out what are the best ways to do it and help them execute on that. We started off, as you mentioned, as an event gifting company, so that's core to what we do. We've been doing that since 2010. Similar to Maui Jim, we'll come on site with a pop-up experience where everybody gets to pick a gift for themselves and then receive it there on site.

Tom Romine [00:04:08]:

Then of course, this little thing called COVID happened in 2020. While all of us, all the meeting planners, our clients were out there kind of wondering what to do next, so were we, and we figured out a way to serve our clients differently using an online platform that we built from scratch. Now four years later, that's turned into really a meaningful part of our business and really a great way to serve our customers, terrific appreciation anywhere in the world. We're excited that COVID was an incredibly difficult year for us and for many in the industry, but we came out the other side and really proud of what we built and now have even more to offer our clients.

Alyssa Peltier [00:04:51]:

I love that. I started my career at Cvent in our customer marketing division, started up part of the startup team within customer marketing. One of the big pillars of that was appreciation and advocacy, the two As of customer marketing. As such, Cvent has had a great partnership with Cultivate and has worked with your organization at our Cvent CONNECT, which is a huge cut, not only just user conference, but an area where we lean into the appreciation of our customers. We lean into the advocacy and gifting is a major part of that, so it's really closely aligned to the Cvent brand as well. All right, Tom, we are getting prepped for our conversation today. Our production team found a really interesting blog article on gifting trends for 2024.

Now we're more than halfway into the year, so I don't want to rehash that, which is trending in 2024, but I do want to touch on some of the things that we've seen that are common in the space. 

Alyssa Peltier [00:05:48]:

Just quick cliffs notes, if that's even popular anymore, I don't even know, spark notes, what's cool anymore? I guess AI, right? It's a perfect segue to some of those trends that we're seeing in the gifting space, AI being one of those, sustainability being another, experiential marketing, networking over content, a really interesting one, some budgetary constraints, and then gifting with choice. Now, instead of going down into all of these, I don't think we'll have time for those six today.

Alyssa Peltier [00:06:14]:

 Tom and I were talking about going deeper on a handful of these, a couple of these, and give you a little bit more meat on the bones for our listeners. Tom, let's start with what you think is going to be not just big in 2024, but will carry over into 2025 from those six that I just called out here.

Tom Romine [00:06:34]:

I actually want to combine maybe two leading things. One is choice, and we've been gifting with choice even with Maui Jim, of course, there's a choice of sunglasses. Before that, Callaway. Now at Cultivate, we've been gifting with choice for over a decade, but what we've realized is the choice works really well because when you give the recipient a chance to pick something that's personal to them, meaning there's an array of options, instead of giving everybody one jacket, maybe you offer five different ones for men, five different ones for women. Let them choose the style they want that they need, and then pick the size, the color, and then receive that item onsite. Choice works, 

Tom Romine [00:07:20]:

and so we've been seeing that our clients use that successfully for years. As kind of a evolution, I think of choice, we're adding personalization even one step further.

It's almost like a new category where you might first pick an item and then now take it one step further by personalizing it with your initials or something like that, that make it even extra special. I want to point to a recent article I found. Deloitte did a research project on personalization across major consumer brands. It's a fascinating article. I could put it in the show notes for you, but one thing I learned was that personalization is actually not new. In fact, it actually dates back to before the Industrial Revolution.

Tom Romine [00:08:10]:

 When you think about it, that brought mass production and making everything the same. Before that, everything was made for the individual, everything actually was personalized. It's pretty cool. Now as things have evolved and production capabilities have really improved and technology has been added to make production easier, now you can add certain components of personalization back into mass production.

We're seeing things like design experiences as we call them, where you come into an experience, you get to design a jacket or some apparel or a pair of shoes or a new handbag, and you actually get to take the basics of it and then personalize it to you and create your own thing. It's really a cool evolution of, I would call these big brands and these innovative brands that want to bring it to the consumers. 

Tom Romine [00:09:13]:

Now we're trying to bring that component into events. We have these design experiences, and the next chapter we see is actually personalizing on site. Now we're going to be adding the ability to deboss leather items right there on site. You pick out a new bag or something and then you get it debossed with your initials right there for the extra personal touch. We're doing that. We're doing other forms of adding a logo or some other form of cool content on top of a product or an item that you've already selected. We see that as an evolution of choice to personalization and taking it a few steps further.

Alyssa Peltier [00:10:00]:

Yeah, totally. I've actually been a recipient of some of this. We had a really, really interesting activation at Cvent CONNECT this year. There was bandanas that were done with embroidery, experts in rodeo embroidery. If you can think about that, almost like curly type lettering. We were located in San Antonio this past year, so bringing the flair of the city, also to the gifting experience, but also the personalization. There were individuals who were getting the names of their dogs on the bandanas, and it was just a really cool activation.

I could see that in practice and seeing how excited... This was an executive event that those were being done for, but I could see how excited our customers felt to be appreciated in that regard and to get something so personal to bring back to home.

Alyssa Peltier [00:10:43]:

 I love that, and I love the history behind all of that too. If I really think about it, you're right, manufacturing and the Industrial Revolution allows you to scale, but you degrade on personalization. We're trying to find this happy medium and this intersection of digital meeting with the personalization. It sounds like we're almost, I don't want to say regressing, but we're moving forward in that way.

Tom Romine [00:11:05]:

I think we are, and you pointed out something kind of fun that I want to touch on, which is we're trying to find ways to help our clients bring in either a destination or a theme or a specific meaning into the appreciation, but we're trying to help them do it in a way in which it doesn't detract from the end goal of the appreciation. For example, you mentioned a little bandana, it's probably a relatively low-cost item, and this is something that we can do now too, which is on-site embroidery, which I think is actually pretty cool. Imagine if the budget for gifts might be two to $300 per person and you're going to San Antonio. Good example, actually. 

Tom Romine [00:11:53]:

We have a lot of clients that say, "Well, we should do something that's Western. Let's give everybody a pair of cowboy boots."

I think for us, what we want to encourage our clients to do is think about, "Hey, we're going to spend two or $300. Let's make sure that, that item goes home with the guest or is shipped later and is something that they're going to love and use all the time." I would make an argument that while matching a theme or destination, cowboy boots is something that a very small percentage of the US population actually wear regularly. Maybe the better solution might be let's come up with a cool personal way with a bandana or an inexpensive cowboy hat that's got their name on it, because we do a little sash and we embroider that and put it on and they wear it that night, and it's fun and thematic, but we're not blowing the whole budget on something that they might not use after the event.

Alyssa Peltier [00:12:48]:

Yeah, utility is certainly part of the personalization. Travel is a factor, all things considered. Cool isn't everything. Just because you can, doesn't mean that you should. Which is a perfect segue, I feel like, to our next topic, which I know we wanted to talk about, which was sustainability. Because that has been an undercurrent for the last, I don't know, four, five, six years even. Certainly, the US is getting on board. Europe is leagues ahead of us when it comes to just sustainability in general, but sustainability as it pertains to gifting,

Alyssa Peltier [00:13:17]:

what does that look like in 2025, Tom?

Tom Romine [00:13:21]:

I think what we're seeing is a few years ago, because this is like you said, been around a while. I don't think it's going to change. People will probably continue to lean into it and they should, and we want to encourage it. I think initially as consumer brands started to recognize, "Hey, maybe people will buy our brand if we make it with bamboo or we make it with a sustainable plastic or a recycled plastic or something." I think the instinct was let's gift items that are made with sustainable products, therefore we're checking the box sustainable. Great. I think what we're now seeing is we're challenging that notion of just checking the box to say we did it, but actually thinking about what are the goals of the gift in the first place and not getting completely sidetracked with maybe what I would call an extra benefit or an extra extra thing that you can add to the goal.

If the goal is it's a gift, this is an incentive trip. 

Tom Romine [00:14:25]:

We want these folks that have earned the trip and their spouse to come. We want them to feel genuinely appreciated for all the hard work over the past year, and this is little icing on the cake. The trip is the cake. They're going on this amazing trip, and that's what our planners do so well. This icing on the cake, there's a great opportunity as we see it to really build a tangible connection to their achievements and that event through an item that they got to pick and use. If they go the old way, which is let's just check the box and make sure it's made with plastic, if the person doesn't use the item after the event, they're missing the opportunity.

To us, the first step has to be choice. It has to be give them a great choice of a premium brand or products that we really believe they're going to use. 

Tom Romine [00:15:28]:

 Maybe not every day, but at least every week or every month, because that builds that connection back to the event. To me, that's the goal of the gifts that we try to encourage our clients to give is the tie back to the event and that tangible connection. I think if you get distracted too much from that and you end up giving stuff that they don't end up using, we see stuff left at hotel rooms all the time, like promotional products or branded items, which have a time and place to be used, but not as a gift. Not as something we want to celebrate a moment with.

Alyssa Peltier [00:16:08]:

It's got me thinking about your three Rs of recycling, reduce, reuse, and then recycle. If you really think about those in order of operation, reduce what you don't need. Maybe we don't need certain promotional products. Take that spend and apply it to something more meaningful and then make sure that whatever it is that you do gift is reusable. 

Alyssa Peltier [00:16:29]:

It isn't a one-time disposable item. It is something that has longevity that somebody is inclined to take with them out of their hotel room, is inclined to use over and over again, is quality. It really is a conversation on quality and an investment in that appreciation, whether that's an employee, a customer, a VIP, if you will. It really is investing in the right products for the right people so that they want to take those things that you aren't just making more waste.

Tom Romine [00:16:58]:

A great example. We do a lot of warm weather destinations because this is incentive travel, so Hawaii, California, Florida, et cetera, Mexico. One of our most popular gifts is sandals. We do have clients that say, "Oh, I want those Havaianas sandals because I could put my logo, my company logo on there or the name of the events on there." Back to your quality point,

Tom Romine [00:17:24]:

 if you put your foot in a pair of $15 Havaianas sandals, sure people wear them, but oh my gosh, once you have worn a pair of premium amazing sandals, OluKai is a great partner of ours that we've been gifting for over a decade. When you step into those, you're like, "Wow, thank you. My back feels better, my feet feel better, and I'm going to wear these for a long, long time." Versus these Havaianas sandals, frankly, we had a group that did this once and the planner told me afterwards, a lot of people just left them in the room.

It's inexpensive, it's cheap. Like, okay, it's a nice touch, we think, but is it? Because that's just waste to me.

In fact, speaking of branded, Patagonia did a survey, they did a research project to figure out are people keeping their logoed Patagonia jacket and for how long? 

Tom Romine [00:18:23]:

What they found out was that when someone permanently puts a logo on a Patagonia jacket or vest, it dramatically reduces the life of the garment. Because once you've stopped using it or changed companies or don't want to wear a logo out in public, you can't even give it to Goodwill because they're not going to resell a jacket with an IBM logo on it, so it ends up in a landfill. To me, that's a travesty. They actually said that they now encourage people not to do that. I think there is a trend in sustainability where people are saying, to your point, Alyssa, it's quality over new or different or with a logo.

Alyssa Peltier [00:19:07]:

I mean, you said something, it's like, look for these moments of wow, not waste. I have my marketer hat on with that. These moments of wow, and that might not be, wow,

Alyssa Peltier [00:19:17]:

 IBM put their logo on it. Not to trash IBM here, but anybody, any corporate logo. It's not about the logo, it's about the moment that you create by receiving that gift and less about the brand and the longevity of that brand. They're going to remember that moment in receiving that gift because it was so meaningful, it was so thoughtful, it was such quality that, that has a lasting impact. You'll remember the brand longer than if the brand is just on the item itself. That's really interesting because we talk corporate gifting, and I wouldn't think, hey, brandless is a trend, but it seems like there is an intersection between the sustainability and more of a less-brand forward approach so that the item lasts longer. 

Alyssa Peltier [00:19:59]:

It doesn't have this fleeting moment with wherever you acquire that item.

Tom Romine [00:20:05]:

Yeah, for sure.

Alyssa Peltier [00:20:06]:

It's really interesting. Well, Tom, I feel like I've learned so much here, and I feel like I have appreciated appreciation just a little bit more in talking with you. It's very clear that you're passionate about gifting, but also making sure that people feel honored and making sure that people feel like they're seen. There's oftentimes we feel like we're just in a sea of corporations and we're just one of a thousand, a million, a hundred, however many you're at your company, how many customers you have. It's clear to me that gifting is an important part of the overall experience you have with a company.

Alyssa Peltier [00:20:41]:

 I very much appreciate having you on the podcast today. I look forward to potential continued conversation. I know we've talked you and your team about coming on here again and maybe talking a little bit more about trends that we're seeing in 2025. Obviously, we were only able to scratch the surface on a couple today, but any closing remarks you want to leave with our listeners today, Tom?

Tom Romine [00:20:58]:

Yeah, maybe just to plant the seed. This is the time of year that I'm sure all of your event planners that might be listening, they know it. The incentive travel market generally operates in Q1 and Q2. Q2 is by far the biggest quarter where most of the folks are having those trips and meetings. This is the time of year for us to do what we call our R&D phase of our business, and we're deep in that right now. By mid-October, right around IMEX, we will be introducing a ton of new ideas, and I think meeting planners love new. 

Tom Romine [00:21:36]:

We love new, as long as it works, and we're excited to roll it out. Maybe on your next, if we get together again in a few months, we'll have some great new things to share that I think planners will love, and I know guests will love. That's where we start is will these guests love to receive a gift in this way, shape, or form? Will they love this new brands? Will they love this experience? I'm excited to share some of the updates in just a few months.

Alyssa Peltier [00:22:03]:

That's great. We're going to be totally looking forward to that and consider this your official invitation to come back and tell us everything, how it goes at IMEX, what the reception is like, and how our planners are looking to gift in 2025. All right, Tom, with that, thank you so much. Thank you to you, yourself, your team, for helping to coordinate all of this and to Cultivate for all of your insights on what's going on in the world of gifting and appreciation. With that, listeners, have a great rest of your week and we'll see you on the next episode. Bye. 

Alyssa Peltier [00:22:35]:

Thanks for hanging out with us on Great Events, a podcast by Cvent. If you've been enjoying our podcast, make sure to hit that subscribe button so you never miss an episode.

Rachel Andrews [00:22:46]:

You can help fellow event professionals and marketers just like you discover Great Events by leaving us a rating on Apple, Spotify or your preferred podcast platform.

Felicia Asiedu [00:22:56]:

Stay connected with us on social media for behind-the-scenes content, updates and some extra doses of inspiration.

Rachel Andrews [00:23:03]:

Got a great story or an event to share? We want to hear from you. Find us on LinkedIn, send us a DM, or drop us a note at greatevents@cvent.com.

Felicia Asiedu [00:23:13]:

Big thanks to our amazing listeners, our guest speakers, and the incredible team behind the scenes. Remember, every great event begins with great people.

Alyssa Peltier [00:23:22]:

That's a wrap. Keep creating, keep innovating, and keep joining us as we redefine how to make events great.