Businesses are spending billions on more sustainable promotional products, but over-ordering, obsolete stock, and poor inventory management could be undermining those efforts before products are ever used.
Thank you for reading this post, don't forget to subscribe!Businesses are buying more sustainable corporate merchandise than ever, but choosing a greener product may be addressing only part of the waste problem.
In the US alone, sales of promotional products classified as sustainable reached $3.69 billion in 2024, according to the Promotional Products Association International (PPAI), growing 20 percent year-on-year. The scale of South Africa’s corporate merchandise industry, while not officially tracked, is evident in the volumes moving through individual suppliers; one of Africa’s largest promotional product suppliers reports capacity to brand more than 250,000 products every day.
“The problem is increasingly not only what businesses buy, but how much they buy and what happens to it afterwards,” according to Malcolm Herbert, Chief Financial Officer at Sapphire, an integrated business solutions company specialising in procurement, logistics and branded merchandise. “Over-ordering, poor demand planning and merchandise that becomes obsolete or expires before it is ever used can mean businesses pay to manufacture, brand, transport and warehouse products that ultimately deliver no commercial value.”
He continues: “This means sustainability needs to start before a product is selected. You can procure the most environmentally responsible product available, but if you order 10,000 and only use 7,000, you still have a waste problem.”
Herbert explains that sustainability isn’t only about what something is made from. “It is about how accurately you plan, how much you buy, how intelligently you distribute it and what happens to the stock afterwards.”
The broader environmental context is significant. The United Nations Environment Programme estimates that 92 million tonnes of textile waste are generated globally every year, equivalent to a garbage truck of textiles being landfilled or incinerated every second.
“For businesses purchasing uniforms, promotional clothing, point-of-sale material, campaign collateral and branded merchandise, reducing their contribution starts with better procurement and inventory discipline,” he adds. “One of the biggest contributors to unnecessary waste is over-purchasing and forgotten stock.”
“Campaign quantities are often forecast months in advance and may pass through agencies and suppliers before being ordered,” he explains. “If forecasts aren’t interrogated against actual requirements and existing inventory, businesses can be left with dated collateral, event-specific merchandise or perishable products with little or no value once the campaign ends.”
Herbert notes that at Sapphire, an extreme example was encountered when taking over a new client’s inventory in 2021. “What we found was that among the stock sitting in storage were promotional lollipops that had expired approximately two years earlier.”
“The client hadn’t only lost the money spent purchasing something that could no longer be used,” he says. “They had continued paying to warehouse it for another two years.”
“Waste has a compounding cost because you can pay for the product, freight and handling, and then continue paying for the space it occupies long after it has lost its value,” he cautions. “We have since encountered similar situations, including perishable products purchased for one-off events being returned to warehouses and left until after expiry.”
For larger clients, Herbert recommends conducting detailed quarterly stock reviews, sharing monthly stock-on-hand information for replenishment programmes and managing purchasing within agreed stock-exposure ceilings.
“Where excess campaign stock remains after packing or distribution, clients should be alerted while there is still an opportunity to redeploy it,” he says. “Where reuse is impossible, alternatives such as recycling or recovering value from the material can be considered.”
Herbert says there is another form of wastage that rarely appears on an inventory report: the lost commercial opportunity when marketing material is delivered but never used.
“A promotional banner sitting in the back room of a retail or fuel site during the campaign it was designed to support may eventually become physical waste, but its commercial value was lost much earlier,” he explains. “From a procurement perspective, everything can appear successful: the right item was produced, it reached the right destination and the invoice was paid.”
“If it wasn’t used when it was supposed to be used, however, its entire marketing opportunity may have been lost,” adds Herbert. “Technology is increasingly helping businesses close this gap.”
“At Sapphire we use promotional management applications across client programmes, including Astron Energy and Engen,” he says. “This tool is used to improve visibility over the distribution and implementation of campaign material across multiple locations.”
“Sustainable corporate merchandise therefore requires businesses to look beyond the product itself,” he concludes. “Preventing waste in the first place is one of the most effective sustainability strategies a business has.”