Whatever you do, don’t call them “tchotchkes.”

“Or even worse, ‘trinkets,’” Andrew Spellman, chair of the board of the Promotional Products Association International (PPAI), a not-for-profit trade group founded in 1903, told Retail Brew. “We don’t mind ‘swag,’ but right now we’re pushing the nomenclature ‘merch.’ We want ‘merch’ to be the word.”

Still, among the more than 15,000 member companies that comprise the organization, plenty sell the cheap your-logo-here stress balls, pens, and bottle openers cluttering drawers worldwide. But it’s a broad category that also includes coveted brands like Yeti (“Yeti has crushed it within the promotional space,” Spellman said) and Stanley, which may not be products a company gives away by the thousands on a trade show floor, but rather to sales prospects or beloved office managers on Administrative Professionals Day (on April 24).

Spellman has been in the industry for 24 years, first working for International Merchandise Concepts, a distributor representing brands in the channel, then on the brand side at Victorinox, the Swiss Army Knife and backpack company. Currently, he’s VP of corporate markets at Therabody, which is best known for its Theragun massager.

Spellman’s got a message for brands that have yet to dip their toe in the merch pool: Come in. The water’s warm. And companies want promotional products from established brands.

Keep reading here.—AAN

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Discount chain Five Below experienced “higher-than-planned shrink” in the fourth quarter even after investing in mitigation efforts that it hoped would reduce losses.

The store’s anti-shrink measures included hiring guards and additional store personnel, and checking receipts, to name a few, but CEO Joel Anderson told investors this week that “the most significant change we made across most of the chain was to limit the number of self-checkout registers that were open while positioning an associate upfront to further assist customers.”

He said that while the types of products being stolen are consistent with past trends, what is clear is that shrink is now higher at stores with self-checkout than at stores without self-checkout.

Keep reading here.—AV

As prices keep going up, so do customer expectations, at least when it comes to middle-class consumers, 50% of whom say they’re spending more than they did last year (thanks, inflation!), per Bread Financial’s latest State of the Middle-Class Shopper report.

The financial services firm conducted a two-part survey between October and December 2023, of 5,819 consumers across the US, and then in January 2024, of 2,289 consumers.

And yes, while most (91%) agreed that their spending was more need-focused than want-focused, discretionary spending, including dining and buying beauty and personal care products, was still a part of their lives.

But since money is tight all around, consumers also have higher expectations from brands.

Keep reading here.—JS

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