BrandShare’s specialty is gifts for e-commerce customers

Mott’s Fruity Rolls. Tide detergent pods. Art of the Shave razors.

These are just some of the surprises e-commerce shoppers have found when their packages arrived – tucked, for example, inside the children’s pajamas from Zulily, the sheets from Bed Bath & Beyond or the men’s shirts from Brooks Brothers.

The retail world no longer guarantees faceto-face opportunities to pitch new products to consumers — a taste test in a supermarket aisle, an impulse-purchase display at the checkout counter — because shoppers no longer have to leave home to buy. So the in-package free sample has become a key marketing and customer-loyalty-building tool in online commerce because of its seemingly undeniable popularity.

“Who doesn’t like free? Especially when something has real value,” said Craig Kapilow, senior director of brand partnerships and integrated marketing at Rue La La, an invitation-only online shop offering short-lived deals on brand-name merchandise.

The answer: No one doesn’t like free, apparently, and that’s meant enormous success for a Philadelphia-area family-run business founded before e-commerce was a thing.

BrandShare, based in Berwyn, Pennsylvania, is believed to be the world’s first and largest media and e-commerce sampling company, providing 74 million “value-add product inserts” a month and expected to reach between $40 million and $50 million in revenue this year. Triple-digit growth since 2013 earned the company — created in 1984 by Dick Guyer and one of his nine children, Doug — a spot on the Inc. 5000 this year.

E-commerce is projected to reach $700 billion in the United States by year-end, and brand spending on product sampling is expected to total $34.12 billion this year, according to the Path to Purchase Institute in Chicago. The Guyer family’s decision to redirect its focus to the online shopping world seems genius.

“If we wouldn’t have made this change, we wouldn’t be where we are today,” said Doug Guyer, president of the company of 54 employees, split mostly between Berwyn and New York City. BrandShare also has offices in Bentonville, Arkansas, and San Francisco, primarily to serve Wal-Mart, one of its biggest retail clients, and in Chicago, home to a major brand whose products it samples, Wrigley.

Founded initially as International Direct Response, the company was proposing a new revenue stream — media inserts, such as credit-card offers — for catalog companies Dick Guyer, now retired in Florida, had served as a list broker. (List brokers help companies get their message to the right audiences.) Doug Guyer graduated from Boston College in 1983 with a degree in marketing.

Then came the idea to expand beyond media inserts (paperwork basically) to product samples. Their first job: placing 200,000 Tylenol packets, along with coupons for the pain reliever, in catalog orders from Cabela’s, Eddie Bauer, and Sportsman’s Guide.

Johnson & Johnson was so pleased with the results that it increased the number of samples to 4 million five months later, Doug Guyer said. The company has “been a great partner ever since,” he said.

As retailing changed, so did the Guyers’ business, rebranded this year as BrandShare. By the mid- to late 1990s, that meant media and product sampling in e-commerce orders.

BrandShare pays retailers a fee, the specifics of which Doug Guyer would not disclose, to get samples included in their outgoing packages. It makes money by charging brands a fee to get their products placed, and almost guaranteed notice.

“We’re going to put your product into a FedEx or UPS package that gets opened 100 percent of the time in a very positive environment,” Guyer said.