OrderMyGear is the technology company behind your company swag
After acquiring BrightStores in November 2022 with help from Wells Fargo’s technology banking team, OMG’s growth brings much-needed solutions to the branded merchandise space.
Branded merchandise is everywhere. From company swag to festival merch, to your kids’ soccer jerseys, people love to proudly represent their team or organization. The process for ordering this gear has evolved from handwritten order forms to a streamlined, technology-driven industry. OrderMyGear, or OMG, has been one of the key players behind the technology since 2007.
“We’re a SaaS (software as a service) company that team dealers, decorators, and promotional product distributors use to build online stores,” said Matt Kaplan, president of OMG. “What we deliver is intuitive and simple.”
Prior to companies like OMG, ordering branded merchandise was time-consuming and rife with errors. OMG enables businesses to sell custom branded merchandise like apparel, promotional products, and sports equipment to groups with just a click through eCommerce-enabled websites.
No sign-up sheets. No waiting for checks to cash. No manual processing.
OMG quickly became an industry-leader in the team dealer space over the course of a decade, but its presence in other parts of the market — decorators and distributors — was minimal.
Doing business with fewer than 10% of the companies selling branded merchandise in 2021 led Kaplan and his team to a logical conclusion — OMG needed to grow, and it needed to grow fast.
They began looking at BrightStores, a market leader in online company stores for promotional product distributors, recognized as company store experts and a leader in company store technology.
“We were a privately owned small company. Competing with larger companies like OrderMyGear became increasingly challenging over the years,” said Tanya Ignacek-Sutton, a senior vice president at OMG who worked for BrightStores prior to the acquisition. “We were friendly competitors and as time went along, we realized it was a perfect pairing.”
Wells Fargo Technology Banking Group
- Full-service commercial and investment banking platform, serving early-stage to mid-corporate tech companies
- 100 specialized technology bankers in nine offices across the U.S.
- More than 1,000 clients in hardware, software, internet, fintech, and sustainable technology
- No. 1 ACH originator* bank by volume and leader in treasury management
* Nacha, 2021, Nacha’s Top 50
Susquehanna Growth Equity (SGE), an investor in OMG since 2018, introduced Kaplan and OMG CEO Leonid Rozkin to Wells Fargo’s Technology Banking Group to help facilitate the credit needed for the acquisition.
“A lot of people are looking for ‘what can you do for me today,’” said Aaron Flack, a growth equity investor at SGE. “But the Technology Banking Group positions Wells Fargo not just as a financial institution, but as a huge technology company focused on long-term investments. So, we are excited to give Wells Fargo an opportunity to help OMG with its acquisition.”
The preexisting relationship — and trust — between SGE and Rahul Baig, head of Technology Banking Venture Capital and Growth Equity Coverage, and Todd Schwartz, Wells Fargo Commercial Capital business development officer, helped them to quickly respond and present a credit proposal to OMG.
“Our speed, confidence, and creativity helped us capture this opportunity,” said Dice Nakamura, Dallas-based Technology Banking senior lead commercial relationship manager.
On Nov. 14, 2022, OMG announced its acquisition of BrightStores.
“It feels like there are big entities out there that have been begging for the solutions a combined OMG and BrightStores will bring,” said Kaplan. “Our new company can now go out and start creating more formal partnerships with some of the biggest players in this space.”
In the months since, Mykayla Goodwin, OMG’s vice president of strategy, has gotten a glimpse of what the new OMG can become.
“We’re having conversations with some of the biggest players in the market,” she said. “It’s hard not to see something special on the horizon. We’ve never been more excited about our future.”
