I've made over 200,000 Christmas sweaters for brands. Here's what 15 years of doing it has taught me.
I did the numbers last week.
Over the past 15 years, I've made more than 200,000 custom Christmas sweaters for brands.
I've made sweaters for most of the brands you can think of — Google, Microsoft, Meta, Dell, BMW, Pepsi, Red Bull, Starbucks, IHOP, Virgin, Warner Brothers, Procter & Gamble, and over 1,000 others. We've also made sweaters for South Park, The Office, and Parks and Recreation.
As far as I know, I was the first person to make a custom Christmas sweater for a brand. Back in 2011, I was running a small Christmas sweater company when Nando's asked us to make 200 for a campaign. The campaign went viral — millions of impressions across social — and the phone started ringing.
Over the next few years we continued making custom sweaters for brands before eventually forming Roody in 2019, where we continue to make custom ugly Christmas sweaters but also lots of other products. At Roody, we plant a tree for every item we make.
Here are four projects that taught me how this works.
IHOP, 2016–2017: a campaign that came back for an encore
In late 2016, MRM McCann reached out about a campaign for IHOP. They had a mockup and they wanted a fully knitted sweater.
IHOP's December 6, 2017 Instagram post showing the second-year campaign at scale. 5,152 likes. 369 comments.
We produced 250 sweaters split between MRM's office in Princeton, New Jersey and a fulfillment partner in Manhattan Beach, California. Delivered December 12, 2016.
The campaign launched. It worked.
The 2016 campaign worked well enough that the following December, MRM came back to do the IHOP sweater again. Different design, same vendor.
We produced the 2017 run. IHOP launched it on December 6, 2017 with a post that opened with their own framing: "It's HOLIDAY SWEATER season once again!" The post pulled 5,152 likes and 369 comments. The comments are the part that mattered.
The same post photographed two ways. Both images from IHOP's official verified Instagram account.
The comments were full of real people asking how to buy a sweater that wasn't for sale.
Real users asking IHOP how to buy the sweater. It wasn't for sale. They wanted one anyway.
"PLEASE TELL ME HOW TO GET ONE OF THESE!! I must have one!" — "How do you get one?" — "I need thisss" — "Will you DM me too plz!"
Within days of the launch, the account director at MRM was in our inbox:
Sweaters are a huge hit! Would it be possible to place another order of 50 or 100 in a rather quick turn time?
What followed was one of the most intense ten-day reorder cycles we've ever run. The request grew from 50–100 sweaters to 200 within 24 hours. The day after that, IHOP came back for an additional 20 units in XXL and XXXL — sizes that required pattern adjustments we hadn't done in the original production.
We started new production the night each approval came through. The whole reorder shipped before Christmas.
What it taught meA viral campaign once is luck. A viral campaign twice is repeatable. Repeatability is what enterprise clients are actually buying.
The reason MRM came back in 2017 wasn't that the 2016 sweater was clever. It was that the campaign produced measurable results IHOP wanted to repeat. The reason we could handle the urgent reorder wasn't luck either. It was that we'd spent years building the systems to absorb that kind of escalation.
The IHOP sweater is also a useful counterpoint to a lesson I'll get into later — that subtle references usually beat obvious ones. The IHOP sweater is anything but subtle. It has the IHOP logo on the house, the pancakes, the bacon, the eggs, the coffee, the snow. It's playful, specific, and unmistakably IHOP. That works for IHOP because the brand is fundamentally playful — a family restaurant chain that's already comfortable being a little ridiculous. The subtle approach Pinterest used wouldn't have worked for IHOP, and the IHOP approach wouldn't have worked for Pinterest. The design instinct is to match the energy of the brand, not to apply a universal rule.
The first order proves you can make a sweater. The second order proves you can run a partnership. I now treat every first project as an audition for the second one.
Virgin Galactic, 2019: sustainability as a procurement criterion
In late 2019, the Senior Procurement and Sustainability Specialist at Virgin Galactic found us through our website. She was looking for custom jumpers for two Virgin entities — Virgin Galactic and The Spaceship Company. The total order was 830 units.
Her first substantive question wasn't about design or lead time. It was about our tree planting commitment. She wanted to know if it was real, what the documentation looked like, and which projects would be available for the 830 trees to be planted on Virgin Galactic's behalf.
We'd committed earlier that year to planting a tree for every item we made, through Eden Reforestation Projects. It was the centerpiece of the Roody pivot.
I expected the commitment to be good for the brand. I didn't expect it to be the deciding factor in enterprise procurement decisions. With Virgin Galactic, it was.
The project itself went smoothly. One technical issue surfaced early — two of the logos in the original design couldn't be knitted at the level of detail required. Our production manager proposed custom patches for those logos while keeping the rest of the jumper fully knitted. The Virgin Galactic design team revised the artwork themselves, combining the two logos into a single patch and adding a snowflake patch on the arm. The project shipped on schedule.
Each jumper was packaged with a note about the tree being planted in its name. After delivery, Virgin Galactic chose Madagascar from our available projects. 830 trees were planted on their behalf through Eden Reforestation Projects in early 2020.
What it taught meSustainability-focused procurement people are the most underrated buyers in our category.
They don't make decisions on vibes. They make decisions on whether you can actually document the thing you're claiming. The reason Virgin Galactic ordered 830 jumpers wasn't price or speed. It was that when she asked specific questions — are 830 trees really being planted, can we document it, can we choose where — we had specific answers.
Most vendors treat sustainability as a tagline. We treated it as infrastructure. That's why we got Virgin Galactic.
Pinterest, 2021–2024: when a 100-unit pilot becomes a 1,350-unit reorder
On a Friday afternoon in August 2021, an inquiry came in through our contact form. The Workplace Events lead at Pinterest was looking to do 100 custom holiday sweaters. She'd found us cold — no introduction, no referral, just our website.
Within 45 minutes, she'd received pricing, sent over the Pinterest logo, and given us a one-sentence design brief I've quoted a hundred times since:
I have attached our Pinterest 'P' but would only want it incorporated maybe once or twice somewhere subtly on the sweater. It doesn't need to be a repeat pattern anywhere.
That sentence is the whole lesson.
Most procurement contacts have to be talked into restraint on logo placement. They come in assuming the sweater should be a billboard for the brand. She didn't. She wanted snowflakes, push pins (the Pinterest heritage iconography), fair isle patterns. The "P" appearing once or twice, subtly. That's it.
The order closed in October 2021.
A year later, almost to the day, she emailed again:
We did some holiday sweaters with you a year or two ago and would like to use the same design (maybe just change the colors!). I'm guessing we would order about ~2k sweaters.
Two things in that sentence. She came back directly — no RFP, no shopping around. And she wanted to reuse the design with a color refresh. When the buyer wants version two to be a recolor of version one, you know version one worked.
The 2022 order landed at 1,350 sweaters — roughly seven times the 2021 quantity. We turned around production for the November–December window.
On December 15, 2022, she emailed unprompted:
Thank you so much for putting together the sweaters for us again! It was a HUGE hit amongst the company, and there are now employees who are organizing to purchase sweaters out of their own pockets, and we've been asked to share your contact info.
Pinterest employees were so enthusiastic about the sweater that they were organizing internally to buy more on their own dime. I've seen that maybe a handful of times in 15 years. She had to clarify, professionally, that any personal purchases shouldn't be billed against Pinterest's PO.
A few weeks later we followed up on the tree planting. The two-year cumulative order meant 1,350 trees. She chose to split them evenly between Madagascar and Indonesia. Her reply: "The sweaters were also a HUGE hit. People absolutely loved them."
Pinterest remains an active account today.
What it taught meThe best designs come from buyers who instinctively understand restraint.
The buyers who say "make the logo bigger" produce sweaters that look like merch. The buyers who say "incorporate the logo subtly" produce sweaters that look like apparel. The first kind sits in a closet. The second kind goes viral internally.
The most undervalued kind of enterprise validation isn't external press. It's the moment when a brand's own employees start asking how to buy more on their own dime. That's the inflection that turns a vendor relationship into a partnership.
Google, 2021: the happy problem
The Administrative Business Partner for a team at Google reached out in early October 2021. The original brief was roughly 300 sweaters for a single org.
The Google custom Christmas sweater, 2021. 477 units, shipped to individual addresses across the US, Canada, India, and several other countries.
Two weeks later, she emailed with what she called a "happy problem":
The sweaters were so popular that we're bubbling it up to a larger org (from 300 to 1000+).
The mockups alone had triggered the order to expand. We hadn't produced a single physical unit.
By the time the order locked in on November 5, Google had committed to 477 sweaters going to individual addresses across the US, Canada, India, and several other countries, with a 22-unit buffer added mid-process when an executive reopened the address collection form without telling her team.
What followed was the most operationally complex single project we'd shipped at the time.
The back of the Google sweater. Custom knitted pattern wraps the entire garment — no plain panel.
Three complications surfaced in roughly that order.
Google's vendor policy required international shipping to go through their pre-approved swag partners. We negotiated a workaround — shipping international orders direct from our facility with our team handling individual fulfillment to addresses around the world.
The Google logo on the sweater triggered a trademark check at Chinese customs. Customs required our factory to be added to Google's authorized IP database before the shipment could clear. We coordinated with Google's IP team in China and got the factory authorized within days.
A Google credit card limit meant the invoice had to be split into three separate payments across three corporate cards. We rebuilt the invoice and got production started over the weekend.
The sweaters shipped in early December 2021. Most arrived directly to individual employees worldwide. A few edge cases — a package to an Indian recipient required a 1,422-rupee local duty payment that we reimbursed personally, a US package came back marked "returned to shipper" and was reshipped. We tracked, troubleshot, and resolved each one.
The line that stuck with me from the whole project came during the procurement negotiation, weeks before any sweater shipped:
I appreciate all of your constant check-ins! This experience has been A+ so far.
What it taught meMost vendors can produce 500 sweaters. Far fewer can produce 500 sweaters that ship to individual addresses across four continents, clear Chinese customs with proper IP authorization, accommodate a corporate card payment structure that requires three separate transactions, and absorb a mid-production order expansion without missing the December deadline.
Large enterprises don't choose vendors on price or design or speed. They choose on whether you can absorb the operational complexity of a procurement process designed for $50 million purchases applied to a sweater project.
That's the part competitors can't see. Anyone can post photos of finished sweaters. The customs paperwork, the payment splits, the worldwide individual fulfillment runs — that's what enterprise buyers are paying for when they choose us over a cheaper vendor.
What 15 years of making 200,000 sweaters taught me
The custom Christmas sweater business in 2026 is a different business than it was in 2011.
In 2011, when Nando's commissioned those first 200 sweaters, the category didn't really exist. The campaign went viral partly because of the novelty — people hadn't seen a brand do this before.
By 2016, when IHOP launched their first campaign, the format was familiar enough that audiences could share it as a recognizable thing.
By 2019, sustainability had become a real procurement criterion.
By 2021, enterprise tech companies — Pinterest, Google, and many others — had built workplace events teams running annual sweater programs at substantial scale.
By 2026, the category is its own established part of the corporate gifting world.
A few patterns survive 15 years of category evolution.
Knitted always wins. Printed sweatshirts exist. They're cheaper. They don't feel like Christmas sweaters. They feel like printed sweatshirts. Every project we've done for Google, Microsoft, Meta, BMW, Pinterest, and the rest has been knitted.
The first design is usually right. Big brands pick version one or version two about 80% of the time. The projects that struggle are the ones where the client insists on iterating to version six or seven, tweaking things that don't materially affect the outcome. Trust the first instinct.
Match the energy of the brand. Pinterest's "incorporated subtly" approach worked because Pinterest is a quiet, design-focused company. IHOP's "logo, pancakes, bacon, eggs, snow scene" approach worked because IHOP is a playful family chain. The design instinct that gets it right is matching the brand's actual personality, not following a universal rule about restraint. The wrong move is the brand that doesn't know which one they are — too subtle for a playful brand reads as cold, too loud for a quiet brand reads as merch.
The sweater is the campaign, not one item in a gift haul. The brands that get viral results lead with the sweater as the moment. The brands that bury it inside a box with a candle and a mug get muted responses.
Order early. The cost difference between a September order and a late-November order is substantial, and almost entirely shipping. The teams that learn this in year one save real money in year two.
Always get a custom neck label. A generic blank-manufacturer's label makes a sweater feel like decorated stock. A custom label makes it feel like a product the brand actually made. The cost difference is small. The perception difference is significant. Almost no one asks for it proactively. Ask for it.
The thing I've come around to after 15 years is that the sweater itself is the smallest part of the work.
The design matters. The knit quality matters. But the real differentiators are upstream and downstream of the actual product.
Can you absorb a mid-production order expansion? Can you clear customs in a country your factory has never shipped to? Can you handle a corporate card payment structure that requires three separate transactions? Can you ship to 477 individual addresses worldwide and personally resolve the 12 edge cases that surface?
Those are the questions enterprise procurement is actually asking, even when they're asking about thread count and lead times. The vendors who answer those questions correctly become the ones enterprise clients come back to. The ones who don't, don't.
That's been the business for 15 years. I expect it'll be the business for the next 15.
