JustinSpeak A Look Inside the Mind of Justin Schmidt

A Place to Buy Prizes

By day I'm a marketing manager.  It's a fun gig not because I have authority, but because I get to work with really competent, good people that make me the job pretty easy.  One thing that I like to make sure and do is show them appreciation any time I can.  One of the ways to express my thanks is with random prizes.

The best place to get random stuff on the Internet is a great little site called The Something Store. The concept is really simple: you give them $10, they send you something.  Thats it.  Easy squeezy.  It makes giving the prize really fun because you never know what someones going to get.

We've been burned a few times with the something store, but we've also got some pretty cool things. For example, the best laughs we've had as a department were for the triple XL men's pajamas that my graphics designer, a woman, won for marketer of the month.  Histerical.

A buddy of mine, Andrew Nagy, wrote a great piece about The Something Store's marketing perspective, and I agree.

Another great place to get cool stuff to giveaway as prizes is the ever awesome ThinkGeek.com.  ThinkGeek is great because they stock only the neatest gizmos and their product descriptions are pretty awesome.

For those of you who like a unique shopping experience, check out Vat19 (disclaimer alert: I used to work for Vat19). They do really cool product videos for everything they stock.  in addition to retailing crazy products, they also produce DVDs.  Czech them out: www.Vat19.com.

One last disclaimer, I was not paid for any of the links in this post.  In fact, I wag my finger to shame whoever writes splogs. No harm in getting paid to write, but knock it off with the BS links.