GAYLORD – SunFrog Shirts has been seeing an increase in production and sales recently, and they’re rewarding the children of their employees.
The organization held a Friday lunchtime event where backpacks filled with school supplies were given to more than 100 children of the organization’s employees. In addition, they dined on pizza while SunFrog Shirts CEO Josh Kent gave a speech about the organization’s success.
About a dozen of those children volunteered to hand out the backpacks, each of which had a SunFrog logo on them.
Jen Paffi, chief operations officer for SunFrog Shirts, said it’s a good way to say thank you their hard-working employees.
“We saw this as an opportunity to help our SunFrog family
out,” Paffi said. “It’s one less thing they have to worry about. School supplies can be expensive.”
SunFrog Shirts began its organization approximately three years ago, and have seen a lot of growth, Kent said. Currently, the organization has about 350 employees with around 11 million shirt designs (from customers around the world), and have sold millions of shirts each year, putting the T-shirt site among the world’s most popular websites.
The organization has made it into the Alexa 500, meaning it is one of the top 500 sites on the web.
“That puts us up with the other household names,” Kent said. “We have as much traffic on our website as Old Navy or Gap. Names that everybody knows. We’re rocking as far as traffic goes.”
Kent said the secret to SunFrog’s success with the organization’s growth online involved direct targeting through social media.
“It’s no longer a banner-ad world that we live in,” Kent said. “We can target a user now not just based on who they are and where they live, but we can target them based on their behavior.
“I could send you a dog picture not just because you like dogs, but because you like dog pages and comment on dog pages, so you’re likely to buy a certain type of dog breed shirt.”
Overall, the organization’s cafeteria was filled with employees catching up with each other, as well as the children volunteering to hand out the backpacks.
Sadie Singler, an 11-year-old homeschooled student, was one of the students who volunteered to hand out the backpacks. Singler’s dad does marketing for the organization and was getting pictures and video of the children and the guests at the lunch event.
“I think that it’s really fun because kids are able to pass out things to other kids that are able to help them learn,” Singler said. “It will be really exciting to see what’s inside (the backpack), because it always seems like a treasure chest when you open it.”