Common questions

A swarm is a group-buy campaign run against a finalized branded product. Each product comes with a frozen pricing ladder — set by the vendor at the wholesale level — so the minimum quantity and the unit prices at each tier are already known. You pick the product and set the window — say, 14 days. Buyers commit their slot at the listed price. As more teammates join, the unit price drops in real time. When the window closes, everyone is charged at the bottom-of-curve price — no one ever pays more than what they committed to. If the minimum quantity isn’t hit by the deadline, no one is charged at all.

Swarms aggregate buyer commitments to unlock bulk pricing — best for company-wide rollouts (uniforms, welcome kits) where everyone gets the same item. Buy Now is a one-off purchase at a fixed quantity break — for when a buyer doesn’t want to wait for a swarm. Gifting is prefunded: your org pays upfront, recipients pick from a curated catalog via a public claim link, and unspent funds refund at close — best for client thank-yous, hire announcements, and milestone rewards. On-demand is single-unit, no-minimum production — decorated and shipped one at a time, for one-off asks, new hires, and replacements. Every product in your catalog can run through any of these, with the same brand-safe approval flow.

Yes. Upload your brand guide PDF and our AI extracts colors, fonts, and rules automatically. Every downstream mockup is checked against the library — strict rules block save, overrideable rules warn. You can add rules manually too, and you can mark logos and color palettes as required across every product.

We have three tiers: Starter, Growth, and Enterprise — sized by the number of admin and manager seats in your org. Buyers are always unlimited and never billed — we want more of them, not fewer. Owners, admins, and managers are the ones running merch programs day to day, so that’s where the seat allowance applies. All tiers include the storefront builder, brand library, and AI concierge. The Volume Rebate Program returns a percentage of your annual throughput at every tier — real money back as your program grows. For current pricing, reach out — we’re in founding-cohort mode and pricing each engagement individually for now.

Minnow handles end-to-end. We work with a vetted network of decorators and blank-goods vendors. When a swarm closes, we generate production work orders, manage the proof cycle, and split-ship to every destination — your org’s locations or individual buyer addresses if your org allows it. You get a tracking dashboard at /manage/production.

No one pays. Buyer cards are saved (Stripe SetupIntent — not charged) when they commit, and are only captured when the swarm closes successfully. If the minimum isn’t met by the window deadline, all commits are released and we notify each buyer with the outcome.

Yes, when your org enables hybrid shipping. Each buyer can ship to a company location or their home address. Office shipping is meaningfully cheaper per unit — one bulk delivery splits the carrier cost across the whole cohort, while individual home shipments are priced per package. The price difference is shown at commit so buyers can pick with eyes open. For gifting recipients, the claim page collects a shipping address as part of the flow.