How Guyanese Swag Grew: Online, Pop-Ups & Marketplaces

Guyanese Swag’s first pop-up did not end with a sold-out table or a line around the booth.

It ended with three sales.

Key and Charles McKay had signed up for an event promoted broadly as a Caribbean festival. When they arrived, it became clear that most of the crowd was there for a Jamaican Independence celebration. There was nothing wrong with that celebration; it simply was not the Guyanese-heavy audience they had expected.

For a young brand trying to understand where its customers were, the day could have felt like a failure. Instead, it became one of the first lessons in how Guyanese Swag would grow: show up, pay attention, learn what people respond to, and adjust.

The first customer was not Guyanese

The first person to buy from the booth that day was a Nigerian man who chose a pair of sweatpants featuring Key’s original Guyana-inspired print.

Key heard his accent and made sure he knew the flag in the design was Guyana’s, not Nigeria’s. His response stayed with her: “It doesn’t matter. We’re all one people anyway.”

That exchange widened the picture of who might connect with the brand. Some customers would buy because they were Guyanese. Some had Guyanese partners, relatives or friends. Others had visited or worked in Guyana. And sometimes a person simply liked the artwork enough to wear it.

So the pop-ups became more than places to make sales. They became a way to watch people encounter the brand in real time.

Customers changed what Guyanese Swag designed

Key had launched Guyanese Swag online first, drawing on the ecommerce, branding and design skills she already had. Online data could show what sold. In-person events showed something different: why people stopped.

Some shoppers were drawn to detailed, artistic interpretations of Guyanese culture. Others walked up looking for something much more direct: a big Golden Arrowhead, unmistakable from across the room.

That mattered.

The first collection had begun as Key’s own creative expression. The events taught her that a cultural brand could not be built only around what the designer personally wanted to make. Guyanese people had different ways of expressing pride, and the product line needed room for all of them.

In that sense, every booth was also a focus group—just louder, more honest and occasionally accompanied by music.

Pop-ups took the brand beyond the screen

As Guyanese Swag appeared at more events in the United States and Canada, the conversations around the products became part of the value.

A shirt could turn into a discussion about somebody’s village. A flag could lead to a story about migration. A familiar phrase could make one person call another person over to the booth.

Those moments helped confirm something ecommerce alone could not: people were not only buying objects. They were responding to recognition.

That made the next question less about whether Guyanese Swag should be online or in person and more about how many useful doors the brand could open.

Walmart Marketplace became another door

Later in 2021, Guyanese Swag products expanded onto Walmart Marketplace.

The milestone mattered because Walmart was a familiar mainstream retail name. For a brand created partly out of the frustration of seeing Guyana overlooked, the presence of explicitly Guyanese products on a major marketplace carried symbolic weight beyond another place to check out.

It suggested that a Guyana-specific product did not have to stay confined to a small cultural event or a niche corner of the internet.

But marketplaces also taught another lesson: a sales channel is not the brand itself.

More channels did not automatically mean better growth

Over time, Guyanese Swag tested different ways of reaching people. Ecommerce, pop-ups, marketplaces and other distribution opportunities each offered something useful, but each also came with trade-offs.

A marketplace can introduce the brand to a new shopper, but it cannot tell the full story as well as a brand’s own home can. A pop-up can create an unforgettable face-to-face connection, but it cannot reach somebody searching from another country at two in the morning.

The lesson was not to choose one and reject the others. It was to understand what each channel was good for.

That is why the current Guyanese Swag store is being built as the home base: the place where products, culture, stories and the wider identity of the brand can live together. Pop-ups, marketplaces, wholesale and partnerships can extend that reach when they make sense.

Growth has always been about finding the people

The path was never as neat as “pop-ups first, then online,” because Guyanese Swag actually launched online before taking the brand into events. Growth moved back and forth between the screen and the real world, with each side teaching the other something.

The three-sale festival taught the brand not to confuse a crowd with the right audience. Customers taught Key that national pride could be artistic, loud, subtle, nostalgic or simply stylish. Marketplaces showed that Guyanese products could sit in mainstream shopping environments. And the company’s own website gave all of those lessons somewhere to come back together.

That is a more useful measure of the journey than counting platforms.

Guyanese Swag has grown by learning where Guyanese people are, how they want to represent home, and how to meet them there without losing what makes the brand Guyanese.

For the story of why the company exists in the first place, read The Story of Guyanese Swag: From Belonging to Brand.