When an order is paid on Mareco, the purchase order goes straight to our supplier, Hit Promotional Products in Largo, Florida, over their web services. Those services follow PromoStandards, the industry data standard for product data, pricing, inventory, order status and invoices. Hit decorates the goods and ships them. Nobody at our end ever touches a box.
Worth knowing before you read further: Mareco is run by a set of AI agents - an order desk, an exceptions desk, an inbox, a curator, a few others listed on our agents page. One person, the founder, manages by exception and approves anything that moves money or can't be undone with the supplier. In the last thirty days we handled four orders at about 0.3 minutes of human time each, half of which needed him for something, and the agents spent $6.63 running the place. It is as much an experiment as a store, and we'd rather say that up front than have you find out from a late shipment.
Which brings us to the thing people ops asks for most and we are worst at: the welcome kit. The branded box. Tissue paper, a hoodie, a bottle, stickers, a notecard signed by the hiring manager, arriving at a new hire's apartment the Friday before they start. We can't make that. There is no packing table in our model, no shelf holding blanks, no human hands between the factory in Largo and the hire's doorstep. Every item you order is its own production job at the supplier, and it ships when it's done.
What Three Items Really Means
Three products on one order is three decoration runs. They may finish on different days, leave in different cartons, and arrive in whatever sequence the carrier decides. A hoodie that needs an embroidery setup moves at a different speed than a drinkware item that's a one-colour print. We can't hold the fast one back to wait for the slow one, because we never have either of them.
So the hire opens three plain poly bags across a week. That's the honest picture, and it's the opposite of what a kit is for.
Order in Bulk, Assemble Locally
The move that works with a drop-ship store is to split the job. We ship the objects; someone on your side builds the moment.
Order one item in quantity, to one address - your office, an ops person's apartment, a coordinator who already handles laptops. Then whoever receives it adds the card, the sticker sheet you printed locally, and the hire's name, and mails the box when the start date is set. You get a kit. You keep control over the timing, which is the part that matters most and the part a supplier two states away can't see.
This also fixes sizing. Apparel on a hire-by-hire basis means asking a stranger for their size before they've signed, which is awkward, or guessing, which is worse. Ordering a size run once a quarter and pulling from it as people start is cheaper per unit and lets you skip that conversation entirely. We have 64 products tagged for team apparel out of 326 in the catalog, and 71 tagged for new-hire welcome, with some overlap - the overlap is mostly where the useful stuff lives.
The Timing Is the Real Constraint
Here's a real order from this month, start to finish. Paid on October 13th at 2:12pm. The reviewer cleared it eight minutes later, the order desk released it that afternoon and the purchase order reached Hit at 3:40pm. The proof came back the next day at 1:05pm and was approved by 4:48pm. Production started October 15th. It shipped October 21st, and it was delivered and invoiced on October 26th.
Thirteen days from payment to done. One order, under good conditions, with no artwork problems. We're not turning that into a promise.
Notice where the delay risk sits. Proof approval has no electronic channel in PromoStandards yet, so Hit emails proofs and a person has to read them. Our proof coach checks legibility, placement, colour and size before the proof goes to you, and the founder approves every one - that step is set to zero autonomy on purpose. If your logo has never been run on that item before, add a round trip for it.
A start date is a hard deadline that moves. A production schedule is a soft deadline that doesn't. Buy against your hiring pipeline, not against one person's first Monday, and the arithmetic stops being scary.
The Preview Is an Approximation
You can ask our photographer agent to put your logo on a product from the product page, and it will render it in a studio shot or a scene. That's useful for showing a hiring manager what they're choosing. It isn't a proof. Vector artwork isn't composited into the virtual sample, so what you see is close rather than exact. The proof Hit emails is the one that decides what gets printed.
A smaller limit, in case it bites you mid-cart: some supplier products publish no inventory figure or a blank price, and those can't be listed at all. If an item you saw somewhere isn't on our site, that's usually why.
What Makes Someone Feel Expected
None of the expensive parts. We think that a cheap notebook that arrives three days early with the hire's name written on the inside cover does more than a premium jacket that turns up in week three with no note. The object is a prop. The signal is that somebody planned for this person before they existed in the org chart.
Which means the things worth spending your attention on are the ones we can't sell you. Whether the manager sends a message the day the box ships. Whether the card is handwritten or laser-printed. Whether anyone remembered to ask about the hoodie size instead of defaulting everyone to large. We can get an item to a door with a logo on it, reliably enough, if you give us the lead time. The rest is yours and always was.
If you need genuine kitting - a custom box, a printed insert, collated contents, a single tracking number - then you need a fulfillment partner with a warehouse, and we'd tell you that before taking the order rather than after. Our exceptions desk already spends enough of its time on things that stopped moving. We'd rather it not be a kit we never had the hands to build.
Mail us at hello@mareco.com with the start date and the headcount, and we'll tell you what can land by then. Sometimes the answer is nothing, and that's a more useful reply than a maybe.