Karen Scarpino, founder of Green Giftz (asi/300878), isn’t someone who cries often.

But she does remember wanting to cry as a kid when she’d watch anti-littering commercials, which made her want to hold onto her beloved bubble gum wrappers.

“I think you should be very intentional and impactful about [promo]. It’s not just junk you’re filling the world with. It’s a gift that you’re handing to someone.” Karen Scarpino, Green Giftz (asi/300878)

“My mom would be like, ‘Why didn’t you throw these wrappers in the trash?’” Scarpino says. “And I couldn’t even articulate to her why I couldn’t put them in the trash. It just hurt my heart. I just knew it wasn’t right.”

And she does remember actually crying when her husband told her he wanted to start a promotional products business and she worried about the economics of selling “pens and pencils.”

“It was so low-end, low-price point,” she recalls thinking. “How can you even feed a family off of selling that?”

Despite her initial reservations, Scarpino and her husband, Lou, ended up founding distributorship Promotional Impact in Grand Rapids, MI, in 1992. In 1997, the business grew enough for Scarpino to quit her ad agency job and join her husband full-time.

When Scarpino left, she brought clients from the agency, and one of them, a local furniture manufacturer, wanted sustainable promotional products. The problem? That category simply didn’t exist in the way it does today.

“What they said was, ‘Karen, we can’t tell these stories and bring in VIPs and tour them through this factory and then give them a gift imported from China that’s made of plastics and harmful materials,’” Scarpino says.

She had the idea of upcycling scraps of the client’s sustainably produced upholstery fabric – turning them into pouches and folios that could be given as gifts to potential customers or used on factory tours.

Green Giftz (asi/300878) started making sustainable promotional products, like these custom upcycled pouches, back in the 1990s.

That was the first time Scarpino transformed excess manufacturing materials into useful branded promo, marking the birth of Green Giftz. And as the business celebrates 35 years, many in the industry remember Scarpino as a pioneer in the niche.

“The first time I called her and asked what Green Giftz was, I thought the lady was frickin’ nuts,” says Craig Donnelly, territory sales manager at Counselor Top 40 supplier Hit Promotional Products (asi/61125). “She saw this vision years ago that wasn’t publicized. That’s brilliance.”

When Scarpino started out, she recalls flipping through the Yellow Pages and seeing companies with tag lines like “We can put your logo on anything.” But she wanted to approach promo in a different way.

“I think you should be very intentional and impactful about it,” she says. “It’s not just junk you’re filling the world with. It’s a gift that you’re handing to someone.”

Green Giftz has created high-end custom clocks using reclaimed wood for clients.

A banner that’s upcycled into a wine carrier. A mini-replica of the world’s first LEED-certified art museum, located in Grand Rapids. Clocks made from reclaimed wood that was once at the bottom of the Great Lakes. The list of custom products goes on and on.

“We could go to her showroom and stay there the weekend,” Donnelly says.

Jamie Venderhenst, senior content marketing manager at a furniture manufacturer, received a Green Giftz-produced pouch made of repurposed chair fabric as a giveaway from her company. She still uses it to this day, a quarter of a century later.

“What stood out at the time was not only the creation of branded merchandise from these materials, but also the intentional effort to extend the sustainability story of the original products through thoughtful reuse,” Venderhenst says. “My recollection is that these initiatives were quite forward-thinking.”

To create each new product, Scarpino says it’s a collaboration between Green Giftz and the customer. Usually, they don’t know what they want, and Scarpino’s team collaborates with the client to find a product that’ll both work from the preferred scrap material and from a corporate storytelling perspective.

Scarpino typically works with industry suppliers, but sometimes when she wants to create a product not readily available, she’ll seek out local artisans. It’s a high-stakes, collaborative process.

“There’s a lot that can go wrong, and we never want to disappoint our clients,” she says. “We treat it like it’s a beating heart that’s going from one living person to keep someone else alive.”

It’s often substantially more expensive to create environmentally friendly products, and Scarpino understands that.

“If you aren’t profiting when you’re doing what’s right for your people and your planet, then it’s not going to sustain you as a business,” she says. “Our job is to make our clients look like rock stars to their bosses.”

Being a pioneer in the sustainability space was a challenge. Often, it was hard to find manufacturers willing to recreate a signature product with recycled material, even if Scarpino offered to pay the difference. “I had to educate people on how to work with us,” she says.

In recent years, however, suppliers have caught up to where Green Giftz was decades ago and are more willing and able to accommodate Scarpino’s needs.

“I feel like we’re heading in the right direction, as far as having more name brands in our industry and having more sustainable solutions and having higher design options,” Scarpino says. “That’s what I always believed it should be.”

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