THE SITUATION BEFORE MOQ1
Small orders weren’t a business. They were a problem.
Every distributor knows the call. A client needs shirts for a team, swag for an event, or gear for a company picnic – not enough to justify a custom run, too complicated to handle manually. For years, Jed Spencer’s answer at NBS Promos was the same as everyone else’s: pass. Focus on the volume orders. Let the small stuff go.
What changed
A family reunion. Then a $5,000 surprise.
It started with a call from an old business associate who needed t-shirts for a family reunion, toddler sizes through men’s and women’s tall sizes, all with the same logo. His solution was to set up an MOQ1 store. In minutes, he filtered it to white shirts, applied the logo, and sent a link. The friend’s wife collected sizes from the family and placed one order.
86 shirts. Logo proportionally sized across every garment automatically – no screens, no setup fees, no fulfillment. Done in minutes.
“I’ve got the perfect thing for you.”
That was the proof of concept. The campground order was proof that it could scale.
Last month, a campground owner reached out. Her husband had purchased a lakeside property and was renovating it from the ground up. She needed staff shirts. Jed set up the store, then walked her through MOQ1’s cross-item bulk pricing: any combination of products counts toward the quantity break together. Order as few as 4 items across any mix and the bulk pricing kicks in – t-shirts, mugs, bags, outerwear, all of it combined.
She placed her order. Jed moved on with his day.
“Thanks. You’re amazing. The shopping experience was great.”
When the text came through, Jed pulled up the order. She had filled the cart with staff shirts, resale logo tees, enamel mugs, tote bags, hoodies, and full zip jackets – $5,000 worth of product. After the bulk discount: $2,700. The whole thing, from explaining the platform to uploading the logos, had taken about 10 minutes.
“I wouldn’t have offered it. It just would have taken a lot of time, and it wouldn’t have been worth it.”
WHAT IT MEANS FOR THE BUSINESS
New clients. Stickier relationships. No new overhead.
NBS Promos now has 60+ MOQ1 stores running across their sales team. Small businesses with a handful of staff who want branded gear without minimum orders. Organizations that want an always-on store and have no idea what fulfillment even means.
They all get a yes now.
Turn time is part of the pitch. Jed ordered a test shirt on a Wednesday and had it in his mailbox the following Wednesday – competitive with company stores that already have inventory on the shelf. For clients who’ve been burned by slow decorators, that number lands.
And the stores make NBS sticky. A client with an always-on MOQ1 store tied to their distributor has less reason to call anyone else. Saying yes to the store setup today is insurance against losing the account later.
WHAT JED WOULD TELL A PEER
The clients you pass on don’t disappear.
Ask Jed what he’d tell a distributor losing small orders to Custom Ink:
“Go set up an account with MOQ1 and start running those. It’s kind of a no-brainer.”
His pitch to clients is just as direct. No upfront cost. Live in minutes. Bulk pricing across everything in the cart – mix t-shirts, drinkware, bags, and outerwear, and the discount applies to all of it together. Production that ships the same or next day on any item.
The detail that makes experienced distributors stop and think is the proportional logo sizing. On a mixed-size order through a screen printer, the logo on a toddler tee and the logo on a 3XL look nothing alike. On MOQ1, it scales automatically across every size in the order. It’s invisible to the client and eliminates a problem most distributors don’t realize they’re handing off.
But the reason Jed keeps building stores isn’t the features. It’s the math on the alternative.
“If you have to tell them no, it just opens you up for problems. It allows another distributor in.”