The Original Story of Looties
So here’s how it all started. I spent a good decade in the tech world, and the last six years or so were all about working directly with different software companies. Along the way, I became a bit of a swag collector. Every onboarding, every offsite, every conference… if there were goodies or merch, I was all in. I’m a nerd at heart: I love gaming, fantasy books, and naturally, that kind of nerd culture was just in my DNA. You know, the kind of goodies you pick up from onboarding kits, tech conferences, or even those random partner events: stickers, hoodies, socks, mugs, caps…. My laptop was covered in stickers, and my closet had a stash of swag from all these different places.
A Quiet Idea
Back in my Strapi days, around 2022, I noticed something interesting. Strapi had a huge community, but there was no public merch store. And then, when I eventually left the company, another very concrete question hit me: what am I actually going to do with all this swag? I still liked the company a lot, but suddenly having all those Strapi hoodies and goodies sitting in my closet felt… a bit weird. At the same time, I knew there were people out there—community members, partners—who would’ve loved to get their hands on that merch, but simply couldn’t. I had accumulated quite a bit of Strapi swag over two years, and that gap between “people want it” and “it just sits in my closet” really stuck with me. It was always in the back of my mind that this could be a thing someday. But I never said it out loud, never shared it publicly. It just sat there as this “what if” idea in the back of my head. At the same time, building a marketplace felt way too heavy. Too dev-intensive. Too many expectations—especially when people are used to platforms like Vinted or Leboncoin. And honestly, back then, the AI tools just weren’t there and low-code wasn’t mature enough. Nothing that made launching something like this feel realistic for one person.
When "What If" Became "Why Not?”
Then fast forward to late 2025, at a PyTorch conference in San Francisco. That’s when I finally joked about it with some colleagues. I just casually said, “You know, I’ve always thought about spinning up a little marketplace for all this swag I’ve looted.” And to my surprise, they didn’t just laugh it off. They actually said, “You should totally do it!” That was the moment. It’s 2026. Conferences, meetups, offsites—IRL is back, more than ever. New tech waves, new fan bases… and suddenly, a real bump in swag popularity again. And most importantly, AI coding changed the game. For the first time, building this actually felt possible. I just thought: why not now? It finally felt like the right moment to turn this quiet little idea into a real thing.
The Stories We Wear
There’s also a fun personal angle: I always thought it would be great to gift my brother, who’s a .NET tech lead, a Microsoft hoodie he’d never get for himself since he doesn’t really go to conferences. And there are so many stories like that. Like one of my ex-manager once telling me how an Istio sticker helped him break the ice with a CIO. It sounds silly, but it works. That really shows how much this culture of tech swag means to people. It’s not just “stuff”; it’s a museum of tech culture. It’s identity, belonging, shared history. And that’s the heart of my startup’s founding story. It’s a way to bring that nerdy, techie passion into a little marketplace where all those conference goodies and onboarding treasures can find a new home. And maybe, along the way, make someone’s day, like my brother’s, just a little bit more awesome.