Inside the Journey of Cruise Merch From Factory Floor to Your Hands
I was reorganizing a lower kitchen drawer the other day. It’s one of my largest, packed tight with logoed water bottles. Collected at events, taken home, then set aside. Nearly all of them, though, remain in their plastic packaging.
And then it hit me: Who decided these were the items? Where did they come from? And why can’t I let them go?
To understand why, I visited Nestor Villalobos at Sharp Promo’s headquarters.
“It’s not so much about the widget itself,” he says. “My product is the customer experience.”
Nestor is vice president of sales at Sharp Promo, one of the largest suppliers of branded merchandise for the cruise industry. The company creates these covetable promotional goods that passengers, employees, and partners encounter every day.
Nothing Starts With the Product
Nestor opened his operations to me, starting in Sharp’s embroidery room, where rows of machines were punching Oceania logos into golf towels in marching synchronization. He pointed to the equipment with pride.
“This brand, Tajima, is considered like the Rolls-Royce of embroidering machines,” he says. Then, gesturing toward the racks of thread nearby: “We go with Madeira. That’s considered the best thread.”
All of a sudden, the row beside me chopped to a stop. Nestor guided me back a few inches, and the line came back to life. I had drifted into the machine’s safety sensors. Impressive machines!
He then guided me to their conference room; the tables and floor were overtaken by bins.
“Normally this room has a showroom, and we have all of our samples out,” he says. “But we’re prepared for Seatrade. So, everything’s in bins right now.”
He opened a bin and proudly showed off a Great Stirrup Cay straw hat, followed by a Norwegian pencil box and Oceania sun visor.
Nestor was referring to the largest cruise industry tradeshow held in Miami Beach every spring. It’s like a supermarket for cruise lines, where they can order everything from ship hulls to wine glasses; meet port officials from all over the world; and even find their next branded caps and towels vendor.
He recounted a recent aerospace tradeshow activation built around something as basic as a branded paper airplane. Instead of handing out a standard item, Sharp helped their client create an event for a prize.
“We saw hundreds of people throwing airplanes around,” he says. “They were taking pictures, posting it.”
What started as a low-cost object quickly became more visible than a traditional giveaway. People engaged with it, shared it on social media, and carried that experience beyond the moment.
For brands, that kind of interaction can translate into a stronger return. Instead of a single impression, the item generates multiple touchpoints—on the floor, online, and in photos that continue to circulate after the event.
From Prototype to Port
“The client comes to us not telling us what they want,” Nestor says. “They tell us who their audience is, what their budget is, and what their timeline is. We love when they say, ‘Here’s our brand, you figure it out.’”
From there, the process moves into ideation. Sharp’s art department develops a set of concepts, often presenting multiple directions at once, based on how and where the item will be used. A giveaway for passengers. A uniform for crew. A retail product. Each serves a different purpose.
“We’re seeing people move away from the standard left-chest logo,” Nestor says. “They want something different.”
What that looks like in practice is a shift in placement. Logos are no longer expected to sit front and center. Instead, they are being moved off-center, scaled down, or placed in less obvious areas of a product. The focus is moving toward items that travel—things people wear, carry, and use in public. Products that extend beyond the moment and penetrate into everyday life.
“We’ll put together ideas and present them,” he says. “Then they pick what they like, and we start refining it.”
Before there are thousands of items onboard, there is always just one. A single sample is produced. Adjustments are made. Details are refined again. Only once that first version is approved does it move forward.
Every order is inspected before it moves forward. Goods are checked again in their offices against original specifications, and anything off is corrected before it reaches the client. By the time a cruise line receives the product, it looks finished. Clean, consistent, and ready to use.
From there, the process shifts to logistics.
“They’ll order large amounts of goods,” Nestor says. “They take advantage of lower pricing, and then they have us hold onto their inventory. They own the inventory. And when they need it, we pull it.”
Boxes of completed merchandise are stored offsite at Sharp’s warehouse, organized by client and ready to deploy.
“We live and die by the in-hands date.”
The Future of Promo Merchandise
I pressed Nestor on where he sees promo merch going next.
“We’re getting to the point where we can create one-of-one items,” he says. “Not just a mug, but a mug with your name on it. Something tied to you.”
Instead of producing thousands of identical products, brands can start to tailor items to individuals. However, my business experience has traditionally pitted personalization against scale. I asked whether the two could realistically exist at the same time.
“We’re getting to the point now with AI… to be able to create custom unique items for individuals.”
At Sharp, those tools are already shaping how the work gets done.
“What we’re using it for is mostly for developing software, proprietary software to make the production flow easier,” he says. “So that our team can actually interact with like a brain… that has all of our company SOPs in one place.”
The goal is speed. Fewer steps between idea and execution. That efficiency is already showing up in the business.
“We’ve grown 50% year over year… because our team is that much more efficient,” he says.
That combination—speed, scale, and personalization—could change how you experience your next branded merch, something that we would not expect.
Something that feels worth keeping.
Back in my kitchen drawer, the logic starts to make more sense. The bottles I saved were not necessarily the cheapest-looking ones. They are the ones that I prize. (But I don’t think I was providing the exposure that the companies were hoping for, by keeping them in my drawer.)
Only now, I have a better sense of how they got there in the first place.
Nestor and the Sharp Promo team will be at Seatrade Cruise Global in Miami Beach from April 14–16, exhibiting in booth 2029.
