Mikael Happe

Mikael Happe has spent 35 years in promotional products. Long enough to have seen every trend come around twice, and long enough to know which ones were worth the trouble.

He's COO and Partner at Scantra, where he runs order operations - from placed order to delivered product - and decides what makes it into the range. That's the sourcing side: finding suppliers, requesting samples, checking materials, comparing what a factory says with what actually arrives in the box. Most of what he looks at gets rejected. That's the job. A product that fails after two months costs a brand more than it ever cost to buy.

Thirty-five years also means he remembers the industry before online catalogues, before eco was a selling point, before anyone could order 500 branded bottles from a phone. Some of it got better. Some of it just got faster.

Suppliers, lead times, materials, print methods that hold and print methods that peel - that's his corner of the business. And the question underneath it all: why so much branded product ends up in a drawer, and what separates the products people actually keep.