Everyday Data Vis — Swag Popularity
Moving on from the emojis that filled July, in August I focused on the popularity of our branded apparel around the A Cloud Guru Melbourne office.
When I joined A Cloud Guru in January, it was pretty clear that everyone here was proud to belong. In fact, they gave me a couple of shirts and a hoodie, and my coworkers would wear them with pride even without any conferences or community events on. I was curious about how our ACG swag was represented around the office — was one particular item more popular than another, or were some teams more likely to wear swag than others? Thus, the project for August was born: tracking wearability of ACG apparel.
We’ve grown quite a lot since I joined, so the first thing to do was to figure out the scope. I couldn’t enlist any help in this project, as telling people might affect their clothing choices, so I gathered data by walking around the office every morning and writing down what I saw. Since this seemed to be a bit high-effort, I only ended up collecting data on the development teams.
Over the month, I observed five clothing items: the logo t-shirt (of which we all own), the This is My Cloud Shirt shirt (conference exclusive), the orange version of the logo t-shirt (conference exclusive), the hoodie (we also all own this), and the DeepRacer team jacket (team exclusive).
We all also own a pair of ACG socks, but I skipped those as it would be really hard to see in winter, with everyone wearing long pants! We also all have another t-shirt — the one you get for signing up to ACG as an annual member — but oddly, none of us wore it!
I also excluded myself from the study, since I didn’t want to compromise the numbers.
Every day is a swag day.
The heatmap here shows number of items worn by each team on any given day. There are absolutely zero days in August where no swag was worn.
Wednesdays were dominant as the most merch-heavy day, with an average of 7 items being worn. Weirdly, it’s right after the least merch-heavy day, as Tuesdays only average 3. The only days where somebody in every team wore at least one branded item were also Wednesdays!
We’re hoodie people.
Since a big part of the curiousity here was about if there was any difference between the teams, I broke down the clothing items by development team.
In every team except for Team B, hoodies are most commonly worn. It’s not that surprising, especially considering some people here keep their hoodies at the office for if it gets cold.
It’s also not too surprising to see that the three exclusive items only make brief appearances, and are limited to certain teams.
Designers are picky.
What a revelation, right?
The designers (minus me) only ever wore the hoodies during August — absolutely no sightings of a branded t-shirt.
On the other end, PMs seemed to be most inclined to rep the logo on its own, and they were (almost!) the only ones to wear conference-exclusive merch.
Long live brand merch.
The major conclusion? We all wear the swag, so clearly we should produce more. 🤷♀️ (Who am I kidding? I really just want the exclusive shirts.)
Coolest finding
My theory going into this was that Thursdays would dominate merch days, since we have a recurring whole-dev-team meeting on that day. I’m not entirely sure what the draw of Wednesdays is, but that definitely wasn’t something I expected.
Most difficult thing
Tracking merch inconspicuously every day wasn’t super easy… you do look a little silly just wandering around the office ‘looking for someone’ once a day and trying to make all the mental notes of what’s been worn where.
What’s next?
I think I’ll wear my logo t-shirt soon.
Thanks for reading! Give this post a 👏 if you enjoyed it, and feel free to check out A Cloud Guru or say hi to me on LinkedIn 🎉
