Two university friends and a stubborn idea about giveaways
Pangolin Prints was started in 2025 by Birkan and Yasin, who met at college and stayed close long after graduation. They built the company around one conviction: a promotional product is only worth making if the person who receives it decides to keep it.
Today the company works on two fronts. We bring unusual promotional products into the United States that no other supplier carries, and we build the e-commerce operations that get them made, printed and shipped.
It started with a drawer full of junk
We met at college and kept in touch through the years that follow graduation, when everyone is figuring out what they actually want to build. Both of them ended up working around trade shows, launches and client gifts, and both of them kept noticing the same thing from opposite sides of the table.
Companies were spending real money on promotional products, and almost none of it survived the week. The pens went dry. The tote bags stayed folded. The flat fridge magnets went into a drawer with the takeout menus. Everyone accepted this as the cost of doing business, which struck the two of them as a strange thing to accept.
The question we kept coming back to
If a company is going to put its name on an object and hand it to someone, why not make an object worth keeping? Not more expensive. Not fancier. Just something with an actual job to do, in a shape that does not look like everything else in the catalog.
That question turned into Pangolin Prints in 2025. The name comes from an animal most people have never seen, which felt about right for a company built on products nobody else was carrying.
Finding what nobody else had
The hard part was never the printing. It was the sourcing. Almost every promotional supplier in the United States pulls from the same handful of importers, which is exactly why every booth at every trade show hands out the same rectangle.
So we went and built our own supply line instead of renting someone else's. That took longer than it sounds, and it is the reason we can now offer shapes that genuinely are not available anywhere else in the country. We are the importer and the manufacturer, not the fourth reseller in a chain.
Why Raleigh
We could have run this as a catalog and let a factory overseas ship straight to customers. We decided not to, because that model breaks the moment something goes wrong, and something always goes wrong. A file is low resolution. A logo needs to move half an inch. A customer needs 400 pieces before Friday.
So we put the equipment in a shop in Raleigh and run it ourselves. It means we answer questions in hours instead of weeks, and it means when we tell you it ships Thursday, one of us is the person putting it in the box.
Nobody has ever kept a pen because it was free. They keep things because the thing is good.
The two of us
There is no account manager here. When you email Pangolin Prints, one of us reads it.
Birkan
Handles sourcing, production and everything that happens between a file arriving and a box going out the door. If your order was printed today, he printed it.
Yasin
Runs the commercial side: the e-commerce operations, the customer accounts, and the systems that let a 20 piece order and a 5,000 piece order go through the same shop without anything getting lost.
What the company actually does
Two lines of work, run out of the same shop by the same two people.
Things people put on the fridge
Custom printed magnetic bottle openers in shapes you will not find in another American catalog, from one small run for a single event to standing orders for companies that hand them out year round.
Production behind other people's stores
We already print, pack and ship daily for online sellers, straight to their customers, with nothing of ours in the box. If you sell it, we can be the part of the business that makes it.
Come say hello
Questions, ideas, or a project you are not sure how to price. We answer our own email.