The Buzz: Making Wishes Come True

Some companies offer a little extra vacation time, others a creative work environment with flexible work-from-home opportunities. Then there’s Betabrand, an online retailer of men’s and women’s apparel based in San Francisco, which sends its employees on bucket list vacations around the world.

Betabrand promises to be the “world’s fastest fashion label” by taking customers from the earliest stages of products and enabling them “to purchase from individuals, not brands.” Betabrand is already a little out of the box considering some of its marketing tactics — hosting hackathons, featuring PhDs instead of professional models on its site, and crowdfunding fashionable designs, to name a few things.

However, the most radical investment the company has made is not in its customers, but in its employees.

Chris Lindland, co-founder of Betabrand, started investing in international travel for his employees after he overheard in a happy-hour conversation in the fall of 2014 that many of his employees hadn’t traveled abroad before.

“I thought, with all the money we spend on fabric and ads and other things, surely we could amass enough credit card miles each month to send someone on a short, eye-opening trip overseas,” Lindland wrote on the company’s blog. ”So, we centralized spending into a Capital One Spark card (with double miles!) and started saving up. We’ve since sent emissaries to Iceland, Ireland and France, all the while injecting a heaping dose of magic into our workplace. Every four [weeks] to six weeks, the company announces the next international adventurer at a group meeting. And every time we do so, the company explodes in good cheer — sometimes in tears.”