is it tacky to bring branded items from your old job to your new job?

A reader writes:

I have a pretty low-stakes question but it’s been on my mind a lot lately: is it tacky to bring branded items from your old job to your new job?

For context: I used to work for a big tech company, and I acquired a lot of swag over my tenure: jackets, mugs, travel cups, etc. At my old role, my colleagues and I would use branded items from competitors and no one batted an eye; lots of them would be free items from conferences and similar events, and hey, sometimes that branded travel mug from our competition is just REALLY nice.

But I’ve switched to a more conservative industry (law) and I’m wondering if it would be weird to bring branded stuff from my old job into the office. I’m not planning to like, plaster my laptop with stickers from my old company or anything; I’m thinking more along the lines of bringing in a branded mug (since my new office only supplies paper coffee cups). I wouldn’t think twice about bringing random branded stuff from other companies, but I wonder about the optics of bringing stuff from my old job specifically. Is it tacky? Does it make it look like I’m pining for the past?

Like I said, this is incredibly low-stakes, but I’d love your thoughts!

Nah, you’re almost certainly fine.

I mean, it would be weird if you were, like, fully decked out with branded items from your old job to the exclusion of having anything from your current one — like if people walked into your office and found you wearing your old company’s branded jacket, t-shirt, and hat and your mousepad and notebook had their logo — but that seems highly unlikely. A mug or a shirt? No big deal at all.

The exception to this would be if there’s bad blood between the two companies or, in some industries, if they’re a direct competitor (like wearing Pepsi swag when you work at Coca-Cola, and I’d suspect wearing Nike if you work for Adidas or similar).

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