BEEN there, done it, got the T-shirt. As catchphrases go, it's as good as any for describing the commercial rationale behind Glasgow-based Business Incentives Group (BIG).

The company was set up in the late 1980s by Ian Adie, a former sales and marketing director with the RAC in Scotland, when it became the first Scottish firm to sell T-shirts for touring rock bands.

Since its first show with Deacon Blue, BIG has worked with some of the biggest names in Scottish music, providing tour merchandising for Texas, Gun, Runrig and Love and Money, as well as more global stars such as Oasis and Eminem. Its most recent touring engagement, however, was not of a musical nature - and not without controversy.

In recent weeks BIG has been selling T-shirts and other merchandise for Nicola Sturgeon, as the new First Minister addressed thousands of the party faithful in venues around the country.

The merchandise went down a storm with the crowds. But it led to a newspaper alleging the manufacturers of the garments were guilty of ill-treating their staff in countries such as Haiti, Bangladesh and Nicaragua.

BIG responded by saying it does not deal directly with manufacturers, and buys its T-shirts instead from two major UK distributors - as is the industry norm.

Mr Adie insisted the company carries out its own checks on the ethics of its distributors, and until now has been satisfied with what it has found. But he said the firm will carry out fresh checks on its supply lines.

Notwithstanding the controversy, the "Nicola tour" capped a memorable year for BIG, which has also pulled together the official Yes calendar in time for Christmas.

The team celebrated in style when BIG was named Glasgow's favourite business at the recent 2014 Glasgow Business Awards.

The award acknowledged its achievements. This year it was again the official merchandise provider for Poppy Scotland, which saw it sell its range of "poppy bling", favoured by celebrities such as X-Factor stars during the Remembrance campaign.

BIG has also continued its long-running deal with UEFA to sell merchandising at the Champions League final, an association that stretches back to the 2002 final at Hampden Park won by Real Madrid. UEFA have already lined BIG up to do the merchandising at the 2015 and 2016 finals.

Yet for all the big names BIG has worked for, Mr Adie, an ebullient Glaswegian who runs the business with his brother Alan, is not one to get carried away with the importance of his work.

Although the Dalmarnock-

based company boasts a truly global reach - he and Alan have spotted their T-shirts in places as far afield as Los Angeles and Sydney's Bondi Beach - he describes its approach as both "irreverent and irrelevant".

"Our company ethos is every day is fun and adventure," he said. "When I hire people to work for us, I tell them that they have to enjoy it. What we do is irreverent and irrelevant. We don't change the world, we're not political. We sell and merchandise T-shirts.

"The reason we won Glasgow's Favourite Business [award] is not because we are a household name. (But) it is almost a certainty that 50 per cent of people in Glasgow have got something we have made in their house, be it a Celtic, Rangers or Scotland scarf or a poppy."

Spending a short time with Mr Adie at the company's Strathclyde Business Centre base is sufficient to appreciate the sense of fun he has instilled at the business.

He also emphasises the role played by luck in building the firm, citing a couple of serendipitous episodes that helped him and BIG along the way.

The first came when he was running a burger van outside Celtic Park under the banner 007 Catering Licence to Grill, and was approached by a famous musician who admired his style.

Ewen Vernal, bass player with Deacon Blue and latterly Capercaille, was a regular customer and loved the Bond-themed T-shirts the staff were wearing. "I had never met him before, but the first time I spoke to him we made a deal that I would give him one of the T-shirts if he wore it on stage," Mr Adie recalls. "So Alan and I went along to his gig and being a man of his word he wore it on stage.

"We were well chuffed - this was our big moment in rock 'n' roll. And as we were walking out the hall, we noticed the queue at the merchandising stall was 10 deep."

It did not take long for a further opportunity to follow for the business, which today sells its merchandise from a fleet of 10 mobile outlets. Alan, then a lighting director, asked his brother to design T-shirts for an Irish artist, Mary Black, he was working with.

Tapping into his marketing expertise, he fashioned an Inca temple design from images of cassettes, which proved popular and led to Mr Adie joining the artist on a six-week tour of North America. "It was all done hastily but it saw me fly to Boston with bags and bags of T-shirts but not much else," he said. "But the people on that trip were amazing."

With London at the time the centre for T-shirt merchandising, Mr Adie's outfit was the first in Scotland to enter the sector.

Before long the company was working with major promoters such as DF Concerts and Regular Music, selling merchandise at Edinburgh's and Glasgow's Hogmanay celebrations.

"The company at the time was called Scottish Music Merchandising, but as we began to grow and do more corporate work the name became redundant," Mr Adie, who is looking to recruit four more full-time staff to add to BIG's current 14 in January. "We've had several changes of name as we have grown and we are now a group."

From an initial focus on music, the company soon moved into football merchandising, working for Rangers and Celtic, before the work with UEFA came along.

More recently the company has diversified, developing e-commerce shops for charities and providing promotional products for small businesses, from branded mugs and pens to polo shirts.

BIG expects to generate "seven figures" in revenue from the Poppy campaign alone this year.

"Our business plan for the next five years will see us grow to become one of the biggest in the UK," said Mr Adie.

Yet the expected growth of the firm's charity activity is expected to be eclipsed by its work in the business to business sector, which has seen that division setting up its own office in the Strathclyde Business Centre.

One recent BIG commission was to supply a bespoke tartan to artists for the MTV Europe Awards in Glasgow.

But Mr Adie says he is particularly relishing the firm's link up with UEFA for the Champions League final in Berlin in June. While he says Alan will run the operation and have maybe 200 staff working on the night: "My job is to make sure that when the whole stadium is packed... the right winners' stock is lifted."