IPS’s ‘STiCKi’ Rebrand Reflects ‘Single-Source Supplier’ Status

The purpose of a brand name is to stick with the customer. When IPS wanted to rebrand to reflect its new identity beyond just traditional print products and as a service provider to the promotional products industry, it looked at the name of one of the products it currently offered and saw potential as a new catch-all brand name:

STiCKi.

It was the name of an adhesive pad that the company had started selling years ago, which owner Scott Thurman calls “a Post-it note on steroids” that sticks to wood, corrugated metal and steel, and won’t fall off as easily as other adhesive notes.

The rebrand for IPS came after acquiring five different companies, each offering something new to the greater IPS effort. After a time, Thurman and the team thought that the IPS name didn’t adequately capture what they had to offer.

Recently, the company also invested in a new ERP system and a new front-end experience that allows STiCKi to better integrate with its customers. The customer can send data on forecasts as well as past-usage statistics on certain products to manage stock in relation to demand and allow STiCKi’s customers’ staff to be more efficient and knowledgeable about their own processes and capabilities. In turn, that takes some of the work off of their plate so they can focus on the bigger picture of their own sales.

“We are so much more than ‘printing,’ but not all of our clients are aware of that,” the company said in a statement announcing the rebrand. “Custom digital print and label production, inventory and specialty tags, branded apparel, company stores, displays and graphics, BI reporting, warehousing, kitting and distribution are all part of our offerings.”

As Thurman puts it, the new name sticks (pun intended) with customers, and in turn allows STiCKi’s customers to “be sticky” with their own customers and employees, like any good branding partner should be.

And STiCKi’s business model allows them to be closer to that “one-stop shop,” or single-source supplier, that many print companies aim to be. Thurman thought that a brand name that identified so strongly with the printing world “pigeonholed” the company to some extent.

“We’re International Printing Solutions, and so people are thinking that we’re printing, and that’s about it,” he says. “We’ve been here a long time, and a lot of the customers just think of us as being the people who do just labels or just printing or just forms. So we really wanted to say, ‘We’re a lot more than that.’”

Thurman says that STiCKi is still that single-source supplier that they aimed to be, but it is the combination of a printer with software as a solution offering that he says separates them from much of their competition within the print industry.

“I think the story behind it is really the fact that we have a big base in the labeling industry and a big base with the sticky pad company that we brought in,” Thurman says. “And so we really liked the idea of having the name STiCKi, because it’s important for us with the [software as a service] offerings to help our brands be sticky.”