Each year, Promo Marketing provides the definitive ranking of the Top 50 Distributors in the promotional products industry. For the next two weeks, we will be counting down the top 10 distributors of 2016 with exclusive interviews featuring the CEOs, presidents and owners of each company. Check back each day for more updates on the biggest companies in the industry. The full Promo Marketing 2016 Top 50 Distributors list will be published on Tuesday, May 30 and in our May issue.
No. 6: Integrated Merchandising
Answers provided by Rick Remick, CEO of Integrated Merchandising Systems LLC/Group II (IMS).
Promo Marketing: What led to your company’s success in 2015?
Rick Remick: Three things: No. 1, our people. We hire and retain talented, motivated, enthusiastic pros across disciplines—creative, marketing, sourcing and project management. No. 2, ideas and innovation. Our teams consistently deliver outstanding service and solutions through deep client knowledge, strategic insights and current consumer/product trends. No. 3, great clients. Success breeds success. We work with client partners who value their brands and rely on IMS to maintain their brand standards while consistently striving to surprise and delight a wide range of stakeholders.
PM: What goals do you have for your business for 2016 and beyond?
RR: Continued growth and innovation. When you have great talent working with outstanding clients, the innovations, cost-savings and solutions are the outcome. When a brand, or collection of brands, requires merchandising programs that provide compelling marketing insights, strategic trend and customer analysis, unique creative ideas, user-friendly technology solutions, and aggressive sourcing—we believe IMS/Group II is hard to beat.
PM: Besides sales numbers, what makes your company a Top Distributor?
RR: The long-term relationships we have with our clients, 11-plus years, and the time we take to understand their needs and pair them with the trends and requirements of each project. IMS/Group II’s goal at the beginning of every relationship and throughout the years is to understand the program and the end-users’ target audiences, insights and motivations, what products they value, how products are used to drive behavior, and what brand assets can be leveraged appropriately. The key to this is understanding the client and the team members across various stakeholder groups. We become a direct extension of our client partner’s merchandising team.
Here are the other distributors we’ve featured so far:
