In the first half of 2020 alone, iPromo booked 1,000 percent more sales and shipped 800 percent more orders than it did in all of 2019. But after months of soaring PPE sales catapulted iPromo to these record numbers, discarded PPE was now littering the streets and piling up in waterways, raising alarm from a growing number of environmentalists. The company has a fun idea to help clean it up…
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Decoration Diaries: How a Promo Distributor Turned a T-shirt Order Into Much More (and Gained New Customers)
When a parent organization at a Philadelphia charter school approached Damien Smith with a chance to provide students with T-shirts and various school supplies for an event, it gave Smith an opportunity to upsell with more promo items that fit into the school’s water park field trip and become the go-to distributor for a community…
Read MoreHow DiscountMugs’ Donated Promo Products Are Helping South Florida Small Businesses Stay Open
The promo industry is uniquely positioned to assist small businesses by donating products and services that can help attract customers and generate funds. It’s a long-term solution, too, and it gives small businesses one fewer thing to worry about right now. Here’s how a few South Florida businesses used donated promos from DiscountMugs…
Read MoreDecoration Diaries: How Classic Print Company Overcame Dye Migration to Deliver a Complex Jacket Decorating Job
For the first installment of Decoration Diaries, Qais Arabo tells us how his company completed a complex jacket project for a luxury department store with its in-house screen printing and sewing capabilities, and in the process overcame a few challenges including dye migration and hand sewing…
Read MoreHigh Score! This Distributor’s Brilliant Self-Promo Has Generated Six Figures in Sales (and Counting)
WHOOPLA, a distributor based in Encino, Calif., sends out two to three self-promo kits a year. Its latest, meticulously crafted and fully themed in ’80s arcade branding, is already a smash hit, generating multiple orders totaling six figures in sales with 100 of the 200 total mailings still to go. Here’s how it came together…
Read MoreAll in the Family: Jennifer Stromberg Is Bringing Big Ideas to StrombergBrand Umbrellas
In January of this year, Jennifer Stromberg was named vice president of the company—a third-generation family executive with 15 years of outside experience. A few months into her role, she’s working on strategic plans for company growth, evaluating the full scope of StrombergBrand’s business inside and out…
Read MoreCase of the Mondays? Nick Lateur of IMAGEN Brands Has the Promotional Products Cure
Each week, Nick Lateur posts a video. He picks a product—something unique or quirky, maybe a top-seller—and looks for any funny twists that would translate to video. The results, some of which may or may not involve Lateur wearing a superhero costume with shiny gold tights, are delightful…
Read MoreDelivering Experience: Starting Out, Growing Up (or Maybe Not) and Making Something Great in Promo
When we look back, it feels as if our baby is “all growed up.” But we realize there is so much ahead for Brand Fuel and this amazing industry—despite the threats in our SWOT analysis. Alibaba, Amazon, Wal-Mart, Costco, Pete The Promo Peddler—we exist because we realize we are what they aren’t. Differentiation is a part of our DNA…
Read MoreSpotlight: Amerifoam’s Lisa Bascom on Leadership, Running a Family Business, Community Work and Local Stardom
Lisa Bascom has a secret identity. By day, she’s president and owner of Brooklyn Products International Inc., parent company of AmeriFoam – The House of Foam, the promotional products supplier based in Brooklyn, Mich. But by night, she’s a superhero, a real-life Doctor Strange with the ability to stop and manipulate time. That’s the only possible explanation for Bascom’s remarkable and diverse list of professional and personal accomplishments, anyway…
Read MoreSpotlight: Inside an Iconic Promo Industry Brand’s Logo Redesign and Refresh
The Koozie brand, especially in the promo industry, is about as iconic as it gets. It’s one of those brand names, like Velcro and Kleenex, that’s so synonymous with a specific product that it often gets used to describe similar products, regardless of the brand. It doesn’t get much bigger than that. But even the best-known brands can use a refresh from time to time, and that’s the situation BIC Graphic found itself in…
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