Bruce Fox Blog

Estimated Read Time: 6.5 minutes

I worked at a pizza place for many years; it paid for a poor college kid’s ramen noodle diet and I’m thankful.  

Working there was busy, frantic, loud, and smelled of pizza – I loved it.

That chain pizza place wasn’t my first job, but it certainly taught me quite a bit and prepared me for my future jobs.

Estimated Read Time:  13 minutes

In the last 48 hours, we have received countless emails. Everything from the 6 PPAI and ASI promotional emails we get per day to typical spam, while other emails are relevant to current projects or are leads. Then there are the emails that go down a rabbit hole that makes you wish you could be on whatever Lewis Carroll had.

What emails are these? Don’t worry; we can give you examples because we have emails like these metaphorically piling up to our eyeballs.

Estimated Read Time: 7 minutes

True or False: Promotional products are a form of advertisement or marketing.

If you said false, then you have two options.

1. You can click off this article and read something that aligns more with your views.
2. You can read on with an open mind.

Estimated Read Time: 7 minutes

ASI recently published an article about how a proposed provision could hurt incentive award sales. It discusses that to offset the costs of tax cuts, advertising specialties like awards and incentives are under fire. The new provision would consider achievement awards for safety and service awards as income for employees, making them taxable revenues. This will also limit the employer’s ability to write off awards for tax deductions. This will certainly raise federal revenues, but this will significantly hurt portions of the promotions industry.

Estimated read time: 5 minutes

Oops, you lost another client.

You turned your back on a sale that exceeded $5,000 and you didn’t even blink an eye. Even worse, that could have been a yearly renewal that is practically easy money.

Gut wrenching, isn’t it? Thinking about the sales goals you could have easily hit and all the money you missed out on. It’s especially scary when you start wondering that if you missed one, how many more you missed.

Read Time: 3 Minutes

Photo by Nine Köpfer on Unsplash

Being a promotional products distributor usually means wearing lots of different hats. Therefore, a lot of skills are required of promotional product professionals in order to have a successful business and bank account. Among some of the more obvious ones: perseverance, resourcefulness, and a lot of patience.

Read Time: 6 Minutes

If you’ve somehow managed to never fall victim to bad design (I don’t believe you) then it’s at least certain you’ve seen it. The example that always comes immediately to mind is an eye sore of a building in nearby Louisville (picture above) called the Kaden Building. Is is perhaps, the ugliest building I’ve ever seen and I involuntarily curl my lip in disgust every time I pass it. Who designed this building? None other than Frank Lloyd Wright.

For anyone that doesn’t know who Frank Lloyd Wright is, it’s worth taking a second to pull him up on Wikipedia. He’s a famous American architect who designed over 1,000 structures including his most famous, the Fallingwater house. Over 500 of those designs were actually created. And in fact, your town, like mine, might even be the “lucky” home of one of his designs. The thing is, while Frank Lloyd Wright’s designs were inarguably beautiful, they were crap.

Read Time: 7 Minutes

If you're like me, you scour every blog you come across that offers you a list of marketing tools to save you time, headaches, or a way to block your ex-boyfriend's entire existence. Okay... maybe that's just me.

The point is, I'll read anything I can find that could give me some insight into the biggest, baddest , and latest marketing tools to make my job easier because I'm kind of obsessed with efficiency. And here's why...

 Read Time - 7 minutes

Whether ' tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous graphic design, or to take arms against a sea of troubled product concepts, and by opposing end them: to be erased, to be deleted.

Okay, it’s not quite that dramatic, but as a manufacturer of custom awards, our company is faced with a growing challenge:  customer-submitted award designs.  The internet has granted everyone access to all the world’s ideas—good and bad.  And technology has put graphic design within reach of everyone over the age of 4.

Unfortunately, a vast majority of the designs we see are cringe-worthy-concepts that look good on a two-dimensional screen, but defy physics in three-dimensional, tangible space.  Check out the figures above for examples of where cool-looking graphics can lead us astray.

Read Time - 4 Minutes

Twenty-one billion is a mighty big number.  In dollars, that’s the annual sales in the promotional products industry.  If 21 billion one dollar bills, end-to-end, were the perimeter of a pie, the pie would be 323,000 miles across.  As big as that is, it’s a pie that’s cut into many pieces—20,000+ distributor companies with a total population well into six figures.

 To get your share, how do you stand out?  How do you distinguish yourself from everyone else?  What makes you the go-to for your customers?  Differentiating yourself as a resource for custom work is certainly something to consider.  Here’s why…