Bruce Fox Blog

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…

Read Time - 7 minutes

The promotional products industry is many things—it’s creative, it’s rewarding, it’s maddening, it’s filled with all kinds of interesting characters.  And it’s quite busy.

In fact, if you take the numbers from Counselor magazine’s 2016 “State of the Industry” issue, dividing the $22 billion in annual revenue by the $1,043 average order size, that means, as an industry, we are handling over 21 million orders per year.  21 million—that’s more than the poulation of the state of New York.  It’s a sh— I mean, uh…a lot.

Read Time - 6  Minutes

In the history of modern satirical magazines, it can be said that Alfred E. Neuman, Mad Magazine’s ridiculous cover boy, was the genre’s Founding Father.

First published in 1952, Mad’s lineage includes National Lampoon (1969) and The Onion (1988.)   Growing up (using the term quite loosely) in the 70’s, the shag-carpeted floors of our house were littered with various Lego, Matchbox cars, Wacky Packages…and Mad Magazines.  The Fold-In was an ingenious regular feature.  Don Martin—with due respect to the likes of Tex Avery and Chuck Jones—was the preeminent cartoonist of the time.

And, of course, Mad Magazine gave us Spy vs. Spy.

Read Time - 5 Minutes

I like trees.  They give us oxygen…They give us shade…And they’re just darn purty.

I also like fall.  Football season...The World Series… Cool nights.  And scaring the daylights out of the neighborhood children under the auspices of Halloween.  (I DO take the chain off the chainsaw!  And the blood on the hockey mask is mostly fake.)

But what I don’t like is the combination of the two.   As in the equation Trees + Fall = Frickin Leaves.  I frickin hate frickin raking frickin leaves.  It doesn’t help a bit that I might be a tad OCD (which should be CDO so it’s in alphabetical order.) OCD to the extent that one leaf on the ground is too many.  The only upside is that raking leaves is a beer sport.  As most outdoor chores are.

Read Time - 5 Minutes

Ah, the 80’s…The Golden Age of Reasoning…

Okay, that may be a bit much for the decade that gave us the Smurfs and New Coke.  But as I (quickly) close in on the big 5-0, I look back on those formative years with the utmost regard for the wisdom revealed to me by the totally gnarly movies of the time.

While it’s true there were lifeless movies like Mannequin, and others like Iron Eagle that mercifully crashed and burned, there’s a lot we can learn from some of the best flicks of the 1980’s, much of which can be applied to the promotional products industry…

Read Time - 4 Minutes

THREE SCARY THINGS…FROM LEAST TO MOST SCARY:

1. There are more dispensaries of logoed stuff than Big Macs.
2. Ronald McDonald. All clowns are downright creepy.
3. Your promotional products company may be more like a fast food joint than a sales agency.
   
   Not my company, you say?  Good.  But let’s give it the taste test first.

Read Time - 6 Minutes

I am getting dumber every day.

On one hand, my brain is being worn down like a #2 pencil in trig class, a slow and inevitable degeneration as my synapses dry up.  At the same time, the aggregate knowledge of the world around me continues to soar.  The result is a widening gap between what I know (or think I know) and all there is to know, ya know?

To cope with this expanding knowledge gap, I have some choices.  If I need the answer to a question, the solution to a problem, or the information to satisfy a particular curiosity, I there's lots of things I can do.