Promokitchen Podcast

This week's #TeaserTuesday deep dive, Danny Rosin of BrandFuel talked to Kate from Clearmount about hiring horror stories. Be warned, their stories get a wee bit PG-13.

Each Wednesday at 3:00 PM EST, PromoKitchen hosts a new #promochat on Twitter. All industry professionals are invited to participate. Each week brings a new topic that is relevant to improving the promotional products industry. For this week's Teaser Tuesday, Kate Plummer of Clearmount talks with Marshall Atkinson of Atkinson Consulting as a more in-depth follow-up to one of Marshall's answers about the #promochat topic "Finding Purpose."

Listen to our #promochat follow-up from 8/8/18 as Charity Gibson talks with Bill Petrie about mentorship.

On this episode, Mark Graham (co-founder commonsku) down with Paul Bellantone (CEO, PPAI and Dale Denham (Chairman of the Board, PPAI) for a discussion about how PPAI advocates for our industry and promotes an environment of success for its members. The impetus for this conversation was a Planet Money podcast\called Rigging the Economy. The episode looked at how some industries use regulation as a way to restrict new entrants in an effort to protect current members. The podcast looks specifically at the dental industry in North Carolina and how they tried to restrict teeth whitening clinics from operating without a dental license. So, in other words, if you were offering teeth whitening services in your local mall and were not a licensed dentist, the licensing board saw this as a crime. Here’s an excerpt from the episode that frames things nicely and also creates a few parallels with the promotional products industry: Teeth whitening is a fairly simple process. It doesn't require a lot of years of school.

On today’s episode Mark Graham (commonsku) and Danny Rosin (Brand Fuel) welcome Luke Freeman to the podcast. Luke is the President of Fort Lauderdale based distributor Wizard Creations. Luke played an instrumental role in rallying his community in the aftermath of the tragic school shooting in Parkland, Florida. Luke brought his community together to raise funds for the victims of the tragedy as well as to raise awareness on how to make schools safer everywhere. The promotional products industry plays a role in national crises, often in supplying products to help those impacted by the tragedy. In other cases, we see products emerge in response to crises as is the case with the clear backpacks that were distributed to students at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School after the shooting. We wanted to discuss what it means for us in the industry when it comes to products that are deemed controversial. How do we handle discussions when clients ask for these products? What do we do if we as distributors have a mo

In this episode of the PromoKitchen podcast, Mark Graham sits down with Gene Geiger, CEO of Geiger. Gene was last on the program in January 2015 and since then he’s been busy making headlines by expanding Geiger’s presence beyond the US. Specifically, just this past week Gene announced that Geiger was merging with the UK’s largest family owned distributor, BTC Group. During their conversation, Mark and Gene unpack what this merger means for Geiger and the industry overall. We have seen a few global merger and acquisition announcements in the last few years and we are only seeing the beginning of an interesting trend as companies in the promotional products industry ready themselves for the demands of a global customer base. Mark also speaks with Gene about the process he follows for making acquisitions work, given the challenges of integrating different company cultures and systems.

Hello everyone, welcome to the PromoKitchen podcast. We are a community inspired conversation featuring boundary pushers, rabble rousers, freaks and geeks who are shaking up the $21 BN promotional products industry.   My name is Mark Graham co-founder of commonsku and today I get the opportunity to speak with one of our industry’s foremost online community builders, Mike Schenker.   In his day job, Mike is the Executive Director of the Gold Coast Promotional Products Association, but his side hustle is guiding the ebb and flow of the Facebook Promotional Products Professionals group, a role that he proudly shares with Lisa Bibb   At 6134 members, the Promotional Products Professionals Group is the largest industry group on Facebook. It was founded in 2008 by Lisa Bibb as a way to bring industry people on Facebook together.   The group is well known within industry circles as a place where people can get ideas for projects they are working on, source hard to find products and discuss the latest trends. And yes

In this special episode, we take a close look at some major industry news just released moments ago, the coming together of alphabroder and Prime Line.

Mark Graham, co-founder of commonsku, speaks with Jonathan Isaacson, CEO of Gemline, about an exciting brand partnership that Gemline just struck with RuMe Brandsuite.

A conversation with Alan Tabasky, Vice President of BEL USA to the podcast. BEL USA is the parent company of BEL Promo, Discountmugs.com, and Branders.com. BEL USA has grown tremendously over the past 5 years and currently has almost 900 domestic employees as well as an overseas office and division. BEL Promo is an industry leader in the Promotional Products Industry in both price and production capabilities. Discountmugs.com is an industry leader in the direct to consumer promotional market, producing over 1,500 custom decorated orders each day for both individual consumers and corporate clients.

Joining us in the guest chair today is Marc Harris, Managing Director of TradeMarc Consulting International. Marc provides senior level executive consulting services for consumer product industry clients with an emphasis on strategic marketing procurement, supply chain management and sourcing of marketing services, including promotional products.

PromoKitchen Podcast #128 | Sexual Harassment - More than just #metoo by PromoKitchen

Hear how PPAI CEO, Paul Bellantone, has responded to the Las Vegas shooting at Mandalay Bay to ensure the safety at PPAI Expo 2018.

Mark Graham, co-founder of commonsku, talks with Ted Church and Anna Sork of Anthem Branding to the podcast today. Anthem is a fiercely unique promotional agency based in Boulder, Colorado.

PromoKitchen Jason Lucash and Mark Graham are at it again with the 4th installment of the Rebel Edition of the PK Podcast. Rebels on this podcast are Sam Kabert and Harry Ein. Shout out to SanMar for their very generous financial support of the PromoKitchen podcast.

Mark Graham, co-founder of commonsku,  talks with Andy Thorne from Outstanding Branding on the PromoKitchen podcast. Andy is one of the industry’s most outrageously, loveable characters. He’s not afraid to speak his mind, he makes friends easily and,  in his words, he’s pretty good at getting people to “say yes to him.” Andy, along with his business partner Sarah Penn, launched Outstanding Branding 8 years ago in their native London, England. Since then, they have grown into a multi-million dollar distributorship by focusing on design, building a quirky company culture and obsessively caring for their global clientele. In our episode today, we talk about how the UK promotional products market compares to the North American market, why Andy isn’t scared of Amazon, how to build a global distributor office and why the future of our industry rests in selling creative marketing solutions vs logoed tchotchkes. A HUGE thank you goes out to SanMar for their generous financial support of this PromoKitchen Podcast.

Welcome to the PromoKitchen podcast. Chefs Bill Petrie and Kirby Hasseman. PPAI has a long history of executing education and networking events to foster growth within the promotional products industry. Recently, PPAI held an event in Denver targeted at young promo professionals called SPARK. This event was created by – and targeted to – millennials who comprise the largest portion of the workforce in the United States. Led by Seth Barnett, PPAI’s Diversity Development and Engagement Manager, SPARK is designed to give millennials an opportunity to become engaged, educated, and connected with topics that are specific to the beginning stages of starting a successful career in the promotional products industry. On a recent unScripted podcast, Kirby and Bill discussed SPARK and, while applauding the overall initiative and success of the event, they expressed some concern about the optics coming out of SPARK and how it might be viewed from an outsider’s perspective. Specifically, the lack of the young profess

Join Mark Graham, co-founder of commonsku and fellow PK chef and long time collaborator, Danny Rosin, co-President of Brand Fuel. In today’s episode, we take a hard look at one of the most prominent yet controversial tools used to source promotional products today: the RFP (commonly known as the Request for Proposal). Like them or hate them, RFPs now define how many end clients source promotional products. At their best, RFPs create a level playing field where the best distributor wins the business. At their worst, they serve as a way for end clients to slice distributor margins to the bone. In my nearly 20 years in the industry, I have not run into a distributor that doesn’t have a strong opinion about the RFP, one way or the other. As RFPs create so much confusion for distributors, we wanted to dedicate this episode to uncovering why RFPs exist and how to manage them effectively. To help us with this, we wanted to talk to someone who has written countless RFPs and counseled end clients on how to negotiat

Not sure there are words that could adequately intro what you are about to hear. PromoKitchen Chefs Jason Lucash and Mark Graham roundtable with industry troublemakers Renya Nelson, Chris Ferriter, and Stephen McFadden for this mind-blowing third episode in the Rebel Edition of the PK Podcast. Listen. Learn. Engage. Also, a heartfelt thank you to SanMar for their generous financial support of this PromoKitchen Podcast.

Mark Graham and Danny Rosin co-host this very special episode. When we started PromoKitchen in 2011, our mandate was to create an open dialog about the white elephants in our industry. Over the past 100+ episodes of this podcast, we have looked at everything from the incursions of Alibaba and Amazon to supply chain disruption to the changing behaviors of end clients. We pride ourselves on addressing topics that bring people together on challenging issues. We continue this theme in today’s episode as we discuss one of the darker sides of the human condition: drug and alcohol abuse, and the ways it can wreak havoc on individual lives and as well as those lives around us. In particular, we are going to focus on issues facing the promotional products industry. We are incredibly honored to welcome Amanda Delaney to the PromoKitchen podcast today. Some listeners may be familiar with Amanda as she worked in the industry as a supplier rep for 15 years. In 2016, she left the industry and checked into rehab aft