skucast

To create extraordinary teamwork and collaboration, we’ve identified ten crucial traits your high-performance crew should unfailingly possess.

Today, we’re talking with one of the partners at Delegate whom many of you know as well, Rory Young, Senior Vice President of Sales, we cover highlights from the report and break it down to some of the most crucial challenges and opportunities facing business leaders as they develop a high-performance team.

Merchology has provided merch for over 60,000 companies worldwide including 86% of the fortune 500. Merchology is a disability-owned business and they were recognized by the Star Tribune as one of the top workplaces in 2021.

No matter what change you are considering, abolishing self-limiting beliefs is what the most successful entrepreneurs do well. Listen to this episode to see if you have any of the most common self-limiting beliefs for people in the promotional product industry!

We started a new series, where we occasionally unpack the most innovative and creative uses of branded merch in the market. Merch is the new press release, instigator, and provocateur, that creates cult-like fervor in followers, and now branded merch is leading trends vs following trends. In today’s episode, we’re going to talk about A24 movie merch!

Welcome to a new episode experience called Open Mic where we take your questions and ask a member of the community (or a member of our team) to join us as our experts to provide solutions. Today, we’ve invited Yvonne Zeman, VP of Sales at Juice Marketing to share her advice about kitting. Yvonne is a master at kitting, having created amazing kits for clients both in-house as well as outsourced.

Imprint Engine opened their doors just under ten years ago and have now surpassed $50 million in sales. As an innovative entrepreneur, Caleb’s helped hundreds of businesses, from startups to well-established companies, become more efficient.

From pixie dust to promotional products, Shelley Williams has tackled a wide range of creative and marketing challenges over her 20+ year career. Shelley joined SanMar as the VP, Marketing in January 2020.

You might think that no one would ever match NYFW + UPS as brands who could partner together in a way that would create magic, but that type of stereotyping with brands, merch, and experiences is what prevents us from thinking critically and creatively.

Joelly Goodson (AKA the Branding Badass) is an award-winning Branding Expert who’s passionate about helping her clients create brand awareness to increase profit. She is a Sr. Account Manager at Genumark, one of North America’s leading promotional products distributors.

Josh Ellis joined PPAI (Promotional Products Association International) in December as the new publisher and editor-in-chief for PPB magazine and the Association’s various digital and print publications.

Michael Scott Cohen is CEO and co-founder (along with his business partner, Jon Alagem) of the creative agency, Harper+Scott. Harper+Scott is a name that is spoken of almost reverentially within the industry, their branding, their team, and their mission have all been behind a secret veil and there’s a reason for that: they’ve just been busy — cranking out innovation after innovation.

Genumark is the largest Canadian owned-distributor and recently named Mitch Freed its new Chief Executive Officer. Mark Freed served as the company’s top executive for 27 years and Mitch -prior to joining Genumark in 2017- worked as a Strategy Consultant in KPMG’s Management Consulting Practice and was the Co-Founder and General Manager of an experiential entertainment company.

On Friday, when we got the notice about Jason Lucash’s departure, all three of us immediately agreed to have one last conversation before Jason rides off into the sunset. There are so many lessons to learn unpacking Jason’s journey so we explore multiple areas.

They were the most unlikely pair to form a partnership and yet several years later Robert Lederman and Lee Fine find themselves in the middle of an incredible growth season professionally and personally as they co-navigate the creative powerhouse known as Juice Marketing.

Jeremy Siegers was born with muscular dystrophy. By his Junior year in high school, muscular dystrophy really began taking its toll on Jeremy. This is his story about struggling to find his place in a world that did not easily welcome him, eventually overcoming obstacles by creating his own path which led to the start of his entrepreneurial journey and the founding of Sharp Mill Graphics.

At skucamp, our bootcamp for entrepreneurs held in September in Palm Springs, we hosted a panel discussion on the future of the industry. That panel featured a microcosm of different types of businesses. Voices that represent smaller distributors, larger distributors, the association, technology/service providers and suppliers.

As most of you know, we made the difficult decision to cancel the in-person event at skucon. In this short episode, Mark Graham and Bobby Lehew unpack a number of things including the highlights you can expect from the event, how to make the most out of skucon, and much more!

Today, we’re resharing our conversation with journalist Adam Bluestein because his topic is probably one of the most influential articles ever written about branded merch by an outsider: “How Supreme-Style Merch Drops Took Over Corporate America” published in Marker.

We’re proud to have put out over 150 pieces of content this year, including blog posts, videos, podcasts, lookbooks, and eBooks. We’re taking a look back at our readers’ favorite posts, and highlighting them as we head into the new year!

If 2020 was the year of fear, 2021 was the year of turbulence. Despite end-user skittishness, frozen budgets, continued lockdowns, supply chain problems, inflation, and “the great resignation”, many of you thrived. This industry’s ability to overcome any challenge is astounding and your optimism knows no bounds.

Jeremy and Jonathan both lead organizations, that despite the challenges of this year, have achieved record growth and more importantly they both lead our industry in social responsibility and sustainability efforts.

Bill Petrie is the founder and managing partner at brandivate. Bill created brandivate to help ignite and accelerate the growth of their clients through market innovation. With over 22 years working in executive leadership positions in the promotional products industry, Bill works with both suppliers and distributors who are seeking to grow.

During the past year, there’s been a huge shift in the sales world with marketing playing a key role. Marketers are now the new Sales Makers. For a long time, the marketing profession was like the stepchild in the sales household in our industry. But now, marketing is the compass, how customers find you; marketing is the fuel for sales growth with existing clients, and marketing is how you differe...

I can’t tell you how many frustrated salespeople I’ve sat across from, people who are doing all the right things but are not yet breaking through and are about to give up, when suddenly one final tactic opens the door, gets the prospect’s attention.