Lakeland PPAI 796873 Lane Seven Apparel Trading PPAI 630869 Montroy Sign & Graphic Products PPAI 422833 Promosonly, Inc. PPAI 798189 Raycon, Inc. PPAI 797712 TD Fischer PPAI 798125 The Barrington Group PPAI 191084 To the Market PPAI 714735 TruLocal PPAI 797452 NEW MEMBER SPOTLIGHT How did your company get its start? After I graduated from the University of Western Ontario, it was “showtime.” I launched my own brand at Toronto Fashion Week. It was a great success, and my design career began. I enjoyed several years in the high-fashion media spotlight, however, my business instincts kicked in. I decided to make a pivot; a pivot toward businessdriven design and stepped away from fashion retail. I turned my attention toward another passion: motorcycles. I approached motorcycle brands and started designing private label programs for them, which took me into automotive, alcohol brands, mass retailers and beyond. What led your company to enter the promotional products market? I was hired to run the production department for a major fashion distributor. My job was to tidy up the production process, implement their overseas production protocols and, most importantly, rescue a project for a major alcohol distributor that had gone off the rails. The brand was expecting delivery of their highly customized, high-volume product within three weeks to coincide with their fall launch, and I had to figure out how to do it. I went in, got my arms around the program, and worked night and day for three weeks, not only to source the manufacturers, but to also set up the production, drive it and get the program delivered on time and budget. I did, and I found that I enjoyed the challenge. Based on my success in that realm, I was hired to work with many other brands and eventually aligned with key individuals in the private label space and collaborated with them, and eventually, Brandworx was born. Since then, we have worked with distributors worldwide on highprofile brands in the alcohol, automotive, beverage and technology space as well as mass retailers. What’s your favorite thing about being in the promotional products industry? Personally, offering and designing creative end-to-end solutions is my favorite part. As a company, meeting our customers’ expectations and successfully executing their highly complex requests gratifies us. Our customers bring complex custom apparel, product and accessory requests to us and rely on us heavily to meet their customer mandates. We are in the business “of making them look good,” so it pleases us to do so. Additionally, I personally enjoy the factories. It’s a joy to work with them successfully and to be able to empower the individuals in the factories. Collectively, we value team relationships, and we respect the requests of our factory partners and work with them respectfully. In return, they work hard for us and deliver our complex jobs and meet our requests. Why did you join PPAI? Brandworx has spent many years finetuning our custom offerings, which include design, sourcing, technical development and logistics on a global scale, and we are ready to expand our offerings and scale up. On a personal note, we lost a member of our team, my sister, a couple of months ago and suddenly. It shook us and is shaking us to action. She was one of the company’s biggest fans and championed our work tirelessly on logistics to shore up our deliveries and support our team. It spurred us not only to expand on the projects we discussed, to certify as a minority-owned business and to actively incorporate the opportunity to give back to society as she did so generously. The more we do, the bigger blessing we can become. Karen Beach Design Director BRANDWORX Toronto, Ontario PPAI 662914, S1 90 | DECEMBER 2021 | CONNECT
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