Customer Growth Journey with STS Brand: Fast Track to First Mil

While average industry growth is around 5%, the commonsku distributor averages around 20%. We're passionate about growth. It's why we exist, to help entrepreneurs grow quicker, faster, and with less stress and more joy in their work. This is a new series that highlights the journey of our clients and how changes to their structure and their systems ignite exponential growth.

The education market is the third largest client sector for the $24 billion dollar promotional products industry, and Fredrick Daniels and Paola Espitia built STS Brand to focus specifically on this opportunity. Learn how Fredrick and Paola built a fast-track to their first million and gained a host of leads through social media by giving high-touch, specialized service to this industry. I called Fredrick to learn exactly how they did it:

You do specialized work for one of the largest school districts in the nation, how did that happen?

It all started when I was a teacher and then a technology supervisor in the Houston Independent School District. My wife and business partner, Paola, was a teacher and principal. She later managed the multilingual education programs for all elementary schools in the district. In 2005, I left the school district to go work for an educational software company. At the time, I was managing four websites for the school system, for four different campuses. When I left, the four principals that I was working with said, “we still want you to do our website work, is there any way you can do that?” 

So suddenly, I have one of the largest school districts in the US as a client, and those four schools turned into thirteen over the course of four or five years. Doing website work turned into doing brochures and flyers and then helping with logos. Meanwhile, I'm still working at what I call “my normal job.” By that time, I'd moved from educational software to work as a Change Process Analyst of a major oil and gas company. STS Brand was work I was just doing on the side. 

But then, I responded to an RFP from the district for promotional items, decorated apparel, trophies, and awards. And it really opened my eyes to this entire industry. We were ultimately awarded a three-year contract and just renewed this past year for a five-year contract. We’ve also expanded to more school districts in Texas, as well as a few out of state. All along the way we just learned how to figure it out. 

And the result? 

We finally rang the million-dollar sales bell at the end of our third quarter, which is the target I set for us this year.

You’ve grown fast, was this primarily based on referrals? 

Yes, and social media. With both of us (Paola and I) being former educators, we just called on our friends and our peers, getting a lot of referrals. But the biggest attribute to our growth this year was through social media. 

How?

I've never gotten into that whole social media thing, I don't even have a personal social media account. When we really started focusing on trying to grow this business more, we were left behind in the whole social media space. And so, we hired our graphic designer and our digital media person (now our creative assistant), and we now have people in place that know how to interact and respond to clients. Twitter is heavily used in the education community and all day long, our clients are posting things, from exciting news that happened on campus to professional development experiences. But where we're getting our greatest reactions and feedback coming back to us is where our clients are giving us the kudos. They started tagging us when we delivered on a cool project for them. 

So, you know, we have a lot of times where a school gets a big, huge vinyl graphic installed on their outside windows or somewhere inside the building, and next thing you know, our Twitter feed is buzzing because we're being tagged, the principal was excited about it and just posted it. And, all of their teachers and staff are liking it, and now other schools and districts are liking it as well. We've gotten a lot of new business just through our customers sharing their social media posts.

That's awesome. What’s your Twitter handle?

@STSbrandTX 

I just followed you. I love this. What a cool story on how the visual aspect of what you do, inside a fairly closed procurement system, leads to more referrals.  

Right. And there's a pretty extreme procurement process. Plus, most schools don't have someone at their campus that's just focused on marketing or even knowing where to get these things. Every once in a while, you may have someone on your campus that has a little bit of background in marketing but they're probably inundated with all sorts of other responsibilities. And so, when it comes to this work, we become their long-term partner with a deep understanding of their needs. 

It’s fascinating how you’ve parlayed your experience into a successful business, congrats on hitting the $1 million mark. 

It came faster than expected. We set the goal for this year and we hit it and we’re still climbing, we’ve got a little bit more than a couple of months left to see what else we can pull in. 

So what percentage of sales are you generating in promo versus print, versus website or creative design?

We’ve left the websites (pretty much) alone. Where we have a lot of uptick in sales this year has been our display products: signage, wall graphics, and window graphics. Schools can be notoriously blank and drab and to make that environment more conducive and exciting for learning or to communicate a particular initiative, principals will want wall murals, wall graphics, acrylic plaques, and floor graphics to bring up that level of school spirit and energy at the campus. About 30% of our business comes from signage and display work. And then our decorated apparel, we do a lot of school uniforms and t-shirts but also a lot of hard goods.

And you’re using commonsku’s shops for some of your apparel? 

Yes. The first one we launched was for a shipping services company and they wanted some apparel for their different regional offices throughout the country. And instead of one of their coordinators trying to wrestle the order from the whole company, we set up a shop for each employee to simply place their orders there. 

Our second shop was a marketing shop, a back-to-school shop. We loaded up a marketing shop with a wide array of different types of products that we knew that our clients would be interested in for back to school. 

And we currently have a shop that's running right now for holiday gift-giving. So those are our three use cases that we've had so far with shops.

What's been the most profitable and opportunity for you with those?

The apparel store. What we've found is that, because we work so closely with our clients and understand their business, we represent a pretty significant value to them, we’re able to curate the right selection of products and we’ve become such a trusted resource that they rely on us, plus, we’re here to guide them through the ordering process. 

You've got such an interesting growth story, what have you learned about working with clients and building trust in a regulated environment? And what has fueled your growth this year?

We really focus on creativity and graphic design creation. We consult with clients before we start our design process, we try to get better intel from them so we can inspire them. We've been doing a lot of screen-share calls, which is something that they love and they can see us work on their design in real-time, rather than working through a ton of email revisions that wastes time. By doing so, we help with their productivity and ours. We’ve also really honed down our supplier list and worked hard to build a better, deeper understanding of our products so that we can advise on client needs. 

And commonsku? How has this helped propel your growth?

I’m a systems and process person. For ten years, I was at a major Oil and Gas Company working on developing systems for engineers to use in a process they refer to as “management of change,” which is different than organizational change management. Like, when they needed to change something out on one of their oil platforms in the Gulf of Mexico. Before we would pull out that whole oil system, we needed to go through a series of reviews and approvals, both inside the company and external approvals. All of that was done prior via SharePoint and spreadsheet. So, I worked with developers to come up with a way to streamline a system that had a workflow behind it, automation and email notifications and so forth. When I came into this business, I was very hungry for automation and workflow.

When it came to the complexity of this business, I knew I needed to figure out how to channel all of this order management and energy in the same way. Where I really need the most support was when I sent a PO to a supplier, because on the sell-side, I’m in control of that, but once I send the PO to a supplier, I’m just keeping my fingers crossed. So, I needed a workflow to help gain control of where everything is at as I continue to sell. I had to ask, “How do we all play from the same sheet of music?” And we found commonsku. commonsku had the workflow I was looking for.

Now, if you ask Paola, it’s about the community, it’s all of the people that are a part of it. And that part is really important for me as well, but we had these two perspectives, the ideation and sell-side, and the management and process side. We can put together a neat presentation and all that, but once I have a client’s order, I need to know how I'm going to track that until it's on their doorstep. commonsku has both.

Without commonsku, we would not have been able to make the growth that we've had this past year because we wouldn't have had a tool and a system in place to underpin all of the work that we're doing here in the office. It has been instrumental, an essential part of our growth. 

Coming from a workflow expert, that means a lot, I don’t know that I’ve ever talked with someone who's got that kind of expertise behind them, I can see why you recognize the heartbeat of what we do. I really enjoyed talking with you, thanks for taking time out of your schedule, Fredrick. I'm glad I now follow you on Twitter, so I can keep up with you guys and the great work you're doing. 

Thank you, Bobby. Take care.