The branded merchandise industry is full of problem-solvers. And anyone who has spent some time around the promo community – heck, anyone who has spent 15 minutes in the SAGE database searching through the diverse product offerings – knows that those solutions to problems are typically going to be of the creative variety.

Because promo professionals come at issues from so many different angles, suppliers and distributors often must navigate their own myriad subgenres of obstacles. Thanks to PPAI member business services providers, there’s probably an available solution to any dilemma.

Let’s focus on a couple of the coolest ones, just in case you ever need them.

Coolest Online Version Of A Starter Home

The term “starter home” sounds like a qualifier, but anyone who has purchased a first home knows that it comes with a great deal of pride, and it represents an exciting beginning. That’s a bit like SAGE’s Starter Stores, industry and theme-based company stores that are pre-built and help distributors pitch company stores to a client without having to build from scratch. They mark the beginning of a great relationship. “The best thing of all is that Starter Stores are free for all distributors,” says Bille Forman, SAGE’s vice president of marketing.

Coolest Way To Turn Your Phone Into A Kaleidoscope

Pantone’s online software, Pantone Connect, not only gives you access to their online color library – we’re talking some 15,000 proprietary colors, from 2024 Color of the Year “Peach Fuzz” to 2020’s “Classic Blue” – it essentially takes the physical swatch and turns it into a digital graphic color so that an entire team can easily stay consistent with specialty colors during production.

Coolest Way To Give The HR Team A Break

From personal assistants and admin help to graphic designers, Delegate CX has become a go-to partner for promotional products firms looking to add offshore help without the headache. Some 400 distributors and suppliers have used the company, which has hired more than 1,250 associates from the Philippines and handled all the HR and accounting details in the process. Even PPAI Media has gotten on board – shout out to graphic designer Rowel Cristobal! He built our cool logo to go with The Coolest Stuff in Promo.

Coolest Way To Buy Your Brand A New Set Of Clothes

Brandivate offers a number of services for promo companies looking to do a complete rehaul of their strategy or online presence. Brandivate’s Brand Refresh option doesn’t go quite that far. It’s more of an update for a company that has a history but needs a fresh look for a new generation of buyers. As Brandivate founder and creative director Bill Petrie puts it to clients, “I’m not saying your baby is ugly; I’m suggesting that your baby has grown up and needs a new set of clothes.”

Coolest Safe Space Where There Are No Stupid Questions

Oracle’s NetSuite is an enormous tool for promo companies. So enormous, in fact, that it can provide different forms of help to different companies. It would be easy to use incorrectly or fail to maximize it. That’s why PPAI formed the NetSuite User Group, which includes in-person meetups and ask-me-anything sessions with experts.

Coolest Way To Show Your Client There’s No Funny Business

Your clients probably already trust you, but nothing builds a great relationship like transparency. commonsku’s client and project portals give clients complete visibility to current and past orders, allowing them to place reorders and start new projects with a click of a button and on their own time, in their customized dashboard. “Clients love your transparency and ability to track their orders through production, and distributors love the organization and how it frees their inboxes and phone lines,” says Alyson Anderson, product marketing manager at commonsku.

Coolest Solution That Gets All Your Other Solutions To Be Friends

The problem with solutions is you might wake up one day and feel like you have too many for your staff to even integrate. Celigo uses AI to help integrate programs and connect applications. “When everything talks to each other, it reduces errors and increases efficiency,” says Nick DiNicola, PPAI’s digital transformation manager.

Coolest Quiz With The World At Stake

That might be a little dramatic. Then again, some might argue it’s perfectly apt. There are a lot of reasons for promo companies to figure out if, where and how they need to improve sustainability, but Storm Creek’s CEO Teresa Fudenberg says education doesn’t stop with team members. Promo firms have a duty to enlighten their customers about sustainability. “We got tired of people saying, ‘Our customers don’t care about that,’ so we launched the Storm Creek Sustainability School,” Fudenberg says. The program includes a quiz for companies to measure their own sustainability credentials.

Coolest Way To Get $50,000 As A Small Business

FedEx advantages are a premier benefit of PPAI membership, and beyond the discounts afforded to PPAI members, there is also the $50,000 FedEx small business grant each year, along with nine additional grants of $20,000. The only strings attached are the continued benefits FedEx offers to its recipients, including a $500 FedEx print credit and an invitation to the FedEx Small Business Strategic Insights Forum.

Auping is a news editor at PPAI.