Episode 118: The Future of Promo is Here with Isaac Hetzroni, Imprint Genius

Welcome to Skucast, the podcast for entrepreneurs in the promotional products industry. Skucast shines a light on our industry's best work, features maverick personalities, and discusses what's really involved in running a modern promotional products business. Skucast is the official podcast of Common Skew.

I'm telling you, this is my prediction: Internet of Things is going to revolutionize how we look at promotional items and how we look at physical marketing. Every promotional item that's in the industry is going to have some type of IoT connection, I'd say, in the next 10 years.

What does the future of promo look like? In a fast-moving digital world, what place does merch really have? What's a Fizz ID campaign or carbon offsetting? And RFID is not a new term, but are you presenting RFID solutions regularly? What's the difference between a wantrepreneur and an entrepreneur? Today we're tackling these topics and more with Isaac Hetzroni, founder and CEO of Imprint Genius. Isaac's a senior at the University of Florida and running a 100% student-led distributorship with a team of 14 students. You heard that right. The future of the $24 billion industry has never looked brighter. You'll see what I mean in our conversation today. Hi friends, I'm Bobby LeHew, the Chief Content Officer at CommonSKU. Quick housekeeping note: SKUCon will open up for registration soon. SKUCon is the conference for innovators, explorers, and dreamers in the promotional products industry. SKUCon is sold out every year, so if you want to make sure you reserve your ticket, head on over to skucon.com and sign up to be notified when registration opens. And we've just wrapped up a series on hiring. Our latest post was The Secret to Building a High-Performance Team. You can read that and sign up for more articles like it at community.commonsku.com. This episode is brought to you by Commonsku, the platform that powers your connected workflow, enabling you to process more orders and dramatically grow your sales. Begin your free trial now at commonsku.com. Here's my conversation with Isaac.

Well, Isaac, thanks for joining me, man. You have such a diverse background.

You grew up in Montreal You became a U.S.

citizen last year. Your dad, who's been your biggest mentor and role model, grew up in Israel, and you visit Israel every year. And one of the things you mentioned to me was the biggest thing that has shaped your worldview is working with your dad on his business. And he owns a power inverter factory in China. Is that right?

Yeah. Okay.

Now, through that, you said you learned about all kinds of things—

overseas fulfillment, production, sourcing, importing, costing.

Can you speak to that a little bit?

I could really have to thank my dad for really where I'm at with the business. I wouldn't have the confidence or the knowledge to be running this kind of business in college currently without all the guidance and support and mentorship he's given me throughout my entire life. He owns a Power Inverter factory in China, and Power Inverters convert your car power into household current. And it's very, it's a very niche product, but the fact that he was able to go and own 100% of that factory, which is very rare without Chinese partner, and run the entire company from the US as well as run the US business really showed me that anything's possible, especially with international business. Growing up, working with the business, learning about sourcing, manufacturing, and having that resource was, has been beyond helpful with how we, uh, built out our business plan.

Did you work in the business with your dad?

Yeah, so every summer, uh, I'd be working and in the business, helping out with marketing, wherever it was needed. I've been to the factory in China to help out with production.

How did your dad's business help shape your, your opinion about the promotional products business? I mean, in addition to anything is possible, what else did you learn that, that's applicable to you today?

For the first year of our business, we were 100% direct source. So, uh, no ASI, 100%, uh, volume direct source from China. And that was definitely a really fun, unique experience. Wait, wait, wait.

Let's back up. This is very interesting to me. So instead of like getting into the business and using domestic suppliers like many of us do when we start, you started from the beginning, which makes sense because your dad's business and the way you grew up in it, sourcing direct.

Yeah, 100%. Okay. 100% direct. So it all kind of started in college. I came in my freshman year And I found this little fan. You ever seen those fans that plug into your phone? They're all over the industry now. But yeah, so this was like over 3 years ago and I had this product I brought to a party and I was thinking everyone's gonna make fun of me for this little gadget. But I'm a huge gadget guy. I'm a big tech guy. And next thing I know, I have literally 10 girls around me all being, oh my God, where'd you get that cell phone fan? And everyone, it's so It's hotter than the Sahara in Gainesville, Florida in the summer. So my response was just, oh, I'm Isaac, I'm the cell phone guy. I mean, the cell phone fan guy. I sell them for $5. Right, just, I'm like, okay, this is a cool way for me to maybe make some friends, get some numbers, and I can make some cash. That was the honest truth.

Yeah, all right, beer money.

It was literally beer money. It would be, so I ordered 100 fans off Alibaba. The next thing I know, in the first week we sold out, like sold out of all 100 fans. And all my friends saw me like making all this extra beer money and they're like, "Hey, I wanna sell cell phone fans too." Next thing we know, within a few months we had 5 different school Pantone-matched colors. Kind of a similar story to PopPromos, if you know how they were founded. So that kind of blew up and then we started getting requests for custom cell phone fans. We got our first request was for 1,500 of our fans. They saw our website and like some PR about us and they asked, "Can you put my logo on the other side of the fan?" And I go, "Yeah, of course." And we made so much more money doing the B2B route. I'm saying, what am I doing selling to sorority girls and drunk guys at the football game? I should be selling to businesses. And that kind of got me into the promotion sphere. And then people were asking me, what other cool products do you offer? And I have, all right, well, I know tons of cool unique gadgets. I go to tech trade shows every year. They're working with that kind of industry for a while. So then I just started bringing in tons of products, everything that I think would be cool. The stuff that wasn't really in the industry. And that's kind of how we started off and branded ourselves.

So Imprint Genius, I love your tagline, Promo Done Smarter. Why did you choose that tagline?

Promo Done Smarter in a few different ways. We want us as a company to look at promo in a smarter way, and that means focusing more on return on investment versus the cheapest price. So you see a lot of people just in a price war. Hey, I want the cheapest pen, I want the cheapest cup, I want the cheapest bottle. But is the cheapest product going to work best for your demographic? Is it going to create the highest return on investment overall? Let's look at this marketing campaign as a true marketing campaign, a true physical marketing campaign, just like any campaign, and figure out what's going to work best for the client. That's one side of being smarter. And then the other side is let's use more smart technology and have more smart integrations to create more unique solutions for our clients.

I love that. So that ties in with a topic you're passionate about, which is the Internet of Things. You mentioned to me you thought the Internet of Things had the potential to really disrupt our business, or at least be so significant in the future that it could even cause a new category or industry specialty to emerge. I, you know, it's funny, I've heard folks talk about Internet of Things in this business, and many people just give it a little bit of lip service and move on. You're very passionate about this and I can see why. Can you speak more about that?

Bobby, I'm telling you, this is my prediction. Internet of Things is going to revolutionize how we look at promotional items and how we look at physical marketing. What Internet of Things is, for people who are listening might not know, that's like the smart home in your house or any type of smart technology. Think of the Google Home or the Amazon Alexa or the water bottle that's tracking how much water you drink. Or the toaster that's automatic. If you look at general trends with the products, if you go like Consumer Electronics Show, one of the biggest categories right now is Internet of Things, and that's having everyday products be connected to the internet either through RFID, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi. What is this going to do for promotional items? Well, when you can start to track certain aspects of the promotional item, let's talk about like a water bottle, for example. If you have a water bottle that's now tracking How much water you drink, it's connected to your phone. Now we're able to go and see, okay, so this custom water bottle cost X amount. And the user of this water bottle, let's say, or this group of users in this demographic data, in this demographic group, used the bottle for an average of 12 months before they deactivated it. And their overall usage rate was once every day or 5 times a day. And on average, they moved around because everything's connected to your phone. We're gonna have all this data. On average, they were moving and they're using the bottle and taking it out, drinking from it 30 times during the day. Okay, so now we have this data. Now what can you do with this data? This data can now be used and to figure out and calculate the two most important metrics in my mind when designing a campaign. That's impression rate and hold time. And I think those are the two magic variables for us as an industry to get to the magic return on investment metrics.

Can you explain both of those?

So I mean, hold time is going to be how long is the consumer holding onto the promo item before it's ending up in the trash. And impression rate is how many eyes are seeing this logo. So, and there, if you look at like the ASI studies, there's a lot of data on this and what products have really high impression rates. And I feel like we're not, as an industry, we're not taking that data into account. Because once we have positive return on, return on investment metrics, then we can compete against the digital marketing space.

You're pointing out a gap we have right now. We have this, these impressions, this impression studies that people like ASI put out, and PPAI has done them as well. And then we have this big gap between that and the practicality of selling and using promotional products out there. And I've never seen anyone make the connection as strongly as you just have right now. With use of IoT products.

[Speaker] Yeah, thank you. I just really see it as being the future because digital marketing, the reason why it's been blowing up in Facebook ads is because you get an immediate return on investment metric and then you can scale up the campaign. But comparatively, look at emails, right? An email, sending out an email has almost no effect, but sending out a personalized handwritten message, is now so much more effective. Before it was the complete opposite. Before, an email was the coolest thing. And I think promotional items are going to have the exact same effect. As we become bombarded by digital marketing, physical marketing is going to continue to grow. And I think that's why the industry is growing at such a significant rate currently.

When you're talking about tracking, you're talking about some pretty sophisticated things you can do with it. What else have you dreamed about in terms of what can be done with Definitely.

I mean, you have smart home technology where the customer or the, the fan can now interact directly with a brand, right? And now they're getting usage metrics on that physical marketing item. You have tons of RFID-related products that are able to be used and tracked. And just the— there's such a wide breadth. And as costs go down, your mug, every promotional item that's in the industry is going to have some type of IoT connection. I'd say in the next 10 years.

You're currently presenting a lot of RFID projects right now. We can't get into the details, but this is just something you're doing on a regular basis.

Is that correct? Yeah, it's definitely one of our bigger focuses as a company is focusing on these. What we call them is, it's called a physi-digital campaign or physi-dig in the office. We're kind of coining the phrase. Physi-dig. Or physi-digital. What that is, it's the combination of a physical campaign and a digital campaign together. And I think that IoT products are the way to connect them together. And I think that by combining the two together, you have a stronger digital campaign and a stronger physical campaign, and you're getting the closest form of return on investment on that physical side as well. That thing that I can't stop talking about, and that I think the entire industry is eventually going to move towards focusing, or at least a lot of specialized agencies is going to be focused on this new type of marketing.

So let's talk a little bit about sustainability, something you and your team are passionate about. What kinds of practical steps are you doing to ensure you consult with clients and provide the most sustainable options?

Yeah, so from the beginning, we've always been sustainability focused. And what that means is we will not sell you the, your junk pen. We're not going to sell you your stress ball. We're not going to sell you promo that's low cost, that's going to end up in the trash. That's low usage, one-time use. What we like to focus on are products that are going to make an impact, they're going to have a high usage rate, and that's really going to have a positive impression on the brand. Because you could have this fantastic brand, and you're putting the fantastic brand on a bad product that people are going to throw away, and what does that do to your brand reputation psychologically? You're associating a bad product with the brand. And we don't want any of our clients to have that experience. And it's horrible for the environment. So that's always been our focus from the beginning.

Have you had to talk clients out of bad promo?

Oh, all the time. All the time. I tell them, no, I'll be like, you want that promo? Fine. Go to the fine print. Like, yeah, it's— we will— I'd rather tell you no and you come back to me for products that we support than you buying the products from us and having a bad experience.

I cut you off.

Go ahead.

So on top of that, just focusing on those higher impression unique items that are high impact and people are actually going to keep and not throw away. We think there's a better return. On top of that, we're very focused on sustainability. So we do offer a lot of carbon offsetting.

Can you, by the way, can you explain carbon? But part of my job as an interviewer is to be the dumbest person in the room. Can you explain that?

And I'll explain that and then I'm going to talk to my director of sustainability and he's going to let me know if he wants it in the podcast.

You know what? We can skip it actually, man.

We'll skip it. Okay. Sorry. All right, cool. Sorry. It's cool. We have so many of these projects that like, I want to talk about, but then I'm like, we, no one else is doing it. And like, I want the industry to be doing it, but like, we have an upper hand because we're the only ones doing carbon offsetting with the promo and stuff like that.

I love it. Well, you know, that leads to a question then. Tell us a little bit about your team.

We are 100% student-run, 14 students out of University of Florida. We work out, we have an office in the UF Innovate Hub. It's like the center of entrepreneurship for Gainesville.

Hang on, hang on, hang on, hang on just a minute. It's all student-led? You have 14 students in your company?

Yeah, 14 students.

All right, keep going.

Yeah, so 100% students, and you can imagine the headache and the fun that comes into it. So exam week, it's a mess at the office, right? Everyone trying to balance school and work. We have, we have a rule where if you're working, you're on the second floor of the building. If you're working on imprint, you're on the first or third. If you're working on school, people are going back and forth trying to balance everything. Okay. But it's, it's been great. I mean, you have, we think we're one of the best places to come get a job at school. We pay well. And then we're able to give people internship credit, really hands-on experience, sales experience. And we have a fantastic time, fantastic culture. We go on tons of trips together. We go to like the Consumer Electronics Show every year. I bring around 60 people, my entire team and entrepreneurs from around the community. Hang on, hang on.

What year are you in?

You're still in school? Yeah, so I'm going into my senior year right now.

Okay, awesome. Speak to that a little bit more.

I think that the industry is making a huge mistake on not really focusing on bringing in more young people within promo. I mean, if we look at majority of marketing campaigns nowadays, they're targeted towards millennials, Gen Zs, yet—

Why do you think we are having a problem reaching that audience?

I don't think we're selling it properly. I think we're selling it, we're not, we can make it look a lot sexier than it is. When I tell people I run a promo company, they're like, Oh, like you sell t-shirts or whatever? That's cool, right?

Yeah, I totally agree. You're talking to the right dude. Yeah. I totally agree.

And there's so much more to the industry, but you have to, from my perspective, right? You have a huge influx of entrepreneurs and wantrepreneurs, right? Within the college age market, within my age.

What do you call it? Entrepreneurs and what?

And wantrepreneurs. Okay. So there's entrepreneurs who are actually doing things and wantrepreneurs are people who claim they're entrepreneurial but haven't really, they don't really have anything to show for it. And I think that promotional items is such a low barrier to entry and something you can really jump into and do well at, especially as a young person, because you understand what the buyer is looking for. They're looking for products that you're going to like because they're trying to market to you. And for college towns, I mean, schools are what the largest— school and education is the largest purchase of promotional items. College towns become a fantastic place to have tons of business. I think it was the perfect business to run during college. It still is. And I think that, for example, free ASI memberships or whatever, or discounted ASI memberships to people in college or in more recruitment type of stuff, or I think, I don't know what could be done. I'll have to get back to you on that. I just, I really think that when I was coming into the industry, it was, I think I could have had a warmer welcome. If that makes sense.

Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. It was almost not frowned upon, but it wasn't, it could have been a smoother process and easier process. Obviously we don't want to flood the industry with tons of small distributors and everyone's and the whole industry's consolidating. But I think that the young mindset in general is going to bring a lot more innovation technology. Yeah. Another thing I've been seeing is the lack of digital marketing within our industry. I mean, we have softwares we're able to go and we have some of the best digital marketers on our team. We're about to do a huge outbound digital marketing push, go with tons of content. And the big guys even in the industry are just not focusing on digital marketing. And I think they're making a huge mistake. You can do hyper-targeted marketing now, target directly your target consumers, run fantastic content and really differentiate yourselves. And I think that the whole industry needs to, needs to watch some YouTube tutorials on how to do Facebook ads and get it going.

It, it's obvious that your culture is an incubator for ideas. How do you guys ideate or think of ideas for your clients? Is it— is it—

is—

do you have any formal process, or you're already in such an incubator that it's just a natural reflex for you?

I'd say it's about your mindset of how you look at The everyday item, the everyday thing. Look at retail trends. I've heard people talk about this before, but look at what's going on within the retail space. What products are trending? What products you see doing well? There's no reason why that couldn't be applied to a promotional item space as well down the road. And I think the promotional space is just a little behind retail. And I understand that, right? Suppliers don't want to take a brand new fad product because there's high risk. But those high-risk products tend to have high reward, a high return on investment. And the reason why I think that we have such great projects we're working on technology is because every person on our team knows that they need to focus on what's new and trending in technology, not just within the promotion space, but outside the space as well. And going to technology trade shows, going to affiliate marketing trade shows, any type of show we can go to outside the promotional space is what helps us so much within the space.

I've maintained this a long time, by the way. You're cross-pollinating ideas from other industries to inform this one, and that's where you're getting a lot of your best feedback.

Exactly.

Tell me, is there anything else you want to add about, about your team?

We come into the office really focused on having fun and making sure we're having a fun time with our clients, having a fun time with our, with our content, our promo. I think that what might demotivate people is having the wrong mindset, like we talked about earlier about promotional items and thinking of it just as pens, right? Trying to just really look at the brighter side of the promo and make it into a fun interactive job makes the whole experience a lot better. And I think that there should be a lot more team building, going to events together and going to these conferences together.

What do you enjoy the most about the business?

I definitely enjoy the creative aspect. It's so fun being able to try to come up with a unique idea that people— or take a unique product and really play around with the possibilities of it. Also, I think once the best part of my job is we do like a full-scale fulfillment for like an event, right? And we're doing all the swag and then everyone's repping the products we're wearing and people's eyes light up when they see our promo. That interaction with the consumer and seeing them be happy is like the best feeling I could ever have.

What brands do you love?

What brands do you and your team talk about and love?

Within the industry, Auragadio, I think everyone loves them. Outside of the business, outside of the business brands that we love, we love Allbirds. We think that their marketing is fantastic. We love all of the Hartman Brothers. Companies, so the ones they did the ads for, like the Squatty Potty and Dollar Shave Club, a lot of those brands and their digital marketing strategies we think are just fantastic. We get definitely a lot of inspiration from that.

You mentioned your dad was a mentor of yours. Any other thoughts on that and other mentors that you have and have had?

Yeah, so my dad's definitely my biggest mentor. He knows just about everything about the company. It's been awesome having him as a personal mentor because I feel like we've gotten a lot closer because of that. Where we share our wins, we share our losses. He has struggles with his business that we could talk about. I can talk about my business and we just are able to stay really close because of that.

Isaac, what's your vision for the future? Where do you see you and your organization in 5 years?

So where I see Imprint Genius is being the place to go to for unique, high-impact, tech-focused promo. Our branding that we're trying to go for is kind of like the touch of modern for promo, as well as we plan to be the best at creating physi-digital solutions in the entire industry. So really, really trying to brainstorm, think of the best, most creative ways to connect those IoT products to, to a digital marketing campaign specializing in those and then focusing on those really large, high-impact campaigns. Because we really think that from a return on investment standpoint down the road, those are going to really hit home.

Isaac, this has been an amazing conversation. I am so honored that I got a chance to talk with you, and I really mean that in all sincerity. And I know when you speak, you're speaking on behalf of 14 others. The future that you have and just the enthusiasm you have around our medium, I just have a tremendous amount of respect. And a shout out to you and your team for doing such amazing work. We'll be watching you, and hopefully we can record part 2 soon.

Awesome, Bobby, it's been such a pleasure.

Thanks so much for tuning in to this episode of SkuCast. Be sure to keep up with our latest content by subscribing to SkuCast on iTunes or to our blog at community.commsku.com. Until next time, friends. Thanks so much for listening.