Episode 365: Why It's Gifting, Not Promo with Erika Athanas

Before Erica Thanos ever heard the word promo, she was already an expert in overseas sourcing, and her brand, Elevate Gifting, has a unique promise: boutique but global. On today's show, we're exploring international sourcing and why Erica calls what she does gifting, not merch, not promo, but gifting, and what that one word change does to provide a unique POV for her clients. Welcome to the SkewCast, the podcast for innovators and maverick thinkers in the promotional product space. My name is Bobby Lehew. I'm glad you're here. Elevate Gifting is headquartered in Castle Rock, Colorado, with sales partners in Los Angeles, San Diego, Northern California, Portland, and Rhode Island. Erica launched the company just at the end of 2023, and the team is on track to break $2 million in sales. Join us as we talk with Erica about her retail and product development background, product safety as an underrated standard in promo, her global distribution network that she's built through years of trial and error, and more. Today's episode is brought to you courtesy of us at CommonsQ. Over 900 distributors powering $1.8 billion in network volume rely on CommonsQ's connected workflow. Process more orders, connect your team, and dramatically grow your sales. To learn how, visit commonsq.com. Now here's my chat with Erica.

Erica, welcome to SkuCast.

Thank you. It's really nice to be here.

You came up through retail buying and product development, as I mentioned in the intro. What did that whole retail experience teach you and get you ready for promo?

The most important lesson that I learned for all those years of doing retail and product development was how much I know about manufacturing, like actual manufacturing of products. When I first moved to the supplier side, the retail supplier side, I worked for a company that we did about 70% of the C Spot Save product in the bins at Target, you know, the front bins in the front of Target.

Okay.

That product turns over like every 6 weeks. And we had 2 offices overseas, one in China, one in Hong Kong. And I went to China every 6 to 8 weeks for 3 years. Wow. It was really hard. My kids were small and it was challenging, but the lessons that I learned going into thousands of factories all over China, I learned how to make a pencil, cosmetics. We even did food and candy, and it was just a really great lesson in just knowing how product is made. And I didn't even know what this promo world was, but at the same time, my ability to do product development and custom product, I think, is one of the things that—

Yeah.

Really helps where we are today.

That's a great experience. So unlike the rest of us that are sort of worried or scared or nervous about going overseas, that was just a part of baked into your DNA.

Yeah, absolutely. You don't have to do it now because there's so many other ways of finding product and doing things. But back then I oversaw, it was like 500 to 1,000 different SKUs at any given time and different process of from developing to shipping. And also product safety. That's another thing that we don't do a lot of in the industry. And I am a huge proponent of that and making sure that product is safe and that I get testing reports and they're on record just in case there's an issue, especially for kids' products or anything that's close to a child's product. It's something that the industry is really lacking in that I hope as a company, we kind of bring to the table as a little other level of what we offer.

Well, I really appreciate that expertise and POV, especially on safety. Do you, what percentage of your projects do you think are now custom bespoke overseas? Could you guess at a percentage?

10%? I would say probably 10%. Yeah.

Yeah. But it's interesting. You have that muscle. You know how to use it. I think that's fantastic. You had worked in the industry and then decided to build your own business. So after 2 decades of doing that, so what were you hoping to build that was different than what you had done before?

So I've been in promo, I think it's 12 years now. And honestly, I had no idea what it was. I'd never heard of it. I was working for a company doing product development, different than what I said before. I was using a model to do this custom product where you source it overseas, you make it custom, it's 60 to 90 days for delivery. And that doesn't work in this industry. And I kept thinking like, where do these companies get their logoed product? Why can't I do that? Why can't we get into that? And, you know, just by happenstance, a very good friend of mine who was a VP of marketing at a large bank at the time needed to do like a custom piggy bank for a kids program and asked me if I would work with their promo person. And I was like, what's that? I don't even know what that is. And we hit it off immediately and we worked on this project together. And she, at the very end of it, was like, I think you need to be in this industry and I think you need to come work with me and be a sales rep under—

Yeah.

And so she really was my mentor. She still is my mentor. She taught me everything I know about the industry.

Mm-hmm.

And, and it was a very autonomous relationship. I ran my own business, didn't have to run anything by her, but at the same time, there were processes that I wanted to modernize and do differently. Right. So I decided to go out on my own. Plus I just wanted to see if I could do it, I guess. I don't know. And I had always wanted to find a program like CommonSkew and do things with a better workflow. But all that to say, we're still very close. She's still my mentor. We still lean on each other. Our teams, like every year at PPAI, we have dinner together with our teams and she's a really important person in my life and she really did teach me everything that I need.

That's amazing. What a great story. Speaking of teams, so you have a team of folks. Tell us again where you're located and how many folks are on your team.

So the home office is in my home in Castle Rock, Colorado. And then there's several people in Los Angeles, someone in San Diego, in Northern California, Portland, and Rhode Island. We're kind of spread out.

Yeah, that's cool. We'll get to Commonsku in a minute, but something someone told me yesterday was how well Commonsku manages teams for business owners and leaders and things like that. We'll get back to that in a minute, but that was an interesting takeaway from somebody who'd been on the platform. But I'm curious about your team working with clients. Clients tend to follow you from company to company, like tend to follow you and adhere to this loyalty. So what earns that loyalty in your mind in the business today?

I think it's really simple. It just boils down to customer support and really being there for your clients and having a trust that they know that you're going to go to bat for them and do whatever it takes to do whatever it is that they need to get it to them on time. And if it doesn't get there on time, you take ownership of everything. There's always projects that go off the rails.

Right.

Always. Nothing ever goes right. Um, just The trust, the level of trust and the ability to be creative and show clients that there are ways to do things differently, especially working as an extension of the company. So most of my larger clients, I'm part of their team. I'm an extension of their marketing team. We have quarterly meetings and we talk about what is the yearly budget? What are the events coming up? You know, let me work ahead of time. That really bodes well. And I think we do our best work when the companies really treat you as a part of the company because you're, you're doing the business that they need you to do and you need all of the tools to do that. I think that recommendations are the best advertising. We don't advertise. We only get new clients from, I mean, when sales partners are trying to build their own business under the Elevate Gifting umbrella, that's different, but I don't advertise. It's just clients. Recommend us or they go from another one company to another and they bring me with them and just kind of how it works.

I love the sophistication of your model in the sense of working with clients for projects and objectives and you're part of their ongoing conversation and not just the, oh, I need this kind of thing. That's real experience talking because getting a seat at the table has always been one of the hardest things to do.

It is hard and believe me, it's not with every client and that's fine, but I just, I agree. We do our best work when we're part of the team and with a seat at the table, for sure.

Building a team, there's this philosophy behind your team, and that's imparting knowledge so that people can build their own business under the Elevate umbrella. And this was on your bio. That was interesting. I tend to be a soft place to land for people. Good listener, big heart, zero judgment, cozy conversations encouraged. I love that line. That seems like the same philosophy you bring to client relationships too.

It is. I think it's all inter-relatable. I'm a personable person. I'm like warm and fuzzy and I get very close to people. Many of my clients are dear friends. We have personal relationships and I think that's the same for clients as it is for the team. One of my childhood best friend is, was the first person who joined the team when I started Elevate Gifting. And every person on my team, there's not one person on the sales side that ever worked in this industry before. So nobody had a book of business prior to starting. And we're a family. We work together really well. There's a lot of camaraderie. We have weekly meetings where we chit-chat and we talk about what ideas, or somebody needs an idea for this project or who's working on what. And I just try to be there to be a mentor and give ideas and just support them as much as I can.

I don't know if I extracted this or interpreted this, but this boutique but global approach to your brand is really powerful. I think that's a cool line.

Yeah, I don't know where you got that from.

I think I saw it on your company and I think I just sort of, the editor in me saw the two things in your brand and I just put them together. How's that? I love that because it's a personal approach. You have that with your team. You have that with your clients. You explained your international muscle and why you have developed such a muscle like that. What are international demands like now? Yeah. Do we have much time? Is that one of those topics? How much time do we have to unpack it?

No, I think I can break it down. I can explain it. I would say, first of all, it is so hard. And the demand for international has grown exponentially, at least in our business. Right. I would say 20 to 25% of all of our sales are international, whether it's a client who has international clients themselves that we need to send individual gifts to, right, with a distribution list of 1,000 people and you're shipping to 500 countries, or I don't even know if there are 500 countries, sorry.

Feels like it though, feels like you're doing that.

Oh man, it does. Or they have offices in other parts of the country, but their main office is in the US, so they are the ones that make all the marketing, team makes decisions of the product. I think it was about 8 years ago I started doing individual gifting worldwide for one of my bigger clients. And it was so hard. I've gone through probably 5 different models of different shipping ways and what's the best way. And there really just isn't. It's so hard. You just can't give the client, this is how much it's going to cost for shipping. You can't. You know, and then most of the time I was like, okay, well, let me ship it on your account so you can deal with all that. It's too hard for us to— the duties and taxes roll in like a month after you ship it. And it's really hard. The model that works best, that it's taken a really long time to create, is we have partnered with multiple different types of companies all over the world. Most of them are other distributors. That have a better global reach than we do. Like we said, I'm a small boutique company. I don't have offices anywhere else. I don't have boots on the ground somewhere else. And when something goes wrong, you really need someone who will go to bat for you and help you because you can't do it from here. It's just so hard. So it depends on the situation. It depends on what the need is. Let's say the project is a US group of people are getting product and then there's in Europe, Australia, Southeast Asia somewhere. I make similar product and I partner with these distributors. So I make one product here and then in the other areas they're made in country so that they can ship more cost effectively. And I can't do that without these partners. And so I've created this network and partners all over the world. That just kind of help us facilitate that. And sometimes it's just warehousing and fulfillment. Sometimes it's actually making the product and sometimes it's me making the product, but then helping me get the product to where it needs to go. Being a small boutique company, it's a lot of trial and error. And honestly, if anyone's watching this and they're a small boutique company like us in the Common Skew platform, if they want to reach out and I'm happy to share the wealth of knowledge that I've gained.

You will get some messages on that because this is probably the biggest challenge I think right now with a lot of distributors. And you mentioned we unpack this in two ways. One was international sourcing, and then you mentioned global distribution. Two different things, but very similar. In global distribution, you're doing so much of that too. Obviously, if you're listening to this, you can reach out to Erica and you'll see a note in the show notes for that. But what do you wish you knew about going global, whether it's international sourcing, whether you're sourcing products, or whether you are trying to work with other partners to distribute projects for US clients or worldwide clients? What do you wish you knew then about going global that you know now? And how would you encourage those folks that are like, I'm in that situation, I just don't have a network like you do?

It's easy to find partners and it's important to, you know, interview them and find like-minded companies that work in the same way that you do, that you can trust and are kind of an extension of your company in a way, and even have interface with your clients if need be. I always make sure we sign an NDA and we sign all the right legal stuff, but, and we have a contract, but our clients' global growth and how we've adapted really just has to do with finding this network. I don't know how to answer that other than it just took a lot of time. I'm happy to share the wealth because I think that it is just so hard. You want to find people that that run their businesses similar to you as well.

And it sounds like it's the kind of thing you build over time because it's project by project and client by client. It's like hand-to-hand combat for all of these little battles, right? I mean, you look back and realize you built up a repertoire, but usually it's hand-to-hand.

It is. It definitely is. The other part of it is just the whole global custom piece of it where, again, I think just the relationships that I've had over the course of many, many years whether it's suppliers that are technically overseas and in the industry and can help you do custom product, or it's those that I just know from previous relationships that I work with. That's a big piece of it too. Being able to think of these things that are creative, that aren't necessarily in the industry, that you need these global resources, manufacturing resources to help you as well.

Side note, and this may just be semantics and it may not even be important, but you use the word gifting and not promo and swag.

Is that deliberate or is that Or did that just happen to be—

Totally deliberate.

Oh, tell us about that. Why?

I think there's a stigma with swag and promo. First of all, I don't think people know what it is a lot of the time.

True.

But they know what gifting is. This is really schmaltzy, but I think it sounds elevated, but I also use merchandise product.

Sure.

I just think promotions tends to be something that people think is crappy and cheap and inexpensive. And most of our clients, or a lot of our clients, we do a lot of high-end gifting for. And so it just kind of, yeah, felt right.

Yeah, makes sense.

Yeah.

Talking, uh, touching on Commonsku for just a minute, you incorporated Commonsku and you have a team. So talk with me a little bit about that experience. What surprised you about how all that came together, and how important has that been for you managing a team? Of people across the US?

So there's two parts to that. First is when I started the company, it was the end of 2023 and we onboarded with CommonSKU, I think it was May of 2024. So there was a good 5, 6 months where we were doing things in the very clunky way where we were making presentations in Sage and then going into QuickBooks and blah, blah, blah, you know, all those kinds of things where no workflow connectivity, nothing that's cloud-based. If someone needed to see the artwork, I only had it on my computer, all that kind of stuff. And I knew that I wanted to modernize the processes. And so I was looking for the Commons SKU. I didn't know what Commons SKU was at the time, but then I did all my research and you guys were top of mind with most distributors that I spoke to and everyone had amazing things to say. And 5, 6 months in, we just blew everything up. So just again, the team had no promo experience. So I'm teaching them all of the processes.

Interesting. Yeah.

Just as they got comfortable, I blew it all up. And I'm like, here we go. We're going to do this thing. And I promise it's going to be really hard, but it's going to be better. I think the hardest part during that time was the fact that I wasn't an expert and I couldn't help them. And we were all learning at the same time.

Right.

But the second part to that answer is really the cloud-based medium or the program is— it's second to none in the sense that if anyone needs help, if anyone is out for an emergency and they have like an urgent thing that I or someone else on the team needs to step in and help them with, everything is right there. All the notes are there. The project is there. We're very good at keeping all of our information there. So not only— I always talk about breadcrumbs. Leave yourself breadcrumbs. Make sure you can find that information. And that helps with supporting the team, whether it's myself or somebody else. And the other thing is that when someone new comes on board, I have them kind of work with someone else for a little bit. Being able to be in the same project at the same time and doing all of the stuff at the same time and seeing it in real time and not being on a Zoom call and sharing screens is paramount to learning how we do things the Elevate Gifting way, but also how the system works. You can only do CommonSchool University for so long without having that tactile experience with it.

Doing it yourself. Yep.

That is really, really helpful. And most I was talking to one of my sales partners. That's the other thing. I don't call them sales reps. We call them sales partners. They really are partners in the company. You know, I was talking to someone who's the newest of the bunch and she's about a year in and she said, if I didn't partner with the other person to do all these projects, I would never be as far along as I am if I hadn't been able to do that. And that's because of common skill.

You are changing some of the things you're doing marketing-wise, a Backpack newsletter. And for those that are listening that may not know what that is, we drop a trends newsletter letter twice a month called the Backpack. That encouraged you, you saw something in it that you saw how distributors were using shops or ideation that kind of changed how you might be presenting products. Tell us a little bit more about that.

I think it was last spring there was a newsletter that came out and that's what it was talking about. And at the time we were a year in to Common Skew and we weren't really utilizing shops yet. We had a lot of clients that already had print on demand shops. But I didn't realize that you could use shops in those ways. And I was always looking for a way to promote specific product or supplier partners. It just really clicked in my head and we basically decided to redo our entire website to focus on doing ideation shops. So I think we have 8 shops. And we just launched our website.

Yeah.

I'm really, really excited to— first of all, the shops are beautiful. The way that you can create the look that you want is fabulous and they're free. And they're— I'm really excited. And I think that it'll be great for our clients to help them dip their toe into things with different categories and find different things. Creating a curated presentation is such a time suck. It's a very arduous process. Even as easy as it is on Commonsku, it's still hard. You still have to do all those things. It gives like a little step up when someone can look at these shops and garner some ideas.

Yeah. You're able to scale the ideation process and that's the whole game, right?

Absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah.

Going back to your team and Commonsku, 9 people. Do I have that right? Headquarters in Castle Rock. You mentioned LA, Portland, Rhode Island, I think. How does having CommsCue with a distributed team give you the transparency and speed that you need as a leader?

Because it's cloud-based and everyone can see everything and be in it, even though we're not in the same city. It's hard when you all work remote and you're not in the same office and there's no water cooler or, hey, let's go out to dinner or have lunch. We see each other in person maybe 2 or 3 times a year. At most, it keeps us together and it really does help the camaraderie and the ability to share things, which I think is really important.

Last Kominsky question. You said you adopted this fairly quickly and to the team, as a leader, you're like, we, we've got to do this. And you had a little tough window to go through to just adopt it and figure it out. How would you encourage other business owners or people that are considering that Because a lot of them look on this side of it and go, oh, I just don't want to make that change right now. That happens a lot. What would you, how would you encourage them?

Aside from it bringing us together from a business owner standpoint, to be able to, at my fingertips, pull a report to see all sorts of different things. I love that management dashboard. I live there. All the reporting is great. And it allows me to look at how everyone's doing if I need to. And if I look at our sales growth, it's incredible. Like when we started, we weren't even close to breaking a million dollars, right? So we started and then the following year to year we grew 70%. We're on track to grow at least another 70 to 80%.

Congratulations.

I think we'll probably break $2 million this year. I'm always waiting waiting for that shoe to drop because of everything that's going on in the world. But you just have to be hopeful and hope that things continue the way they are. But that's what we're tracking. It's not solely due to Commonsku, but I think the connectivity and the workflow and the ability to do more sales because you're not having to do all of these other things, it just, it makes a real, real difference. It really does.

Well, congratulations on the growth. That's phenomenal.

Thank you.

We had a CEO summit a couple weeks ago and the industry standard growth is something like 2 to 3%. It follows GDP. And the average growth in that room were all customers on CommsCue at 37%. So it's phenomenal to hear that. That's the thing we love the most is helping our customers grow. It's a part of our mission.

Yeah.

So I wanna ask it back to you and your journey, a theater degree from San Francisco State. Now, before we hit record, Eric and I were laughing because there's, there's a lot of people in our customer success team that are theater rats. I'm a former theater rat. There's a bunch of us on the CommsCue team that's former theater folks. Is there a through line to business and success? How did theater prepare you for someday working with gifting and customers?

Yeah. I mean, I think there is definitely a through line. But first of all, I want to say this because I already said this to you, but we need to have a common skier karaoke party or some sort of a talent show or something that we can all like, you know, dance around. But I started performing when I was really young. I went to school for it and then I lived and worked in New York for a long time before I decided I didn't wanna do that anymore.

I did my whole life. You were going, you were going for it.

Yes, I was. I mean, I worked on and off professionally for, I don't know, however long that is. I'm not gonna age myself, but it was a long time. All of the things that I learned from professors, teachers, working, all of that, it's, you can be a chameleon. You can kind of insert yourself into any kind of situation. And read the room really well and understand how you can almost manipulate the situation to your favor. There's nuances that you learn in practice and in learning about having to be on stage. And I don't know, a lot of people talk about the business mind is the left brain and the creative side is the right brain. Do I have that right? I think that's right.

I think so. Right.

Yeah. I think so. Yeah. I have always been both. I've always kind of been nerdy about spreadsheets and computer programs and things like that at the same time as being very creative. And whether it was retail or promo or whatever, it just kind of fits who I am. And I think I bring a lot of that knowledge that I have. I'm a people person, and that you learn from people.

You do. You learn how to— yeah, that's so good. You have a favorite production or show?

That I did?

That you did or that you love?

Let me think. I played Little Red Riding Hood in Into the Woods. It was a national tour. That's cool. So many years ago.

OK, that's cool.

That, I would say, was probably my favorite.

That's great.

Love it. I love— yeah. So good.

The team will like that.

You? How about you?

A production? I'm such a nerdy writer. I'm a Sam Shepard, Samuel Beckett fan. So some of those darker pieces. I do love Hadestown, though. I love Hadestown. That's really good.

Yeah, that's a good one.

Erica, this has been phenomenal. I want to say this before we close. Congratulations to you and your team and a shout out to your team who will likely listen to this. And I want to tell them congratulations too for the growth that they're having. We love talking with customers and seeing their success. So thanks for being a part of our community.

Thank you so much. It was really good to talk to you and thank you for having me. I really appreciate it.

All right. I'll see you at Expo.

Yes.

Okay. Thanks, Erica.