Centering your business around a niche can help you stay focused. There’s less pressure to be all things to all people, and you can become a highly specialized partner for your customers.

For The Foundry (asi/343637), a distributor based in Long Beach, CA, that niche was providing products and services like point-of-purchase displays, large format print, promotional products and more for the beverage industry. The company’s background wasn’t in print or promo; it was more on the beverage sales and marketing side of things. But, over time, founder Brandon Lutz and his company drifted to the print and promo space.

“We have a very different distributor position than most out there in that we didn’t come from the industry, and we just kind of fell into this,” Lutz says. “It’s kind of worked out from there.”

The Foundry grew into the print and promo space first with point-of-sale and print collateral and slowly added other services like apparel. This created new challenges and new opportunities for Lutz, like taking Pantone shades and seeing where else they could create branding opportunities.

“We saw brands going out and doing events,” he says. “So, we got into building our marketing equipment kits for a lot of these brands, and we just got to see these brands grow through just stretching their brand identity over a ton of different assets.”

As with so many who start in print and do promo, or vice versa, Lutz says that a lot of it came from being “in the business of saying yes and kind of figuring it out later.”