Convergence Corner: Online Stores & Managing Inventory With Jennifer Lowry
The senior account executive from Digital Marketing and Print Solutions traces her company’s growth from catering to the restaurant industry to managing e-commerce for financial institutions.
Changes happen. Monkey wrenches have a nasty little habit of finding themselves in even the most well-thought-out schemes.
Jennifer Lowry, senior account executive from Carrollton, TX-based Digital Marketing and Print Solutions, parent company of promo distributor Inven (asi/232072), remembers one project that required a bit of thinking and patience when everything they had planned for a campaign faced last-minute changes.
“We want to know the big picture,” she says. “The challenge on this one was that we thought we had the big picture, and we did for that current time based off of the parameters that [the client] had put in place and we had discussed. Everybody was on board. Within two months, they added a full event team, which completely changed the entire scope.”
This was a campaign her company had worked on with a financial institution, where they were managing their online storefront presence. That hiccup of adding a new events team into the fold meant “backpedaling” a little, as she puts it.
“We had to figure out how we could take their storefront, where they were ordering print materials and mostly their swag from, and add on a component to it without interrupting any kind of day-to-day activity that they had on it and add features the events team could utilize that were specific to them,” she says.
Spoiler: They got the job done, but Lowry says it took some intense teamwork, and she relied heavily on her IT team to get the project across the finish line.
“They’re really the ones who had to kind of be the brain behind how we were going to make this work,” she says. “A lot of our internal employees have worked with us for 10 years or more. I’m not the only one who’s been here for years and years. We just kind of had to come at it like a village. We have to make this happen.”
Key Takeaways
• Jennifer Lowry emphasized that the expansion into promotional products was driven by customer demand – particularly from restaurant clients seeking a one-stop shop for print, promo and fulfillment.
• Many distributors, including Jennifer’s team, often say “yes” to new opportunities before having full capabilities, then build the infrastructure to support it. This agility is key to growth.
• A long-term print client needed a more robust online store. Jennifer’s team built a custom solution but had to quickly adapt when the client added an events team with different ordering needs.
• One of Jennifer’s top pieces of advice is to understand the client’s billing structure early. Whether it’s credit cards or cost codes, this affects how the e-commerce platform should be built.
• Successfully adapting the storefront required cross-functional teamwork, especially from IT. Jennifer highlighted the importance of having a strong internal team with long-term experience.
• Jennifer advises distributors to select items that are useful and industry-relevant – not just cheap giveaways. The goal is long-term brand visibility.