Wendy Nowakowski knew they wanted to do more.

“It’s like owning a snowball stand,” she says. “It’s not enough to just offer all the flavors.”

Nowakowski, owner of UBrandYourself, isn’t expanding into frozen treats. But she has grown her business from simply a small enterprise in her garage producing fiber art and embroidered patches and eventually grew to custom printed apparel. With that, her equipment investment and footprint grew, moving into a dedicated space in Bel Air, MD, and she grew the business to include other branded promotional products like drinkware and more.

This, of course, is where the snow cone metaphor comes into play.

“In order to stay on trend, you need to offer hand-dipped soft serve along with shaved ice and all of the toppings,” she said. “Branding is much like that. To be a full-service branding company, you need to offer everything branded to meet the foreseeable needs for your customers.”

That is the essence of the “one-stop shop” mentality that so many distributors seek nowadays. Modern distributors, whether they got their start in print or promo, understand that the two aren’t separate, but complementary parts of the greater branding effort.

“We do all the things,” Nowakowski said. By that, she means everything from apparel like T-shirts, hats, hoodies and polos to custom-cut vinyl products like stickers and vehicle wraps; print products like business cards, name tags and banners; and hard goods like hand sanitizer, keychains, lanyards, coasters, mouse pads and more.

The Realities of Growth

There’s the idealistic view of the entrepreneur that grows from their garage to a business empire, but it’s not something that happens overnight or without incremental adjustments. Nowakowski couldn’t simply add new products and services without investing time and money into hiring and training new staff to use new equipment.

What Nowakowski did well was make sure her team was competent at different roles. To use a sports analogy, it’s like legendary Soccer Manager Johan Cruyff’s revolutionary idea of Total Football, where every player on the pitch can fill into any other position.

“While every artist at UBrandYourself has a particular role, I cross-train them to operate all the equipment in our studio,” Nowakowski said. “This provides backup to our team and adds to their confidence when they discuss options with our customers. Knowledge is not only power – knowledge sells. When our staff is confident, our customers are confident in their purchases and in our ability to produce amazing products.”

To get to this point, Nowakowski has invested in both onsite and offsite training for the staff. She cites recent training from Vastex on its manual screen-printing equipment, like the six-color, six-station manual press and portable one-station/one-color press that she added to her facility. There was also the machine that the team affectionately nicknamed “chunk,” which uses a software to cut rhinestone patterns into thermoplastic and required training on using vinyl cutters with specialty materials.

UBrandYourself has expanded from a small operation to a full-service decorator complete with high-volume decoration equipment.

Print on Demand’s Place

If you’re a print shop owner, contract decorator or promotional products distributor and you’re not paying attention to print on demand, you’re missing out on one of the more paradigm-shifting technological advancements of the industry for quite some time. It’s allowed printers and decorators to minimize risk of dead stock by printing based on demand, and using processes like direct to film has made it even simpler to print a design and apply it to a variety of substrates and products when needed.

Nowakowski and UBrandYourself were early adopters of print on demand, and because of that they became a go-to for customers in the tristate area looking for printers using direct-to-film transfers with same-day prints on any material.

More than that, with the plan to bolster their headwear, they are using heat press for applying logos to headwear pieces like patches. That hasn’t been without its own learning curve, however.

“The biggest challenge is placement on the multitude of garments,” Nowakowski said. “We have created placement guidelines for the products we print. We train all our artists on the industry standards and correct placement so we can be proud of each job and our customers can look amazing.”

How They’ll Continue Growing

Nowakowski might have become a much larger and more comprehensive business than she imagined at its start, but that doesn’t mean she’s slowing down.

“We would like to add etching to customer-supplied merchandise in the future and expand our cap embroidery machine to more heads,” she said. “We see an uptick in caps and would like to ride this wave to provide faster turnaround times to our cap customers.”

They’re also planning on adding custom temporary tattoos – a fun and different way to use the power of wearable branding and print at the same time.

“It goes along with one of our campaign ads that reads, ‘Brand it like a tattoo! We’ve got you covered – literally.’”

Beyond adding tattoos, the growth strategy for UBrandYourself includes learning more about the promotional products industry as it ventures farther into that space.

Since its inception, UBrandYourself has expanded into other branded products like signage, drinkware, stickers and more.

“Our long-term goal is to attend more trade shows that showcase new and unique promotional products and order more samples from their suppliers to show our customers,” Nowakowski said. “We would like to send more of our artists to trade shows because by sending different people, you can reach a whole different sector in the marketplace.”