Show Your Logo and the Promotional Products Bus. Part One: The Driver
Meet Don, President of Show Your Logo, Inc.
So who is Show Your Logo anyway? If you’re new to this blog (like we are), you may be wondering. Sure, Show Your Logo is a promotional products company. That much is obvious from all the images of custom t-shirts, printed drinkware, and logoed bags splashed all over our home page. So often with internet-based companies, you don’t get the opportunity to really know about the people on the bus. Who’s driving? Is he a trustworthy bus driver? Who’s navigating? Who are the people sitting in all those bus seats, and how do they work together to make for the smoothest bus ride possible? The ultimate goal? We want our bus to deliver the highest quality, most affordable promotional products you’ll find anywhere, and we want that gas pedal to the metal. Fast turnaround times are important to you, and they’re important to us, too.
That bus analogy? It comes from a spin on Jim Collins’ work “Good to Great.” If you’ve ever sat in on a Show Your Logo team meeting, you know all about the wheels on the bus, the engine on the bus, the gas in the bus, and the seats on the bus. Don, Show Your Logo founder and President, likes to speak in figurative language, which does make for more colorful team meetings.
If you’ve seen any our Show Your Logo videos, you’ve gathered that Don is a living, breathing tall tale. If you fail to notice him simply because he’s 6’5”, he’ll get your attention in some other way. (Read: busting through walls on a motorized cooler.) Underneath all that bravado, rest assured the fearless leader of Show Your Logo, Inc. is one smart cookie. (And he’ll hate that I just described him as a “smart cookie.” MENSA intelligent? How’s that? Yep. He’ll hate that, too.) In other words, in spite of all his wicked entrepreneurial skills that put the wheels on the bus in the first place, he’s a pretty modest guy. You’d like him.
Don fired up Show Your Logo, Inc. from a spare bedroom in a little townhouse in Montgomery, Illinois. He’s not exactly a speed reader, but that lobster trap brain of his is a storage unit of information any hoarder would love. And we’re not talking about an economy sized storage unit. We’re talking about the big ones, the kind those people on Storage Wars would pay a premium to bust open. In 1999, he slowly digested a couple of books on html and web site development and went to work. A few years of sixteen-hour workdays later, Show Your Logo, Inc. was born. His actual firstborn, a daughter named Emilie, was a toddler, necessitating a move to a single-family house where the expansion of the business continued in the basement with the addition of new employees. More gas!
Not only did Show Your Logo expand with incredible speed, so did Don’s family. Triplet boys joined the Show Your Logo family early in 2004. It was a pretty sweet set up that Don still worked in the basement. When his overwhelmed wife was faced with three screaming, hungry babies (and an active three-year-old) and simply ran out of hands, Don could be summoned from the basement to feed a baby or two before getting back to the business of Show Your Logo below. Good times. (No, really. Good times.)
All those employees walking in and out of the house plus triplets plus a rowdy three-year-old inspired Don to expand even further in late 2004. Rental office space was on the map, and we arrived in November of that year. We put up the walls and painted it ourselves. However, business was booming. Promotional items and custom-shirts were flying off the presses. The bus was getting full, and no one likes to be overcrowded. Don purchased our current office location in Oswego, Illinois (in the far western suburbs of Chicago) in 2006 to accommodate even more growth. Since then, Show Your Logo has expanded from its original space in to the space next door. In spite of the Great Recession, Show Your Logo has continued to grow. We can attribute that to the bus driver as well as the hard working, dedicated staff at Show Your Logo.
It’s a cool place to work. It’s a cool place to visit.
Promotional cooler race, anyone? (Rules and regulations regarding Promotional Cooler Racing can be viewed next to the fax machines. Stats can be viewed here as well.)
Foosball in the break room.
Diet Coke machine that dispenses all the free Diet Coke we junkies need to make it through the day. (Some are fonder of our custom “Surprise Me Diet” button that dispenses any of a variety of diet sodas.)
The indoor basketball court is pretty cool, too. Nothing like getting a little sweaty playing horse after lunch to shake out the cobwebs after a morning sitting at your desk! Join us sometime. The competition is fierce.
Don created a successful company from the ground up and has worked hard to create a positive climate that is perfect for generating the kind of customer service we think our clientele deserves. The best! We absolutely love what we do, and we love to print logo products for our customers to elicit top-notch customer satisfaction.
So for this installment, we at Show Your Logo are raising our promotional drinkware to Don. He’s a great bus driver, so get on that bus!
