By Susan E. Campbell
NEPROMO is a locally owned promotional products company that has the distinction of being operated by four people who have been friends and business partners since their college days in the 1990s.
Deana Endieveri, managing partner, and her friend Kindra Chamberlain, had one table-top printer back then and sold silk-screened T-shirts dorm-to-dorm. Now the two women, along with their co-owning husbands, Mike and Jim, have seven embroidery machines and five screen printers Production takes up the entire former Coca Cola bottling plant at 95 Main St. in South Glens Falls.
NEPROMO is a company that will put a name or logo on just about anything to help build that client’s brand, as long as the product has been tested to be safe, lead-free and ethically made.
“Never did I think I was going to own a business and be a managing partner,“ said Endieveri. “Things just happened in this collective of ours.”
Endieveri was a communications major in college and heading to be a journalist, she said. But when she was exposed to a friend’s business she realized “we had something in front of us that had potential.”
Three years into the venture, after hundreds of cold calls along the east coast, Endivieri got a hold of someone who said they needed a rush job for IBM. This meant acquiring more equipment and a bigger space, and “the business grew and grew,” she said.
Endieveri likes “the hunt” and making the sale, even though it may take a while to clinch it.
“It’s like going fishing or to a baseball game. You may wait all day for that big fish or a home run, but it’s worth it,” she said. She has experience in sales going back to her childhood, “always selling stuff in the driveway, like silk worms and lightning bugs in a jar.”
“Owning a business is a tough challenge. It’s hard work and dealing with adversity and not always glorious,” said Endieveri. “That’s my definition of the entrepreneurial spirit.”
Endieveri and her partners share a closeness that extends to staff, who they regard not simply as workers, but as true team members. There are over 30 full-time people on staff and a dozen part-timers in the summer, which tends to be a busy time for office picnics, events and 5K races for which promotional items are custom made.
A handful of staff have been with NEPROMO for more than 20 years.
“Your vision of being a business owner on your yacht and bossing people around is not my vision,” she said. “It’s the collaboration that motivates me, and helping to make people feel good about their contribution. When they feel success, that drives me.”
“When you take a part of yourself and give it to another, they lift you up and will take you with them,” she said. “It’s not about control over people but being at their side.”
Endieveri said she doesn’t believe in pidgeon-holing ideas or creating an environment of fear. If employees need to take care of their kids or a personal issue, she gives them the time. She believes they will be more productive in the long run.
“I am a big believer in reaping what you sow,” she said, a philosophy she applies to customers as well as employees.
Endieveri said customers have been asking to put their brand name on bags they are seeing online for 99 cents apiece, which would save them up to 50 cents per unit compared to what they pay NEPROMO now.
“Those bags come at a human cost. If it’s dirt cheap, there’s somebody that’s not being paid a decent wage. Or the product has not been manufactured in an environmentally responsible or clean way,” she said. “We can’t beat that price, but we do stand by compliance to the Consumer Protection and Safety Act.”
Online competition is one of NEPROMO’s biggest challenges today. “Everybody wants to be an Amazon,” Endieveri said. Another challenge is finding salespeople who will “knock on doors and make endless phone calls and production crew willing to be on their feet all day.”
The trajectory for the company is steady growth, and Endieveri said the company can increase sales without investing in more equipment or adding production workspace. She would add working shifts and increase the services NEPROMO offers as their niche for quality promotional products continues to develop.
Learn more at www.nepromo.com.