ASI® Expands Relationships with The Vernon Company, Kwik Kopy Printing (ICED) and CorpLogoWare

Trevose, PA – Mar. 21, 2005 – Advertising Specialty Institute® (ASI) announced today that The Vernon Company, Kwik Kopy Printing and CorpLogoWare are making new significant investments in ASI products and services, as integral components to support their sales of promotional products.    

The Vernon Company (asi/351700), founded in 1902 and one of the largest promotional advertising firms in North America ($68 million in sales), recently entered into a comprehensive three-year agreement with ASI. The agreement provides opportunities for Vernon’s 500 field salespeople to use ASI’s ESP Online product marketing and research tool to increase response times and overall client satisfaction levels for its 50,000 clients.

“ASI’s ESP Online program has been an integral part of the Vernon support team for as long as I can remember,” said David Regan, vice president of sales for The Vernon Company. “Four years ago, we began to introduce ESP to our field salespeople who wanted this tool. The improvements made over the last few years have been terrific and the salespeople love the ease that ESP Online gives them in researching products and creating presentations for their clients.”  

The family-owned International Center for Entrepreneurial Development (asi/396500), the holding company for Kwik Kopy Printing, AWT, Copy Club, The Ink Well, Franklin’s Printing, Women’s Health Boutique, Parcel Plus, Kwik Kopy Business Centers and COMPUTERTOTS/COMPUTER EXPLORERS, is also benefiting from ASI membership. ICED is using both ASI’s ESP Online and its LogoMall Website design and hosting services. Currently, they are offering these benefits to the entire ICED family of franchises – over 400 domestic center owners. 

“We are excited about our relationship with ASI,” said Jim Hadfield, vice-chairman of ICED. “For our center owners, adding promotional items to their existing product line is a natural accompaniment.  Advertising specialties are a great way to provide added value and service to their customers, while increasing their own revenue stream.”

CorpLogoWare (asi/168827), one of only two promotional products companies licensed by the United States Olympic Committee, is creating a closer relationship with ASI as well. Its more than 100 account executives are using ESP Online to service the 70 corporate sponsors of the U.S. Olympic Team and its thousands of other clients. ESP works well with IMPRINT, CorpLogoWare’s proprietary Web-based enterprise management system. CorpLogoWare also provides direct access to all Nike products to corporations for co-branding opportunities.

“ESP Online from ASI saves our company thousands of hours of research time and has resulted in many enhanced sales opportunities,” said Jack Levine, president and CEO of CorpLogoWare.

Increased use of ASI products by distributors means that ASI suppliers are enjoying both greater exposure and newfound sales opportunities with these large distributor firms and their sales forces.

“The commitments on behalf of these high-volume distributor firms, including larger organizations in related industries, like printing services shops, are expanding the overall promotional products market,” said Dan O’Halloran, CAS, vice president of distributor and Internet sales at ASI. “Therefore, sales are increasing overall for both established and new distributor firms, as well as supplier firms.”

For more information about how ASI can help reinvigorate or launch your sales efforts in the promotional products business, contact Dan O’Halloran at ASI, at 800-546-1350 or at [email protected]. For more about ASI, visit www.uat-asicentral.com.

About ASI
Advertising Specialty Institute is the largest media organization serving the promotional products industry, with a membership of 20,000 distributor firms (sellers) and supplier firms (manufacturers) of promotional products. Supplier firms use ASI print and electronic resources to market products to more than 17,000 ASI distributor firms.  Distributor firms use ASI print and electronic resources, which contain more than 700,000 promotional products, to locate supplier firms and to market services to buyers. ASI provides catalogs, informational directories, newsletters, magazines, Websites and databases, and offers interactive e-commerce, marketing and selling tools.