Two women in Heather Sanderson’s mentorship program each sold more than $1 million in 2011. It is a useful detail to keep beside the usual founder’s trophies. Awards look handsome on a shelf; a colleague with a growing book of business can answer the telephone.
By 2012, that program had developed five product experts at Overture Premiums & Promotions, the Illinois company Sanderson had helped establish eleven years earlier. The business served more than 2,500 clients across nearly 20 industries. Somewhere between the client list and the individual sales figures sits the interesting part of her career: the effort to make a company larger while giving the people inside it room to become more capable.
Sanderson’s business was promotional merchandise, a trade whose finished work is often small enough to fit in a pocket. Her responsibilities were considerably less portable. She co-founded Overture in 2001 and led it for more than sixteen years. The company became a national distributor, with production capabilities behind the branded goods and a workplace that found room for a little mischief.
A boutique with a catalog room
Overture’s beginnings were modest. Aimee Ericson, who joined in 2001 after leaving HALO, remembered helping with the first orders and arranging the catalog room. The original ambition was a boutique agency. It is an appealingly physical beginning for a business that would later be recognized for technology: orders to process, catalogs to organize, customers to persuade.
Ericson spent years as a sales assistant before taking on small accounts of her own. She also helped Sanderson with women’s business events. Her eventual emergence as a multimillion-dollar salesperson gives the early company a human scale. The distance between arranging a room and managing major accounts was covered over years, through learning, persistence and relationships.
In that account, Sanderson appears as a founder whose work involved getting other people into useful rooms. The sales floor and the business gathering were connected. For an employee learning to win clients, accompanying an experienced founder to an event could make the abstract business of networking rather more concrete.
The work behind the logo
Sanderson wanted an agency that could offer attentive service at a lower cost. Her response was to bring more services inside the business and shorten the supply chain. That choice came with an obvious complication: doing more yourself requires the people, equipment and space to do it.
The proposition depended on better control. A distributor taking responsibility for more stages of an order has more opportunities to check the work. It also has more responsibilities when something needs correcting. Sanderson’s approach put those responsibilities closer to the customer relationship.
Overture’s business included warehousing, fulfillment and screen-printing. These are practical words, with none of the perfume of an advertising slogan. They describe the machinery beneath a promise: storing goods, decorating them and getting them to the intended recipient. A beautiful idea still needs someone to put it in the right box.
The company appeared on the Inc. 5000 in 2015 and 2016, ranked No. 3,050 and No. 4,034 respectively. Inc.’s profile identified Sanderson as its leader and placed the business in Vernon Hills, Illinois. Those entries offer a second view of her work, alongside the promotional industry’s own awards: an operating company growing among businesses across the country.
A certificate that opened a conversation
A client encouraged Sanderson to seek certification as a women-owned business after Overture had been operating for a few years. The suggestion became commercially consequential. Through the Women’s Business Enterprise National Council, known as WBENC, she attended events, built connections and gained access to large corporate buyers.
Her explanation was disarmingly practical: certification helped put the company before businesses it would have struggled to meet independently. There was still a bid to prepare and work to win. The network helped make a conversation possible; Overture’s capabilities had to give that conversation somewhere to go.
She also described working with procurement teams to understand what they needed, then developing websites that could sit within a client’s portal or be maintained separately. Promotional merchandise, in this version of the business, came with a digital ordering and service layer. The catalog room had acquired some rather ambitious company.
WBENC named Sanderson a WBE Business Star in 2013, with the Women’s Business Development Center in Chicago listed as her regional connection. The honor placed her among women business owners from different industries and regions. Her professional world extended beyond competitors selling similar products.
“The benefits of being a female-owned business are immense.”
Heather Sanderson, on joining ePromos in 2024
Permission to enjoy the office
The picture of Overture during Sanderson’s leadership includes a mini bowling alley, a foosball table, basketball hoops and motorized scooters. An office equipped with scooters has, at the very least, taken an unusually literal interest in internal mobility.
These details belong to her stated preference for a workplace where people worked hard and enjoyed themselves. They sit beside the less photogenic work of improving processes and organizing client teams around industry experience. The combination is revealing. She took an interest in how work moved through the company and in what it felt like to spend a day there.
Overture repeatedly appeared on Counselor’s Best Places to Work list during her tenure. In 2016, Sanderson entered the magazine’s Power 50 at No. 43, one of two women making their debut that year. The accompanying recognition connected her growing influence with both the company’s expansion and its workplace record.
Growth, with the dates attached
The sales figures show the business changing scale. Overture entered Counselor’s Top 40 in 2016, reporting $42.2 million in North American promotional product revenue for 2015, compared with $37.2 million for 2014. The increase was 13.4 percent.
The following year’s ranking placed it at No. 38, with 2016 revenue of $43 million. Its reported five-year growth rate was 74 percent. The quieter year-on-year increase, 1.9 percent, belongs in the picture too. A business history becomes more useful when it allows room for different speeds.
Recognition accumulated around the same period. Sanderson received Counselor’s Distributor Woman of Distinction award in 2012 and its Distributor Entrepreneur of the Year award in 2015. The latter was presented during the July awards gathering at Chicago’s Navy Pier. In a trade devoted to helping other names become familiar, hers was becoming familiar too.
She was also an EY Entrepreneur Of The Year Midwest finalist in 2013. In 2016, Overture appeared at No. 48 on the Women Presidents’ Organization and American Express list of the 50 fastest-growing women-owned or led companies. The lists measured different things, but together they describe the breadth of attention surrounding her business.
Making room beyond Overture
Sanderson’s mentoring extended beyond her own staff. In 2016, she was recognized among Enterprising Women of the Year award winners. Her profile described work with young women through the Women’s Business Development Center, as well as mentoring small business owners. The company also supported local charities.
There is a useful continuity between those activities and the internal program that helped produce million-dollar salespeople. Both involved a business owner making experience available to someone else. Neither requires a grand theory to be valuable. A smaller business can have very specific questions, and an experienced operator has usually collected a few specific mistakes worth helping someone avoid.
Her connection with executive education appears in WBENC’s 2012 annual report, which lists her among participants in the Tuck-WBENC Executive Program. Alongside the awards and the mentoring, that entry adds another role to the picture: the founder as a student, making time to learn while responsible for an expanding organization.
The next team to build
Sanderson left Overture in 2017. JoAnn Gilley succeeded her as chief executive. That date matters when considering the company’s later expansion: a founder’s contribution has its own period, and the people who follow have theirs. Sanderson’s Overture chapter had already taken the business from its early agency ambitions into the Top 40.
In April 2024, ePromos Promotional Products announced her appointment as vice president of sales. The brief was familiar: lead a sales team and support strategic growth. Her experience developing people at Overture was part of the reason the move made sense to her new employer.
Sanderson pointed to ePromos’ WBENC certification as one attraction. More than a decade after her own Business Star recognition, the women’s enterprise network remained part of how she talked about opportunity. She emphasized access to contracts, learning, business partners and clients.
The thread running through this career is remarkably practical. Bring the work close enough to manage. Help a buyer find a capable supplier. Give a colleague the experience to take on an account. The branded object may be what leaves the building, but the more enduring achievement can be the person who is ready for a bigger responsibility when the next order arrives.