IMS and the art of getting it there

At The Home Depot, the problem began with perfectly ordinary packages. Different merchandise vendors shipped signage directly to stores. Associates then had to find the parcels, sort out their contents, and work out what belonged where. Each delivery made sense on its own. Together, they created a small administrative obstacle course on the shop floor.

IMS Integrated Merchandising Solutions intervened at the level of the box. It aligned incoming materials with the retailer’s execution calendar, consolidated them into store-specific kits, and added consistent labels, installation instructions, tracking, and photographs. In its account of the project, IMS reports 96,000 associate hours reallocated annually and a 15% reduction in associated freight costs.

A poster has a supply chain

That box explains the company better than the phrase “marketing execution agency.” IMS works in the space between deciding what a customer should see and making sure the customer can actually see it. Its materials include traditional signage, point-of-purchase displays, branded merchandise, print, and digital in-store marketing. Its responsibilities can stretch from procurement through distribution and analytics.

Owned by Omnicom, IMS serves retailers, brands, and agencies with complicated campaigns to run. They may need thousands of locations supplied, several suppliers coordinated, or different versions of the same promotion. IMS brings creative, technology, sourcing, and logistics into that assignment. It sells the coordination along with the things being coordinated.

Wingstop provides a named example. In May 2022, IMS announced that it would manage the restaurant chain’s merchandising sourcing, production, and fulfillment. A new Wingstop Brand Store would connect pricing and store data with ordering, including orders for multiple restaurants. The shopping interface was the visible part of a much longer operational arrangement.

Where the requests pile up

Consider a pharmacy chain whose stores need signs for flu shots, clinic hours, photo services, and local offers. Brand control matters. So does the fact that the hours at one branch may differ from those at another. In an IMS case study, each local request passed through the client’s internal creative team before printing and shipping. The queue grew heavy.

The intervention was specific. The creative team made master templates; IMS programmed the areas that stores could change. Managers could order customized pieces through the existing merchandising portal, with completed artwork routed to printers. IMS reports 6,000 creative hours saved in the first year and a 30% reduction in printed signage and other merchandising costs.

What failed first was the allocation of attention: repeated variations occupied people who also had national work to do. The transferable idea is to separate the rules from the variables. A designer defines the permitted choices once; a store supplies the local information. The approach depends on requests being repeatable enough to fit those rules.

“Turning your marketing vision into retail reality.”

IMS’s own description of the job

The calendar can be a cost tool

A different client, a Fortune 500 beverage business, had distributors and field teams ordering materials just in time. Numerous shipments followed. IMS describes an internal fulfillment operation without the systems, processes, or staffing needed for consolidation at that scale. The proposed change was to collect orders over a defined interval and ship the varied items together.

IMS says shipment count fell 78% in the program’s first year, producing seven-figure savings. The principle is easy to understand and harder to operate: an ordering deadline becomes part of freight management. As an operational inference, that approach needs enough predictable demand and lead time to combine orders. An urgent replacement for tomorrow’s event cannot always wait for the next cycle.

The cheaper, greener surprise

Sometimes the assumption worth changing sits inside the specification. When Rémy Cointreau sought to remove plastic from point-of-sale materials, IMS audited existing and proposed items and suggested alternatives. Both sides initially expected sustainability to involve more expensive substrates. The reported result reversed that expectation: 30% less plastic across the relevant items and $50,000 lower total campaign costs.

That does not price a future project. It does suggest a useful question for procurement: has anyone compared the complete redesigned campaign, rather than assuming the new material must cost more? In this case, the audit supplied a reason to reconsider an accepted tradeoff.

Software meets the packing line

IMS calls its technology offering MerchTech. Its execution platform includes budgeting, forecasting, sourcing, ordering, management, and analysis. Store profiles record details such as fixtures and formats so forecasts can reflect actual locations. Separate compliance tools address whether displays arrived and were set up correctly; audience measurement examines interaction and context. Delivery and effectiveness require different evidence.

The market position follows from that breadth. A printer, merchandise distributor, or freight provider can supply an individual piece. IMS’s pitch is to manage how the pieces depend on one another, supported by its own warehouse operations in the United States and Canada. Its business is a tailored enterprise service engagement, with technology woven into the work. A buyer evaluating that arrangement needs to compare the full cost of production, freight, inventory, and staff time. A cheaper sign can still be expensive to distribute.

There is meaningful commercial scale behind the pitch. Counselor’s July 2026 distributor ranking placed IMS at No. 16, reporting $206.4 million in 2025 revenue, up 6.7%. That figure belongs to the promotional-products ranking context. In the accompanying profile, IMS described expanding nearshoring, domestic supplier relationships, and alternative global production options as clients dealt with tariff uncertainty and shifting supply chains.

Back to the shop floor

The company’s own staffing language spans designers, procurement specialists, logistics workers, and data scientists. That combination is revealing. A dashboard can expose a problem, but somebody still has to change the specification, supplier instruction, or pack-out. Expertise matters at those joints.

In October 2026, IMS argued that retail media, data, fulfillment, and store execution need closer connections. The ambition returns to the original Home Depot problem: a campaign has many owners, but the associate receives the consequences together. Anyone can copy the first step. Follow one promotion all the way to installation, and count the decisions the recipient still has to make.