For forty years, most of the marketing world has been racing away from paper. A family-run shop in Daytona Beach built a business by running toward it - and teaching universities how to make a donor feel like more than a line in a database.
Josh Tabaj is the Chief Marketing Officer and one of four co-founders of Branded Bills, the Arizona headwear and apparel company that turned a hand-branded leather patch into a national custom-merchandise business. Branded Bills started around 2015 in a Mesa garage with a branding iron, a knife, and roughly $1,000 from each founder; its first patch hat went to a South Dakota brewery. The company grew from state-pride hats into a vertically integrated operation that sources and produces its own headwear, runs a custom and corporate-branding division, sells officially licensed collegiate gear, opened its first physical store inside the Phoenix Suns' Footprint Center in 2022, and moved into a 96,000-plus square foot Tempe headquarters in 2025. Tabaj handles the marketing side of that machine - the brand voice, the customer story, and the argument that a logo deserves better than a screen print.
Custom Ink is an online retailer that lets anyone design and order custom apparel and promotional products - t-shirts, hoodies, hats, drinkware and swag - without order minimums or design software. Founded in 2000 in a Virginia basement, the company built an easy online Design Lab plus human design and support help, turning group orders for teams, schools, businesses, nonprofits and events into a business that has grown to roughly $500 million in revenue. It has since expanded into corporate swag management through acquisitions like Swag.com and Printfection.
The Icebox Cool Stuff is an Atlanta-based, full-service branded merchandise and custom apparel agency founded in 2001 on the belief that promotional products can actually be cool. It handles the whole chain - creative design, product sourcing, in-house decorating, warehouse fulfillment, company-store management and global distribution - for corporate clients ranging from Delta Air Lines to Google. Roughly 150 employees work across three locations and 150,000+ square feet of warehouse space, serving brands that want merchandise people actually keep and wear.
Paige Cannon Fuller is the Chief Marketing Officer of The Icebox Cool Stuff, an Atlanta-based branded merchandise and apparel agency, where she leads the marketing and creative teams that build merch programs for enterprise clients such as Delta Air Lines and the NYSE. A marketing and brand strategist with a background spanning apparel, e-commerce and consumer brands, she joined Icebox in 2018 as VP of Marketing & Brand Management and was elevated to CMO in 2024. Earlier she founded the advisory shop Fuller Made and held senior marketing roles at Alternative Apparel.
THE/STUDIO is a custom product manufacturing and on-demand merchandising platform that connects brands, creators, and organizations to a global network of vetted factories. Founded in 2013 as a custom patch shop, it now produces 300+ categories of custom goods - pins, patches, apparel, coins, drinkware and more - with no minimum orders, fast turnaround, and software that compresses the traditional sourcing process from months to days. The company positions itself as a modern, ethical answer to slow legacy manufacturing, serving over 100,000 customers including Nike, Adidas, Netflix, Uber and the Met Store.
Joseph Heller is the CEO and founder of THE/STUDIO, the company behind TheStudio.com and SuppliedShop.com, a supply-chain platform that connects creators, brands and small businesses with vetted factories worldwide so anyone can make custom products - patches, pins, apparel, medals and more - without minimum orders or sourcing expertise. After more than a decade working with factories in China, he built a low-MOQ, on-demand manufacturing model and a fully remote, globally distributed team, raising an $11M Series A in 2018 after 18 months and more than 150 investor rejections. His through-line is democratizing access to manufacturing as a path to broad-based wealth creation.