We like working with brands who value their brand as much as we value ours.
“We like working with brands who value their brand as much as we value ours,” says Renya Nelson, founder of Brand+Aid. “We’re pairing their brand with the best possible products. We take a really serious approach.” Braind+Aid takes a serious approach because they know experiential advertising is perhaps the most effective way to make an impression on consumers. The better the product, the longer that impression lasts. Brand+Aid provides the right products to the right brands. “Any business comes to us with any type of marketing goal or issues and we brainstorm with them to come up with the best product to match their goal,” Nelson explains.
“I can tell a cheap swag item from a good one any day,” Nelson says. “It’s a value thing.” Nelson and her team help businesses understand that the items they use for marketing reflect the quality of their brand. “If you’re going to put your logo on this, make sure it’s a quality product,” Nelson says. It’s not only Nelson’s eye for design and quality taste that qualify her to find the products for brands, but her years of experience as well.
Nelson recalls her time spent working at a marketing agency in LA. She worked with a product rep who seemed to lack ideas. Meanwhile, Nelson attended Magic in Las Vegas and, as she explains it, “fell madly in love with brands. I got the true taste of how many people go into a brand.” It was during this time at Magic that Nelson started to see herself as a cultural anthropologist, studying fashion, technology, and how it’s all tied together. And it was not long after that she decided to leave the marketing firm and start her own promotional products company, one that would use creativity and expertise to help brands thrive.
After reaching out to her contacts and informing them that she would be starting her own business, she nearly immediately received a large order from Pepsi and Walmart for lanyards. It was an order larger than she could afford, but Pepsi and Walmart are not brands one turns away. So, facing the cash flow problem so many companies face, Nelson got creative and took a loan out from her dad, a loan that she repaid very soon afterward. However, Nelson still didn’t have enough money to run her business full time, so she started taking contract work while keeping her promotional products company on the backburner until April of 2014.
In February of 2014 Nelson got a call for a wireless company looking for someone to start a webstore. It was an order large enough to require all her time and attention, so by April Brand+Aid became her full time gig. After running the business on her own for a year, working twenty hour days and barely eating, Nelson decided it was finally time to hire her first full-time employee in 2015. Brand+Aid continues to grow in both team members and clients, as more brands take advantage of the superior service Brand+Aid provides. “You get good service with us,” Nelson says. “We trust brands and they trust us.”
In 2013 Nelson had moved back to Salt Lake City, so Utah gets to claim Brand+Aid as one of our own. “My business actually grew exponentially after I moved to Utah,” Nelson says. She explains that because the company is in Utah she was able to rent space, something she could not have done in LA. She also praises the Utah startup environment and culture stating, “The culture is full of people with values and we have really hip, young companies surrounding us. [Utah] is on the map for really good things.”
Published 2/23/2016
