Today we’d like to introduce you to Paola Espitia.
Paola, can you briefly walk us through your story – how you started and how you got to where you are today.
We actually kind of got into the marketing business by accident! Fredrick and I met at UT where we both graduated with degrees in education. For a while, we both worked in Houston ISD as teachers. Fredrick moved on to work as a technology specialist before leaving education to pursue other career opportunities, and I moved on from teaching to become an assistant principal, a principal, then a central office manager for HISD.
After leaving education, Fredrick started to do web maintenance for schools as a sort of hobby to stay connected to that community. At the time, our name was SimpleTech Solutions. Thanks to his entrepreneurial spirit, web maintenance snowballed into fulfilling requests for graphic design, promotional products, apparel, all of the things that are now the bread and butter of STS Brand. Once we started building a family together, I left education to spend more time with our kids and to get involved with the business.
With my operational skills and Fredrick’s confidence as a risk-taker, we were able to quickly grow our business and take it on full time. SimpleTech Solutions was renamed to STS Brand as a nod to our start in web maintenance but also to let everyone know we’re so much more than that now. We currently have an office in the Energy Corridor with a small team of employees to help with order operations and graphic design, plus an additional design team we work with remotely. Our current niche is education and providing for schools, so we haven’t strayed too far from our roots! We’re just involved in a different way than we had originally planned.
We’re always bombarded by how great it is to pursue your passion, etc – but we’ve spoken with enough people to know that it’s not always easy. Overall, would you say things have been easy for you?
The promotional products industry is fairly easy to get into since you can do it on your own and without a lot of overhead, so we’ve been fortunate that there haven’t been too many challenges in starting our own business. Maybe the biggest challenge we’ve run into is finding the right people to join our team. Since we are a small family business, hiring the best fit weighs a lot on us and is very time-consuming. We not only want to find someone talented who will add valuable skills to our company, but we also want to find someone who would fit into the family that we’ve built around us. We have a very close relationship with our customers and suppliers, and we want to make sure we can trust whoever we hire to help us maintain and foster those relationships.
The flip side of this is that working with your spouse is definitely a challenge as well. It’s a lot harder to leave work at the office when it’s so easy to ask questions about a project over dinner. Working with family just doesn’t allow for much unplugging, and it’s hard to maintain those boundaries. The ultimate goal is to grow and manage our company in a way that lets us go on vacation in peace—no more business calls on the way to grandma’s house!
So let’s switch gears a bit and go into the STS Brand story. Tell us more about the business.
STS Brand is a creative marketing agency that specializes in promotional products. We like to think of ourselves as storytellers and experience-makers, which means we won’t just push products onto our clients. We are a one stop shop for almost all marketing needs: apparel, giveaway items, wall and window graphics, print media, signage, graphic design, photography and videography, and more!
We specialize in offering a comprehensive approach to marketing and collaborating with our clients, but I’d say we are most known for our cookies! We understand the importance of showing our appreciation to our clients for choosing to work with us, so we like to make visits to say hello and drop off our special chocolate chip cookies every once in a while. I recently had a client refer to me as “the cookie lady”! I think this kind of individualized service and care is what sets us apart from our competition. We understand that collaboration is key to building the brand you want so we want to make sure we’re with you every step of the way.
Has luck played a meaningful role in your life and business?
I don’t know if we’ve been lucky (or unlucky) exactly, but we have definitely benefited from being in the right place at the right time. We make a point of going to a lot of tradeshows, workshops, and conferences for our industry to make sure that we’re up to date on the latest marketing trends and resources to better serve our clients. Going to these events has allowed us to meet the most brilliant leaders in our field who have also become great friends and mentors. We’re truly lucky to have this community behind us to help us grow and become even better at what we do.
Contact Info:
- Address: 15119 Memorial Drive #106
Houston, TX 77079 - Website: stsbrand.com
- Phone: 281.962.1013
- Email: info@stsbrand.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/stsbrandtx/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/STSbrandTX/
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/STSbrandTX
- Other: https://www.pinterest.com/STSbrandTX/
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