Master Fulfillment Companies Critical to Expanding IRR Marketplace
Creating a Consumer Redemption Experience and an Engaged Enterprise
Insights From Leading Master Fulfillment Companies
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The leading master fulfillment companies can help thousands of potential engagement solution providers access the latest in catalog redemption, gifting and enterprise engagement technologies to serve the hundreds of thousands of companies overlooked by the leading IRR companies. Master fulfillment companies can help address the IRR industry's biggest challenge: The 120 or so IRR companies in the US cannot possibly serve the 200,000 or more organizations large enough to benefit from a formal approach to stakeholder engagement. Master fulfillment companies can support both the largest firms with state-of-the-art real-time feeds of the leading brands and hot products, and to varying degrees can help smaller solution providers with event and related gifting technology, recognition or incentive platforms, or in a few cases enterprise engagement technology solutions.
Master fulfillment companies could be a key to help expand the number of solution providers focusing on the vast marketplace of smaller to mid-size organizations largely deprived of both a consumer retail experience for catalog redemptions and enterprise engagement technology to more effectively engage all stakeholders. This can only change as more promotional distributors, marketing agencies, and human capital advisory firms grasp the opportunity to help their clients enhance performance through people and become aware of how these fulfillment companies can help.
Here's an update on some of the most established master fulfillment companies and the ways they help the leading IRR firms as well as a growing army of smaller solution providers serving the broader marketplace with both catalog and program management technologies and related services.
Creating a Consumer Redemption Experience and an Engaged Enterprise
Go online to any major consumer web site, and you’ll find the latest, hottest items available, usually ready for shipping within a day or two. For employees or even consumers seeking to redeem their incentive and loyalty points through the incentive, recognition, and loyalty marketplace, that’s not always the case. This annual update in trends in the master fulfillment field reveals a surprising fact: today’s leading master fulfillment companies can support the industry with both a consumer catalog experience featuring the latest products and pricing, when a significant number of incentive, recognition, loyalty and promotional firms lack the API or other electronic connections to feature the latest products on a real-time basis.
Partially as a result, the IRR business has increased their use of gift cards, even though they almost always cost more than wholesale merchandise. Recipients prefer not only choice and value but the ability to find the latest products. Would redeemers prefer gift cards if they found the specific item they desired on the online redemption catalog? From the point of view of creating a more lasting memory, evidence suggests receiving a specific item from a company fosters a more compelling reminder than a generic retail gift card, but if the most desirable products aren’t available, or it’s taking weeks to arrive, why bother?
The same technological disparities exist for smaller to mid-size enterprises as well when it comes to front-end engagement program management technology to engage sales and non-sales employees; supply chain and distribution partners, and other stakeholders. Some recent start-ups sell robust gifting platforms with state-of-the-art consumer catalogs featuring a wide variety of voices, but none offer enterprise engagement technologies enabling companies to engage all their stakeholders with communications, learning, voice and feedback, assessment, suggestions, wellness, safety, etc.
Consequently, many organizations miss the opportunity to have an inspiring consumer experience when rewarding points or shopping for rewards powered by enterprise engagement technology making it easy to deploy fully integrated engagement efforts sales and non-sales employees, customers, distribution partners and other stakeholders.
Multiple reasons explain the disparities between what is possible and what remains common today in the field. Many of today’s IRR players date back to the era of print catalogs. Many smaller and even larger incentive and recognition firms often set up online catalogs on a quarterly basis, requiring information well in advance with pricing set only irregularly in spite of often dynamic changes in the consumer market. Likewise, many of these legacy IRR companies either have over the years built their own front-end program management platforms usually focused toward sales or non-sales employees, often lacking the full features of an enterprise engagement platform with communications, learning and gamification, suggestions, wellness, safety, etc. to harmonize interests across the enterprise.
As a result, the general population of businesses cobble together gifting platforms with often limited technologies to deploy basic sales recognition programs, restricting them to simple do-this, get-this program structures with little but finger-in-the-wind metrics.
To varying degrees, master fulfillment companies provide the tools any solution provider can use to help their clients engage key stakeholders.
Insights From Leading Master Fulfillment Companies
Here are perspectives from principals of some of the leading master fulfillment firms in the field. These companies, of which there are no more than several dozen in the US, support solution providers in the IRR market with merchandise, travel certificates and gift cards. Between them, these companies provide all the services an IRR, promotional or other marketing and human resources advisory, research or other firms need to help clients engage stakeholders.
Scott Kooken, CEO and Co-Founder of Links Unlimited, Cincinnati, founded 29 years ago in the days of print catalogs, believes creating a consumer experience online has become table stakes for rewards, recognition, and loyalty. For Links Unlimited, which largely serves the industry’s incentive, recognition, loyalty, and promotional firms, that means stocking the leading brands and models that consumers covet based on the same wholesale pricing retailers enjoy. In this way, he notes, his company’s reseller partners can feature the latest most exciting products as well as earn a reasonable margin for their services.The key, Kooken emphasizes, is the ability of companies like his to obtain the same terms with manufacturers as retailers in terms of access to the latest products and seasonable promotional discounts, which he notes is based on his company’s ability to make formal commitments in advance. As a result, his company can ship products in most cases within a day of redemption. It also enables his company to provide daily feeds to its distribution partners to the latest products and pricing; share real-time shipping information and set up curated brand redemption sites like it recently has done for Ray-Ban. This enables organizations to create highly customized catalogs featuring the latest desirable brands and pricing, using a customized access card for redemption.
Dave Roberts, President, of 50-year-old Power Sales Inc., Kansas City, also one of the largest master fulfillment companies, agrees that not all the IRR industry players have the database technology enabling them to highlight the latest most popular products and pricing. Power Sales provides product, pricing, logistics, and supply information through multi-day electronic feeds using EDI/API connections for their over 11,000 inventoried items. His company’s services are optimized when the two databases are connected. He says that some incentive, recognition, loyalty, and promotional products companies do not have state-of-the art database solutions, making it difficult to maintain the latest products and pricing, especially in an era of rapid pricing changes exacerbated by tariffs. On the other hand, he adds, some of the more recently launched gifting and recognition startups are able to offer an enhanced consumer redemption experience with the latest pricing and products due to connected databases. The ability to provide real-time feeds to inventory has greatly reduced his company’s traditional back-order challenges and makes rapid delivery the norm rather than the exception. 
Ree Politte, CEO and Founder of 32-year-old St. Louis-based GGI Worldwide and Luxury Brand Names, believes that the major role for her company today is to identify and stock the latest brands so that her clients’ catalogs remain fresh with the most exciting items tailored to their audiences. She says her company has recently brought on such brands Cloud Nine Sheepskin, Bushnell Golf, Cole Haan, Daniel Welling, Gemini, Spartina 449, Bogg bags, Nora’s Naturals and Krewe so that client catalogs can always feature the latest hot and up-and-coming brands for multiple demographic groups. Similar to Links Unlimited, her company can offer event-gifting and curated gifting sites, including gift certificates, but otherwise provides feeds as desired to the catalogs of her reseller clients. Politte says that experienced merchandising and a culture dedicated to making it easy help solution partners bring a consumer experience to any type of IRR program and that technology plays a key role. 
Cleveland-based Partners for Incentives, founded in 1932, addresses the market from a different point of view, says Mary Anne Comotto, Principal and President. Like most master fulfillment companies, she sells only through solution partners such as promotional distributors and related marketing and human resources advisory firms. Her catalog technology and online catalog supported with an inhouse inventory of over 8,000 items, enables her company to feature the most popular items and generally ship within a day or two of redemption. She says the company was also among the first to offer enterprise engagement technology that supports sales and non-sales recognition and incentives and customer and channel partner programs with surveys and feedback, communications, learning, innovation, wellness, safety, loyalty, human capital analytics, and more.The company has a five-person support team that enables solution providers to provide a turn-key engagement solution with program and catalog management software offering the latest instock merchandise shipped from her company’s 200,000 square foot facility.
For Ryan DeGrand, an owner, and Andy Haemker, Executive Director of Pro Am Golf, a 50-year golf wholesaler and retailer in Brentwood, MO near St.
Louis, having the latest and greatest makes all the difference in a redemption catalog. As a long-established retailer as well as master fulfillment company representing all the latest brands in clubs, apparel and accessories, Pro Am prides itself in having the most desirable products. For instance, DeGrand says, “putters are hot right now. We can provide feeds right now to what serious golfers are looking for.” Adds Haemker, “In effect, we have become both a consumer brand and a technology company, but we can only be as good as our catalog partners. Some still don’t have the ability to accept the daily feeds necessary to create a retail experience.” The advantage of working with a master fulfillment company with a retail division, they agree, is the ability for corporate customers to meet an organization’s most demanding requirements for the most popular items or experiences, such as on-site or brand headquarters fittings, or golf simulators to boost traffic and meaningful conversations at events and trade shows.The conclusion: as a result of companies like these, promotional and other marketing and human resources advisory firms can expand into the engagement space with minimal financial investment.
Enterprise Engagement Alliance Services
Celebrating our 16th year, the Enterprise Engagement Alliance helps organizations enhance performance through:
1. Information and marketing opportunities on stakeholder management and total rewards:
ESM Weekly on stakeholder management since 2009; click here for a media kit.
RRN Weekly on total rewards since 1996; click here for a EEA YouTube channel on enterprise engagement, human capital, and total rewards insights and how-to information since 2020.
2. Learning: Purpose Leadership and Stakeholder
Management Academy to enhance future equity value and performance for your organization.3. Books on implementation: Enterprise Engagement for CEOs and Enterprise Engagement: The Roadmap.
4. Advisory services and research: Strategic guidance, learning and certification on stakeholder management, measurement, metrics, and corporate sustainability reporting.
5. Permission-based targeted business development to identify and build relationships with the people most likely to buy.
6. Public speaking and meeting facilitation on stakeholder management. The world’s leading speakers on all aspects of stakeholder management across the enterprise.
