Growing Up Promo: Daniella Dubinski - St. Regis Group

Daniella Dubinski is the VP of Purchasing and Product Development for Canadian-based supplier, St. Regis Group, who merged with ESP Promotions in 2016. Her father, Merrick Falkenstein, started ESP Promotions, and she has been involved in the company in some capacity for as long as she can remember.

Daniella’s parents made the move from her birthplace of South Africa to Canada, with nothing but themselves and ten thousand dollars in their pockets, when she was just a kid. While she doesn’t remember every detail of the business’s beginning, she does remember being brought into the office every Saturday with her brother as her father caught up on paperwork. Her mother worked as a full-time hairdresser. What started as simply roaming the building with her brother on weekends, staying out of Dad's way, turned into summer holidays spent filing paperwork and bribing friends with pizza to help put stickers on catalog errors. Fast forward to present-day, she has earned her title, although she will tell you it’s not a title of VP of Purchasing and Product Development that defines her, nor is it one that even begins to describe all that she does on a daily basis.

Daniella went to school for fashion design. After graduating, she quickly realized her degree wasn’t going to help her land a career in fashion in Toronto. There “just wasn’t much here at the time,” she recalled, so she ultimately decided to go back to where it all started and begin working for her father’s business full-time.

“You can try to take me out of promo, but you can’t take the promo out of me”

Working in almost all aspects of the business throughout her entire life, Daniella quickly found her niche in sourcing. “That’s what my dad did, so he showed me how it's done, and I just fell in love” she said. With a background in and a passion for fashion, product development was a seemingly natural fit. She began working with customers on different product lines, and the more responsibilities she took on, the more she loved everything about what she was doing. She very proudly knew this business better than anyone else could, because she truly grew up in it. “It’s not something you can learn,” she stated. “This business is different for me. It’s in my blood, and I could never take myself out of it. You can try to take me out of promo, but you can't take the promo out of me.”

“I felt like I had to become ‘not the boss’s daughter’ once again.”

In early 2016, ESP Promotions had the opportunity to merge with St. Regis Crystal, a high end glassware, gifting and awards supplier. The merger took ESP Promotions from more of a “cheap and cheerful” supplier in the promotional products space, to a supplier with the ability to focus on quality, sustainability and compliance. “We never would have thought about selling other peoples’ products before this, and now our brands are a huge part of our business,” Daniella said. With Merrick still heavily involved as an owner, Daniella has worked her way into a high-level position she may not have been able to move up into had the merger not happened, although it definitely provided it’s share of behind-the-scenes challenges along the way. In a sense, Daniella had to completely start her career over when the two companies became one. “You can’t learn where peoples’ strengths are unless you start from ground zero,” she told us. “I felt like I had to completely start over regardless of my experience,” and on top of that, “I felt like I had to become ‘not the boss’s daughter’ once again.”

There seems to be such a stigma attached to those individuals who go to work for their parents’ business, as opposed to what is viewed as a family business. Coming into the new walls of St. Regis after the merger, Daniella wasn’t the only ‘owner’s kid’ anymore. “We were a family business,” Daniella said. Along with her father, brother and uncle, the family of ESP Promotions joined the family of St. Regis, where Merrick’s new partner worked alongside his own daughter, along with his brother, wife and stepson. “It was kinda like going back to college as the new kids,” Daniella said as she recalled the early days of the merger. “Everyone always thought I was rich and had all this money, and because ‘my dad owned a successful business’ I had everything handed to me.” That wasn’t the case at all. While she’ll tell you she still to this day has no idea what her parents make financially from the business, she says, “My parents wanted me to know what it was like to work for things just like they had to do, and I had to earn everything that was given to me.”

Daniella was one of the lowest paid employees at ESP for years, and has never viewed herself as any different than any other employee. She often hears the phrase “you have skin in the game,” which she said is something that continues to baffle her. “I’m an employee here, just like every other employee I work with. I have a work ethic that I learned from both of my parents' being entrepreneurs who worked hard and went into the office every Saturday when they needed to. I see that trickling down now with my children when I take them into the office on Saturdays.”

While Daniella’s experience and work ethic alone makes her a valuable asset to any company, her job will never be ‘just a job’ to her. “Unless you’re in it, you never really understand,” she said. “I work with the other ‘kids’ and I see the same things in them I have in me where we maybe care more than other people. It’s not just a job to us, and not everyone has the same drive and work ethic we do. You can’t hold that against people and you can’t let that affect you.”