Hello everyone, welcome to the PromoKitchen podcast. We are a community inspired conversation featuring guest suppliers, distributors, and service providers discussing insights into the 20 billion dollar promotional products business.

Join Mark Graham, co-founder of commonsku as he welcomes to the podcast Rich Patterson, owner of Patterson Brands in beautiful Vancouver, BC.

This episode looks at the perception of our industry as a place to start one’s career. Specifically, we’ll look at how high school students perceive us and how they compare us to other lines of work.

Mark became interested in having Rich on the program after reading Rich's blog post where he shares the story of him talking about the promotional products industry at a high school career fair. What made this experience unique is that Rich was speaking alongside technology giants who arguably had the upper hand from a brand perspective. This discussion gets at the core of how perspective employees/entrepreneurs see our industry, how we can compete for talent and when is actually the right time to enter this industry in the first place.

Born and raised in a small town in Canada’s Rocky Mountains, Rich grew up camping, hiking and skiing. Rich graduated from Simon Fraser University in 1992 with his Bachelor of Arts in Communications. He has worked in government and the private sector in senior PR & marketing roles — most notably as the marketing manager for Roots.

Since 2005, Rich has owned and operated Patterson Brands, one of Vancouver’s top corporate gifts, swag and licensed merchandise distributors.