Multi-segmented designer and manufacturer ChemArt announced that effective immediately, it has implemented a necessary organizational executive shift, according to the company.
Bill Thomas will assume the position of president of the Lincoln, R.I.-based company. David Beaupre will take on the role of executive vice president; Kurt Hague will expand his role as VP of operations and general counsel; and Deb Parkinson will manage all the marketing activities as VP of marketing and development.
Parkinson will be responsible for supporting ChemArt and its sales strategies with market-driven strategies including campaigns and programs that foster growth and market penetration.
Under the new structure she and her team will also focus on business and market development to position ChemArt for the future.
ChemArt has served as the premiere designer and manufacturer of photo-chemically etched decorative ornaments and collectibles in the United States. ChemArt also provides products for the giftware industry and fundraising ventures, and is pushing its way into the retail licensing segment as well.
Parkinson told DailyVista that the new organizational structure at ChemArt is not necessarily a change, but rather an evolution of responsibility.
“I’ve been with ChemArt a little under five years, and came here when they took over a retail initiative. Prior to that, they’d just been a behind-the-scenes manufacturer for a lot of people,” she said. “The result is that I oversaw both marketing and sales, and because of a change of leadership, we now have a new president who will focus on sales, which gives me an opportunity to focus on marketing as well as development.”
Because of Parkinson’s interest in market research and development, she will now be able to focus more of her efforts on that and tweak the strategy to reach the new markets that are out there, and figure out the best way to approach them.
“I think that our branding efforts to this point have been to distinguish ourselves,” she said. “We were behind-the-scenes, and now we have the opportunity to build the brand under a name of ChemArt – short for Chemical Art because of the process we use – and we were able to put in place the classical branding strategies with positioning, including the marketing communications that come with it.”
As ChemArt further penetrates the retail segment with licensing partners like the Baldwin brand, an extension of Black & Decker, the company is also working with The White House Historical Segment, which has granted ChemArt permission to sell their products in the retail division as well.
“The retail has its own little umbrella because we now sell custom products to retailers, Baldwin and White House and regional appeal products, and a semi-custom product to retailers under the ChemArt name,” Parkinson said. “It’s quite complex. We touch a lot of people in many different ways and the real story we have resonates and it doesn’t matter how it resonates, whether it’s with the donor, the member, the volunteer or the consumer that walks into a retail establishment… we really do have a very unique proposition.”
ChemArt uses traditional print media as well as some electronic forms of reaching out to customers. The company has been building a permission-based opportunity for newsletters and is also entering into Webinars that use one of ChemArt’s clients to speak to the other clientele in that same platform.
“We’re trying to engage them, which brings us back to the idea of social media – how that becomes one more arrow in our quiver, and other elements of how else we can reach the customer, whether it’s through ecommerce or international marketing,” Parkinson said.
While there are many other initiatives in the pipeline, our source said that ChemArt is definitely focused on social media, and is working diligently trying to determine whether or not it will make an impact and ultimately lead to a sale closure.
“We’re very new at social media,” Parkinson said. “We have a blog, and we’re on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, but we’re still feeling our way through that. It’s baby steps for us.”
With three segments of business – industrial, decorative and retail – ChemArt targets a wide variety of consumers, ranging from engineers to fundraising and higher education to religious institutions and the government.
“The decorative portion of the business is dedicated to custom products for philanthropy and fundraising… creating awareness and working with donors and making sure that the membership is recognized in some way,” Parkinson said. “So that’s the primary product and market that we actually serve and tagged onto that is retail opportunity, so we’ve kind of created an umbrella company so that we serve a significant number of constituents, most B-to-B, and we’re looking at avenues of B-to-C, but again, that comes under development part of what I’ll be doing.”
ChemArt has contracted specialists for its Web site, but hasn’t ventured into partnering with any additional firms for other services. The company has a unique relationship with the surrounding Rhode Island colleges and as such, ChemArt’s college internship program is an ambitious one, where students are expected to assist with research and development and to contribute their expertise to aid the company’s success.
“We’re not averse to it, but because we’re a small business, we’ve used our resources differently, but that doesn’t mean we wouldn’t speak to someone who felt they had a very strong background in a particular focus that we had,” Parkinson said. “So if we had an initiative for ecommerce, for example, certainly we need to understand not only front end, but the back end of it, and I’m sure there are hundreds of thousands of people who say they are experts in how to set that up and work not only B-to-B, but also B-to-C.”
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