Do You, Will You?

Donn James

Well, I’m back even if not better than ever. While very few of you hang on every written word here, I realize this blog is something you have come to expect on Friday and notice its absence when it goes missing…like one of your children when you lose them at the mall.
I’d like to offer a good excuse for missing last week so if any of you have a good excuse you haven’t used lately, please forward it to me. I had to attend a wedding last Friday and while I generally can come up with good excuses to skip them, I was hard-pressed to find a worthy excuse in this case. I am of an age where all my grandparents have long since fled this mortal coil so the old “grandmother died” excuse was out. Then I remembered that I own a saw and I lovingly gazed upon it last Friday and wondered which limb I would miss the least. Thinking that might be a tad too radical, I ran up to the grocery store to see if I could get my arm stuck in the blood pressure machine but that only worked for a few seconds. I finally settled on the old standby, an excuse that has worked several times in the past. I was all set to tell the bride and groom, “I was sleepwalking and I accidentally got on a plane” but my wife gently took me aside and quietly reminded me, “It’s our son who’s getting married.”
So I offer this as proof of my attendance and it was a beautiful wedding, as if I’m a credible source for beautiful…I think a bacon-wrapped meatloaf is beautiful. I teared up at the wedding but they were no different from my tears over the meatloaf. But the venue was great and so was the food…and we had cookies…A lot of cookies. Someone, certainly not me, came up with the idea that both families should bake dozens of the different cookies the kids had grown up with, kind of a sugar coma homage to their youth. It was during these baking marathons that I fantasized about ways to avoid attending the event. I was probably one snickerdoodle away from a good excuse. Together we made roughly 864 cookies and I thought we were making them to help soak up all the alcohol everyone was drinking that night.
There certainly was an abundance of alcohol being served but, for me, it’s usually an afterthought and I barely notice it until the first person face plants on the dance floor. I actually like being around people who have been over-served as they have given me volumes of material over the years.  As I age I suspect weddings have just joined the list of things that are wasted on the young and when young people get married…as is often the case, the friends and family members they invite are also young and once they realize it’s an open bar, the beauty of the ceremony becomes a memory they are soon fogging with booze. For many of them, when they see an open bar they turn into squirrels trying to figure out a way to store alcohol for the winter. And they know so little about drinking it’s terrifying to people my age because while they’re old enough to be drinking, they’re also old enough to drive. Thankfully, almost everyone had been shuttled or Uber’d in or was driven by a person with a lick of common sense so we had no problems because all the young know about alcohol is shots. I will tell you I think shots are stupid and people who drink shots are right there also. I tried to make my way around and tell them that while I didn’t mind if they got drunk, I expected them to get drunk like adults and …Adults Don’t Drink Shots! We drink cocktails because we’re old enough to know that, by itself, booze tastes like crap.

It’s not really that different in business. IMC has married some awesome and amazing promotional products and, for 2016, we have new products from our collections and 6 new retail brands for the industry. We believe IMC products speak for themselves and we can also show you ways to use and market them to your clients. We will blow your mind with our decorations and we will make your customer think you are off the hook. The 2016 IMC catalog is available by request from the IMC website and will be posted on the online services. We’ll continue to treat our clients professionally and get your orders to you…on time and on budget. If you’re curious about click on the tab and see. You can also get on the distribution list for our 2016 catalog using the catalog page of our website. We have new items in the IMC Collections and several new retail brands debuting in 2016. We have products for every event and if your client has invented a holiday or celebration, we can also custom-make almost anything you can dream to make your client’s event all it can be. Take a look at our YouTube channel to see some videos showcasing popular products for some ideas on how to use them. We take our business relationship seriously and we want you to enjoy, give and receive our products and be able to use them every day. We look forward to working with you and we always have ideas to make our products work for your clients. The 2016 IMC catalog is also live and available virtually at Zoomcatalog.com if you’re tired of fighting paper catalogs. It can be viewed nicely with your laptop, iPad, tablet or phone. IMC is the recognized leader in the introduction of new retail brands to the promotional product industry and has multiple design awards from both ASI and PPAI. Since introducing Waterford® Writing Instruments and MoMA years ago, IMC has presented more than 48 retail brands from global suppliers to enhance the selections you can offer your clients. This year we are proud to present Just Mobile, Block, Magisso, PlayableART, Molla Space and Airplane Pockets to the promotional products industry. We invite you to browse any of our 2,300+ products on the IMC website to see items suitable for any occasion or event and pieces you can use to personalize your relationship with your clients. We have promotional products for every event, show, convention, corporate store and company program that will keep your client looking to you for new ideas. What do you think? Let us know with a comment here or on Facebook or Twitter. IMC wants to know…do you remember what happened?