Natalie Bellando has always gone above and beyond for her customers.
Sometimes that meant taking phone calls from home or chasing trucks, she said with a laugh.
“I used to have to chase down the FedEx driver to give him hard copies of artwork that needed to get to a vendor,” Natalie said.
Much has changed in 20 years
The easy artwork upload system in place today at Totally Promotional didn’t exist when Natalie was hired as a sale person 20 years ago.
“Things were really different then,” she said.
She was the only sale person in the Celina, Ohio, office when owner Tom Casad hired her on June 11, 1997. The company was just getting its foot in the door of the online promotional products business. The office staff totaled a half dozen people, including Tom.
Computers were still foreign to a lot of people, so most orders were taken over the phone.
“And we had a lot of walk-ins,” Natalie said.
She also recalled the hundreds of catalogs she flipped through each week to find the perfect products for her customers.
“It took a lot of research,” she said. “At that time, we were working with about 4,000 vendors.”
Every order resulted in mountains of hard copy. Normal production time was 10 days; rush production was five days.
Totally Promotional has grown over the years
“Now many of our orders are 24 hours (production),” Natalie said.
Totally Promotional today has more than 260 employees and is a leading retailer and manufacturer of custom-printed promotional products. About a year ago, its office moved to a newly renovated building in Coldwater, Ohio, adjacent to its production facility. Much of the company’s ongoing success is due to devoted employees like Natalie.
Thank you for your continued service, Natalie, and congratulations on your 20th anniversary!
