Login | May 27, 2025
Consolidus coordinates organizational branding
RICHARD WEINER
Legal News Reporter
Published: May 12, 2016
The Army Reserve Officers Training Corps had a problem.
The program had 273 branches at major universities throughout the United States, but no one office to coordinate the purchase of promotional products. The result of this lack of coordination, said Akron entrepreneur Jeffrey S. Jones, can be true of all multiple-location organizations: the mugs, pens and sweatshirts available at one AROTC outpost could be wildly different from the same materials at another outpost.
So, the AROTC made a deal with Jones’s startup, which he called “Consolidus,” to handle its multiple-location branding.
That was in 2008. Today, in 2016, Consolidus is, “definitely in our growth phase,” said Jones. The company, which is housed in the Akron Global Business Accelerator, just hired a half dozen people and is looking to hire even more.
When he was a child, Jones, now a 45-year-old graduate of Akron North High School, had two dreams in life. “I wanted to be a firefighter and I wanted to be an entrepreneur.”
He wound up fulfilling both dreams, although it was the second one that continues to drive him.
But even during his five-year stint as an Akron firefighter he worked on his vision of starting his own business.
“We have always been self-funded,” he said. His firefighter’s salary gave him both the income and the spare time to start his business.
The idea for the company that eventually became Consolidus was simply born out of understanding the potential of how to tap into “a $22 billion promotional branding industry,” Jones said. Within that industry, he said, at least $50 million comes out of Akron, making it “one of the top markets for branding materials.”
He was not the only one. “We have 25,000 competitors,” he added.
So far, so good, as Jones said that Consolidus was recently named the eighth-fastest growing business in the industry.
Making any kind of dent in that industry is a major accomplishment, said Terry Martell, chief operating officer of the Accelerator, who has been providing business advice to Jones from the beginning of Consolidus’s existence.
“Everybody seems to know somebody who can provide monogrammed T-shirts, hats, jackets, pens, etc.,” said Martell
“Jeff had a singular vision,” said Martell, “To create a ‘group purchasing organization’ which would consolidate volume purchasing using a professional, online storefront that large decentralized organizations would find appealing, efficient and cost effective. [That concept would be] able to derive more value from an organization’s brand.”
But even that would not be enough to crack a market as competitive as this one. To start with, Jones said he knew that he needed a unique market niche, and found one, taking the entire business in the late 2000’s to the beginnings of what would become “the cloud.”
Billing Consolidus as “a lean management solution for branded materials,” the company creates a dedicated, web-based shopping page for individual customers that saves them both time and money, said Jones.
“A customer looks at that page and says ‘that page is designed just for me’,” said Jones. “That is our number-one competitive advantage.”
On that page, Consolidus customers from every office or post order all of their promotional materials. In this way, a mug, banner or pen purchased from an AROTC post in Kent will look exactly the same as one ordered from a post in Ann Arbor or Biloxi, except for the name of the location.
Jones explained that he support staff at Consolidus creates the web store, sources the potential products and has deals in place with shops that create and drop-ship the product on order. There is an in-house design team, although Jones said that, for the most part, Consolidus’s customers use their own designs. Consolidus’s main business is as a middleman between customers and their promotional materials, said Jones.
Access to an individual web store is limited to official purchasers for the customer’s organization, said Jones.
But the company’s main website, at http://www.akronpromoshop.com, is open to the public.
Jones said that Consolidus has found most of its success, to this point, working with nonprofits and educational institutions, in addition to its Army and other armed services branches’ ROTC programs.
In an embodiment of the phrase “think globally, act locally,” Jones said his approach has been to start with a local organization, provide them with the service that they need, maybe even going overboard, and then expanding through the local organization to state and local affiliates.
In one example of that approach, Consolidus’s customers include most of Ohio’s universities. The company started supplying goods to The University of Akron, said Jones, and then expanded its business from there to a statewide purchasing consortium of schools.
Success with The University of Akron led to a working relationship with the Inter-University Council Purchasing Group of Ohio (IUP-PG), a consortium of the purchasing officers of Ohio’s 85 intuitions of higher education.
“That contract continues to be renewed,” said Jones.
The same approached has worked with the Better Business Bureau. “Consolidus has been a tremendous partner to BBB over the past few years,” said Christy L. Page, president and CEO of the BBB of Akron (which covers six counties).
“Not only have they been a wonderful partner to our BBB here in Akron,” said Page, “but they’ve worked with us to create a website dedicated to BBB branded products that the entire BBB system across North America can use.”
And with the Ohio Small Business Development Center (SBDC), an state office dedicated to helping small businesses.
“Consolidus’s slogan is ‘Innovate, Consolidate and Save,’ and that is what happens with the team there,” said Mary Ann Jasionowski, director of the SBDC.
Again, Consolidus started with an Akron office and Jasionowski said she was so impressed that she recommended that “all state SBD centers now use Consolidus for their branding.”
Other Consolidus customers include a number of hospitals, Big Brothers Big Sisters and private companies like Tuffy Tire and Auto Service Centers.
Even with the success of his business, Jones said he is proudest of the work atmosphere in Consolidus’s office.
The layout of the office is completely open, with Jones’s desk at one end of the airy, ovoid space, “to facilitate open communication,” he said.
Every hour, work stops so that the staff can spend a few minutes exercising. The company also supports the LeBron James Family Foundation and the Akron-Canton Regional Food Bank.
“Our most positive impact is on the lives of our staff,” Jones said. “There is no better way to grow than with the quality of the staff. We are giving them livelihoods and careers that they enjoy. At the end of the day, that is the most important thing that we will have accomplished.”