Lake Area Promotional Moves From Home Into Downtown
Posted
Jordan Fouts-
After running a promotional and customization business for five years, Jon and Tina Goon don’t consider any request particularly strange anymore. It’s not their usual type of requests at Lake Area Promotional Specialties in downtown Warsaw, but they’ve had enough orders for prank mugs, joke T-shirts and even a few bathroom items that nothing surprises them these days, Tina Goon said. “I don’t recognize anything as unusual anymore,” said Jon Goon, adding that they draw the line at anything they consider distasteful. The Goons opened Lake Area at 107 E. Market St. in early August. Most of their customers have more routine orders for unique items – shirts for sports teams or family reunions, gifts such as ornaments or smartphone cases with custom images, and tchotchkes like keychains, flyswatters and pens bearing business names. “The general promotional products you’ve ever been handed or have handed out,” Jon Goon said. They recalled other items as sweet and thoughtful, from custom wedding decorations to a pillowcase covered with preschoolers’ handprints. “Anything we’ve got can be fit to the occasion,” he said. “It’s a pretty good niche. People like to have a unique, memorable item.” “You’re pretty much limited only by your imagination and what’s available,” Tina Goon said. Lake Area has a variety of techniques at their disposal, including screenprinting, embroidery and sublimation, and a catalog of items for customizing, some carried in-store and others available by special order. They can work with just about any idea, from pinning down a vague concept to imprinting full-color artwork provided by a client. Tina noted they’re not afraid to do legwork in meeting a customer or developing an idea. “If you’ve seen it, we can get it,” Jim said. “If you have a concept but don’t know where to go with it – if you can source it, we can get it.” Tina also said they plan to keep a stock of blank ornaments handy for the holidays, and should be able to turn them around in about a day. They quote most orders at one to three weeks. Farmers by trade, the couple started doing custom-printed promotional products out of their home for extra income. The printing and engraving machines, as well as the stock of blank shirts and other items, eventually nudged them out of their home and into a downtown storefront. “It takes more room to show off what we do than to do what we do,” Jon observed. “We don’t inventory a lot because not everybody wants the same thing. It’s a small shop and that keeps the price down.” The extra space outside their home also translated into extra business. Tina noted they’ve taken on 10 new corporate clients since August, which Jon added may not sound like much, but comes in addition to walk-in clients too numerous to count. “As far as individual clients, I wouldn’t hazard a guess,” he said. “This is getting walk-by, walk-in customers that weren’t possible to get when we worked in our home.”
