Palmer Blog
June 12, 2012
The first sign that a company is struggling with service issues is when you see a survey from them entitled “How’s our service?” At least that was my recent experience with a prominent Mississauga dealership. I trade cars a lot and I’ve always been partial to sport cars and European styling. Now that my young family and mini-van days are behind me, I’ve spoiled myself over the last few years and currently own a BMW […]
May 11, 2012
We moved to a condo a couple of years back and quite enjoy it. It has an interesting mix of people and the convenience of the condo life is great. The only thing I didn’t count on, were vampires in the elevators. I actually like vampire movies and the new one coming out with Johnny Depp looks like a hoot. On the morning in question, I had just finished watching an installment of Being Human. […]
May 7, 2012
When I started in the marketing business decades ago, PMS was certainly a big deal. It could cause a headache and cramp your style for days at a time. PMS, short for pantone matching system, was the bible for recreating your corporate brand on things as varied as golf balls, business cards, brochures…you name it. Every company had logo standards and PMT sheets and then of course you would have to match those PMS standards […]
March 20, 2012
If you think of all the choices you’ve made and all the different roads you might have gone down, does it ever make you wonder about the decisions you’ve made and the ones you’re about to make? I came to Toronto in the early eighties. I was a full time musician at that point in my life and against the advice of pretty much everyone I knew, I came to Toronto to give my music career […]
February 17, 2012
We had our new Yellow Pages delivered this morning. Hooray! Apparently 550 million of them were delivered in the USA as recently as last year. The half dozen copies we received, weighing in at 30 lbs, will go directly into our recycle bin. Last fall there were hundreds delivered to the mail room at our 25 story condo in Toronto. I never saw anyone pick them up and I believe the majority were recycled as well. […]
January 30, 2012
My last blog of 2011 was about turning over the captain’s chair to my staff while I took a 3 week vacation. A real vacation at that, not glued to my e-mail or solving problems from afar. I let them sail the ship and I relaxed. It was a welcome change. If you have an experienced team, the captain is only needed when you hit rough water. Steering the ship through a crisis is a […]
December 21, 2011
As we approach the holiday season I am currently 1 week through a 3 week vacation. Along with it being my first extended holiday in the last 24 years, it is really the first time I’ve let my team fully run the ship without at least some guidance from afar. The timing was right. They all have confidence in their abilities and so do I. It is a necessary step in the sustainability of my […]
I started Palmer Marketing at age 34 in January of 1988. I had 2 kids in diapers and a crazy idea about running my own company. I came from an entrepreneurial family and had no good reason to believe it wasn’t possible and as it happens, it was.
I’m definitely a country girl. I didn’t grow up in an actual town, village or hamlet. It was more like the middle of somewhere along Highway 28, surrounded by trees. Many thanks goes to my high school art teacher, Mr. Edwards, for inspiring me to choose this career path. With the realization that I actually could create art for a living, college lured me away from country life to the big city. Kitchener, to be exact, to study Graphic Design & Advertising at Conestoga College. Talk about beginning an adventure and a culture shock! Not staring at people with purple, green or some other wildly coloured hair was a bit of a challenge. City buses (lol thinking back), who knew they only stopped on the same side of the street as the bus stop sign!? Lesson learnt.
I love my work like I love summer. Why not? Summer is when I get to play my favorite sport—golf! Playing artist is a lot like playing golf. You need to be calm and cool under pressure if you ever hope to keep the ball in play; that’s rare for an artist. My best shots happen when I talk less and concentrate more; that’s not so rare for an artist.
I am the 8th of 9 children raised in Essex County outside of Windsor, Ontario. We lived on a gravel road, no sidewalks and our greatest adventures were in our own backyard. I still have friends I made in grade 1 and continue to stay in touch today. After graduating from the University of Windsor with a Bachelor of Commerce degree, I moved to the big city of Toronto and have worked most of my career in the printing industry. I got to know the folks at Palmer Marketing as a key supplier to them for over a decade.
To say the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree would be an understatement in my family; at least when it comes to picking a career path. There isn’t a person in my immediate family that hasn’t at some point or another worked in the IT field. I guess there’s something in our DNA that pulls us towards computers.