Alumni Focus- JT Marburger
Evaluate. Decide. Evolve. These are the three basic steps to JT Marburger’s entrepreneurial success. After graduating from Georgia Southern in 1984, Marburger worked as a pharmaceutical representative and quickly decided that it wasn’t his career path of choice. In 1990, he was given the opportunity to join his mother’s firm, Incentive Marketing, a corporate promotions company.
As president of Incentive Marketing, Marburger took the business sales from $200,000 a year to $5,000,000 and secured Incentive’s first major contract with Time Warner. This partnership helped Marburger develop strong relationships with Turner Sports affiliates: NBA, NHL, MBL, NFL and NASCAR. In 2005, Marburger became president of CorpLogo Wear and once again grew the company from $12M to $45M, in just 3 years. Because of the relationships formed, he was able to secure license agreements with United States Olympic Committee and supplied the uniforms for all of the volunteers and employees at the 1996 Atlanta Summer Olympics. He also signed an exclusive contract with the Atlanta Braves and licensing agreements with NCAA, NASCAR, and FIFA World Cup. Marburger had to break ties with his partner in 2008 and founded Insignia Promotions, a joint venture between Incentive Marketing and ProForma, which in three years has become a $6.2M business and is the world leader in recycled PET (RPET) merchandise.
PET, polyethylene terephthalate, is the type of plastic used to make recyclable products such as Coca-Cola bottles. Marburger and Insignia Promotions has developed and continues to manage the entire supply chain from collecting and processing the post-consumer plastics, to breaking down the bottles and reforming the plastic into polyester to be used for promotional items and corporate wear.
In 2007 Coca-Cola approached JT, who has been an approved supplier for ten years, with the idea of recycling plastic Coca-Cola bottles to create polyester goods. At Turner Field, zoos nation wide, and recycling centers, Coca-Cola collects the used bottles and sends them to a recycling plant where 50% of the plastic goes back to Coca-Cola to be processed and cleaned and formed in to new bottles. The other half goes to Marburger’s manufacturers who transform the plastic containers in to polyester yarn, which is woven in to fabric and is used to create T-shirts. The RPET is also used to create promotional items such as reusable plastic bags, hats, and even furniture and hard goods in which Insignia Promotions is currently working to expand their product lines.
When you visit Turner Field to watch a Braves game, all of the employees are outfitted in RPET uniforms manufactured by Insignia Promotions and on the sleeve is the iconic Coca-Cola contoured bottle with a number in the middle. Marburger’s licensing agreement with Coca-Cola allows him to use the contoured bottle and the number in the middle which represents the number of bottles used to create the shirt.
“Everyone wants to be green friendly, but they want to do it at the same price,” says Marburger.
The challenge, Marburger said, is in getting the efficiencies necessary to create economies of scale so that companies like Time Warner, NCAA, and Delta Airlines will want to replace their current uniform and promotional goods with Insignia Promotions’ products.
“I have worked with manufacturers to grow our volume and produce economies of scale so that now the recycled shirts are roughly the same price as regular polyester,” states Marburger.
Marburger’s evaluation of Coca-Cola’s proposition to use post-consumer goods and to create eco-friendly merchandise has led him to where he is today. With a $6.2 million company. And his decision to manage the entire supply chain from collection of recycled bottles, to processing, to fabricating has propelled his success. Insignia Promotions has provided RPET merchandise to companies in over 41 countries, has established relationships with 10 key recycling centers and plans to increase the number to 25 in the coming years, and has significantly decreased businesses’ carbon footprints just by replacing their uniforms. But Insignia and Marburger are still evolving.
Insignia opened a London office just 18 months ago and was named as one of Think London’s Top 100 Companies to Watch and is currently working on a contract with Penn Tennis and the Tennis Industry of America. In October, while playing tennis, Marburger noticed that the Penn tennis ball container was made from PET, just like the Coca-Cola bottles, but it had a metal ring around the rim. Marburger went to his supply center to see if the cans were being recycled, after discovering that they couldn’t use the bottles because of the aluminum around the lid Marburger figured out how they could easily remove the hindrance and use the bottles to create recycled merchandise.
Marburger approached the Tennis Industry of America and Penn Tennis with an idea to set-up an entirely new enterprise. The initiative would set up recycling centers at tennis courts nation wide and the PET collected would be used to create shirts, sweat bands, racket bags, etc.
In just twenty years after graduating, JT Marburger has grown three multi-million companies and has become a world leader in RPET merchandise and attributes his success to his Georgia Southern degree.
“Georgia Southern prepared me 100% to be an entrepreneur. Georgia Southern teaches you to think like an entrepreneur, I think of my management degree as a degree in logical thinking,” says Marburger. He advises students to “to be thoughtful with questions and listen and look at every opportunity and then try to logically breakdown that opportunity and decide whether or not to go for it and not be afraid of failure. You can’t be afraid to fail.”
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