School Specialty LLC has been awarded a Gold Reggie Award from the Association of National Advertisers (ANA). The Reggie Award platform, in existence since 1983, recognizes the best companies and products in their industries for creativity, brand engagement, potential sales opportunities and quantifiable growth. In 2021, School Specialty was awarded one of the highest honors for its adaptation to challenges related to COVID-19’s unimaginable disruption to every aspect of its core business model—education.
The company attributes its win to addressing several critical challenges head-on. First, they maintained valued strategic partnerships with educators who needed guidance. “We needed to uphold our original mission to facilitate student success, even if through completely different solutions,” says Stacey Rubin, Senior Vice President, Marketing. “We needed to learn what schools did and didn’t want from us,” she further cites.
The organization threw itself into learning and redesigned marketing, the product mix and ramped up knowledge and outbound communication of tips for safety. The organization rapidly sourced new innovative products like air cleaning robots and fast-tracked a new supplemental curriculum called “Catch Up With Coach”, designed to reverse learning loss caused by “COVID-slide.”
“The Gold Reggie gave our entire team of associates the recognition that is so deserved for the extra hours put forth and the stronger partnerships we forged with our customers,” says Rubin.
The Reggie Awards historically honor organizations that increase sales, digital engagements and earned media placements and in the case of School Specialty, the award met all requirements making the “back to school” period a profitable one and one that rescued a difficult start to 2020.
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