How a Billion-Dollar Business Got Its Name
The Problem
In 2020, I led a project to turn Avery Dennison's on-garment branding product line into a billion-dollar brand. The product — heat-applied patches, transfers, graphics — had real market potential: consumer demand for personalization had become permanent, and apparel companies were struggling to deliver personalized goods at speed without waste. But the product was known internally as "EE" — External Embellishments — and marketed entirely on its features, which in many cases meant its limitations. Internally, the reputation was poor. Externally, it was nonexistent. We needed a name, a brand, and a story the market didn't know it was waiting for.
"Marketing doesn't need to choose a lane. It needs to be human."
The Big Idea
We started with a simple question: what did people in the industry actually call this category? The answer was a resounding "it depends." Some said patches. Some said transfers. Some said trims. We saw an opportunity to name and claim the space entirely. But the real unlock wasn't the name — it was the positioning. The graphics and words on our clothes — a jersey number, a pride flag, a survivor's ribbon — are how we express identity. By leading with that human truth, we created emotional investment that traveled up the supply chain and across to investors. We developed the name Embelex as an inversion of External Embellishments — making internal adoption easier while building forward-facing equity. It also worked as a verb. To express. To decorate. To Embelex. We then made a deliberate — and in a traditional B2B manufacturing company, genuinely controversial — decision: we launched it like a consumer brand.
The Story we Told
How do you Embelex? We invited CEOs, TikTok influencers, employees, and press to answer. One influencer used an Embelex patch to upcycle a shirt she'd stolen from her ex-boyfriend. Traditional B2B logic says I can't prove that reached a buyer. I'd say: find me a fashion buyer who wasn't on TikTok in 2022.
The Results
Organic search drove 26% of website traffic — against an industry average of 2–3%. Over 2,000 leads generated. Buyer recognition grew from less than 5% to 40% among key customers. Less than six months after launch, Embelex broke into the NFL as embellishment partner of the San Francisco 49ers. Avery Dennison went on to acquire five companies in the space. Embelex grew to $300M in two years with partnerships across the NBA, NFL, Premier League, LaLiga, and MLS. The PRWeek Award for Best in Corporate Branding followed.
$300M
revenue in 2 years
26%
organic search traffic
2,000+
leads generated
29
press articles
+35%
buyer recognition