Women in Print and Promo: Dominique Volker, Executive Director of Enterprise Sales, Whitestone Branding

For the 11th year in a row, Print & Promo Marketing is proud to present its annual “Women in Print and Promo” feature. In honor of Women’s History Month — and every month — we are sharing the transformative paths these women have taken to help drive the industry forward. Find out what motivates them, where they’ve succeeded, and how companies can advance female talent. Stay tuned throughout the month for more profiles, and check out the March issue of Print & Promo Marketing for the full feature.

Dominique Volker, executive director of enterprise sales for Whitestone Branding, details her journey from growing up in a sleepy town in central Pennsylvania to becoming a sales powerhouse. 

At 18 years old, Dominique Volker went from farm life to the fab life. After growing up in a remote town in Central Pennsylvania, she packed up her bags and moved to New York City to pursue her high-fashion dreams. Volker attended the Fashion Institute of Technology where she studied fashion merchandising with a specialization in product development and a double minor in psychology and Italian.

After studying abroad in Italy, she interned for Women’s Wear Daily and Nylon Magazine, along with big names such as Marc Jacobs. While working side gigs at restaurants, Volker went through a series of internships and interviews that led to nowhere. But the course of her life was about to take an unexpected turn when she met Joseph Sommer, an aspiring business owner, at a nearby bar.

“Ironically, we lived in the same building on the same floor and became fast friends while I finished school and worked those restaurant jobs,” Volker says.

For her post-college job, Volker managed a Korean restaurant in East Village in Manhattan. Sommer, on the other hand, had been writing countless business plans around marketing, advertising, and promotional products based on his major in entrepreneurship. He worked for a luxury gifting company and another promo distributor. He was ready to be his own boss.

He built a super corporate ESP direct site and relied on family and friends to spread the word about the company geared toward traditional promo products. He landed a large account with a program that “definitely made things a little more real,” Volker says. It was time to take this idea out of his apartment and into a WeWork.

In 2015, just a few weeks after starting her restaurant management job, Volker signed on as his company’s second employee and first long-time hire as operations manager. “Fast forward six years, and I built a $7 million annual book of business, having sold over $20 million; assisted in hiring 40-plus colleagues; rebranded the business twice; moved, bought, and sold ancillary businesses; and now find myself heading up the sales department — specifically enterprise clients,” she says.

Since accepting Sommer’s offer, Volker climbed the ranks from operations manager to vice president. In late 2022, they restructured the business, and all titles switched. As a result, Volker stepped into her current role as executive director of enterprise sales. She formed a new department, Enterprise, in the business specific to enterprise and e-commerce clients, including setting up workflows and processes, and selling into contracts with clients.

“We have a team of five sales, one sales ops, several e-commerce assistants, and enterprise production teams,” Volker says. “Our crew of around 15 traditional account managers sells into program business that I manage, in addition to our business development manager/department, and our sales trainer and developer, responsible for training and developing talent into senior account managers.”

Today, Whitestone has a fully remote staff in around 15 to 17 states. New York City was kind to Volker, but after 10 years of attending concerts, exploring food, and creating amazing relationships, she traded in the fast-paced life for the warm weather and car ownership that San Diego can provide.

Her Proudest Career Achievement

Last year I was honored with the nomination and finalist position of ASI’s “Salespeople of the Year.” For many years, I was grinding in sales and didn’t look up for any kind of personal accolades so that was super special and humbling for my team to give me a nomination.

How Failure Taught Her Resiliency

“Working in a startup environment, failure is a massive piece of the puzzle. You have to be OK with failing and seeing that as a learning experience. Creating a new department is like a mini startup within a startup, and trial and error, I find, can be your friend. You have to cast a wide net, test out theories and ideas, and fail quite a bit to find that one right process, client, staff. Prior to starting the department designed to act as a support pillar to our existing company stores, we had a new client who went from $0 to $1M within a calendar year. They were scattered and a medical startup during a global pandemic, so they were also trialing their processes. They ended up going with another vendor after that meteoric rise as they did all their signage and had a close relationship with their main buyer after layoffs took our main contacts. Having worked with the team and talking so much about them, it definitely stung when they left, but all that did was teach us lessons to learn. Two months later, I had signed a contract with my next biggest client who did $600,000 annually. One year after the store was set up, they grew to over $2,000,000 annually and counting. Sometimes, something doesn’t work out to free you up for something better.”

Her Most Significant Barrier as a Female Leader

“I think the most classic and ubiquitous feeling is that people don’t take you seriously until you prove yourself. Pairing that with being in a more creative marketing space, it can be a bit of a double whammy. When I was first starting out, the advice was to act very corporate. Not only was I a woman, but I was also 23. Working with global banking institutions, massive household names, you can sometimes see the facial shifts when people go from thinking they’re above you to understanding that you’re an educated professional who’s an expert in the subject matter. On the industry side, the timeline is the opposite. There are a lot of mom-and-pops and startups, so no one really batted an eye at our little company. Now that I’m finding myself in rooms of owners and CEOs of some of the largest companies in the industry. There are some events that I describe as ‘suits and scotch.’ You can tell the group isn’t used to many women in their space and you have to push through harder to be heard and taken seriously. I think the big-name suppliers and distributors should look at those crowds and bring in more female leadership, which has always proven to be an excellent fiscal decision.”

How She Thinks Companies Can Attract and Retain Female Talent

“We have a company that, for many years, was almost 90% women. (We’ve since balanced that slightly but still heavily skew a women majority.) Our leadership team includes four people — three women and the one man is the owner. I think highlighting the main piece of the question here — which is advance — is most important. There are so many women in creative marketing roles to tap into. They’re really not hard to find. Looking outside the industry of promo sales and looking into hospitality, food and beverage, fashion, and retail are goldmines for great talent To retain these women, you need to offer a path to advancement — whether that’s fiscally or developmentally but, of course, ideally both. Allow them to make the hard decisions and work through, manage teams, attend leadership conferences, and to be in those rooms of men who have been around for 30 years, and they will stick around.”

Her Job Advice to Women

“I love this industry for the flexibility and creativity you can have both in the normal day-to-day of selling product, but also in the way you can shape your career. While there are glass ceilings everywhere, there’s a fluidity to this industry that makes it somewhat of a choose your own adventure. For anyone who likes to be creative, hustle, and multitask, this is the perfect industry to start and to forge a career.”

Her Upcoming Goals

“Personally, I’m typing this on a 15-hour flight to Vietnam to see Asia for the first time, which has always been a bucket list item. I also recently bought courses to be Scuba Diving Certified, which I hope to do in the next few weeks upon my return. Professionally, I’m looking forward to stepping further out of the day-to-day of sales and into my own as a leader both in the company and in the industry. As mentioned, it’s been eight years of grinding and building, hardly looking up to take in the scenery. I hope to continue to grow and learn to be the best manager I can be to bring my team the same kind of fulfillment I’ve had.”