Women In Print and Promo: Stephanie Bass, Senior Director of HR, BAMKO

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.

Stephanie Bass, senior director of human resources for BAMKO, Los Angeles, discusses company culture and setting goals for her business.

Stephanie Bass

In seven short years, Stephanie Bass has shaped BAMKO’s culture, and how the company celebrates its employees. Now it’s time to celebrate her.

Born and raised in Los Angeles, Bass always knew she was destined for a life in human resources. In this case, there was no family business to inherit, but it was a family affair. Both her mother and grandmother had enjoyed successful careers in the field.

However, Bass wasn’t quite ready to onboard employees or resolve workplace conflicts. She wanted to get to know herself, gain independence, and create her own experiences. So, this west coast girl packed up her bags and headed east to the University of Maryland. After receiving her Bachelor of Arts in communications, she was faced with another decision: return to California or move to New York City with a handful of friends. Her boyfriend (now husband) also lived in NYC. It seemed like a no-brainer.

Sometimes the City of Dreams isn’t as glamorous as it’s often portrayed. Before ultimately returning home, Bass spent her first three years in New York working at a hedge fund. It was a push toward self-realization — mainly that she’d thrive in a creative work environment. From there, Bass spent a handful of years performing HR tasks in the advertising space. Her professional instincts were right.

Bass’ mother had built her HR career in the entertainment field, mentoring new employees along the way. But one of her former mentee’s who left the production company for a promotional products distributor stood out.

“I was approached by a former mentee of my mother’s about a position at BAMKO,” Bass says. “She was relocating and on the hunt to backfill her HR manager position before she vacated the role. I wasn’t actively looking to leave my former company, but I was intrigued by BAMKO, its culture, and the industry in general, so I took the call.”

As the new global human resources manager, Bass wasn’t sure what to expect. Back then, the distributor operated on a much smaller scale.

As her nominator points out, BAMKO was “small, most[ly] regional distributors with a few dozen employees in two offices.”

“… The company has transformed and grown in incredible ways, and [Bass’] vision and steady stewardship have been critical to building culture while the company has massively increased in size and scale,” the nominator adds.

Today, Bass is the senior director of human resources, and handles every aspect of HR one could imagine. She helped employees emotionally navigate a pandemic and reimagined ways to engage with remote workers. Yet she remains modest. When it comes to solving promo’s staffing problems, Bass credits her team for doing all they can to attract, retain, and develop the top talent in the industry.

Perhaps she’s onto something. “When I started with BAMKO we had 250 employees globally, and now we are 900 employees globally.”

Her Proudest Career Achievement

“During my very first year at BAMKO, we successfully completed two company acquisitions. I had no prior experience with acquisitions, yet I was suddenly tasked with spearheading a process I knew nothing about. I led the HR due diligence developing the entire integration and corresponding timelines. Prioritizing the employee experience, I really locked into creating a seamless and positive transition for the team members who would be joining us from the companies we had acquired. I recognized how scary and uncertain that process can be for people, so I made it my personal mission to create a positive experience for those individuals. Since then, we have conducted three additional acquisitions and one merger, each of which has gone very smoothly. I think we did a great job at getting people excited about joining BAMKO, and I am quite proud to have been a driving force behind that achievement.”

How Failure Taught Her Resiliency

“The most important part of my job is to create connection and increase engagement with our employees. I was already facing the challenges of doing so with a global culture with offices around the world when the pandemic hit. 2020 was an extremely difficult time for many reasons, and people struggled to adapt to a world full of unknowns. While we rose to the occasion and found ways to engage virtually, it was difficult to really know when someone on our team was having an especially hard time. I constantly felt like I was failing our people when they needed me most. Instead of dwelling on what I could not control, I focused my energy on doing more and found ways to better the lives of our team. We used the challenge of the pandemic to get creative and came up with new and innovative ways to engage and connect with our employees. Some failed. Others were a smashing success that are central to what we do today. Now, when I think back on the pandemic, I am quite proud of how we responded to such an unprecedented situation and the great lengths our team and I went to in order to ensure that our people felt connection and community with BAMKO.“

Her Most Significant Barrier as a Female Leader

“I know this is, sadly, an all-too-common experience in the industry. I have been incredibly fortunate in that BAMKO is different in this way — it has always been central to our ethos that we elevate the smartest, hardest-working, most capable voice in the room. I’m convinced that has been one of the biggest secrets of our success. Probably my biggest challenge in this area has been having to help other women who join BAMKO from this industry understand this dynamic — that BAMKO is unique and that you’ll have every opportunity that you’re willing to earn here. That’s not always so easy when you’ve come up in the environments that exist elsewhere in this industry.”

How She Thinks Companies Can Attract and Retain Female Talent

“Our leadership team believes diversity and inclusion [are] crucial for our company to thrive. We prioritize hiring those with diverse backgrounds whenever possible and look internally to grow and develop our next female leaders within our existing team. We also offer flexible work arrangements and have implemented generous parental leave policies because we understand how important these accommodations are for our female workforce.”

Her Job Advice to Women

“I look back at the beginning of my career with BAMKO and, while I may not have realized it at the time, I most definitely had imposter syndrome. I felt like I was somehow undeserving of my seat at the table — like I had not accomplished enough to warrant my position in leadership. I believe that is a common struggle other women face in the workforce and the industry alike. While the print and promo world is male dominated like many other industries, it’s important to remember your worth, and what your perspective and skillset bring to the table. Women are inherently creative problem solvers, and we all know that ability is invaluable in the print and promo space.”

Her Upcoming Goals

While I am always focused on my personal and departmental KPI’s, my ultimate measure of success is the quality of our employee experience. Everything we do at BAMKO revolves around growth, which leads me to challenge my department to constantly optimize the way we help our people do so. What are we doing to elevate and evolve the employee experience? How do we have people feeling more connected, not just to the company, but to one another? How can we help more people elevate themselves and do the work to advance in their careers? The work is never done and there is always more that we can do, and that’s one of the main reasons I absolutely love what I do.

Personally, I recently gave birth to my second child, so a lot of my personal goals are probably centered around getting enough sleep and maintaining my sanity this year! My goal is to take a children-free vacation with my husband towards the end of the year…keeping my fingers crossed!