Founders Letter : Unsupervised since 1996.

Promohacks |

JUN 22, 2026

A letter from Michelle Harris — on 30 years of doing it our way.

The Story Behind Karst

My stepdad started this company almost by accident.

Gerald Karst Sr. spent his career as a Charleston firefighter and later as a nuclear foreman at the Naval Shipyard. When he retired in 1996, he quickly discovered that retirement wasn't quite his thing. Beyond the golf course, he was bored.

That year, as a Shriner and second in command of his chapter, he was tasked with sourcing uniforms. After calling around and finding few local options for quality embroidery and screen printing, he decided to do it himself.

He named the business Karst Kreations (with a K, which drove me crazy later on) and ran it as a hobby out of his home. Most of his work came from industrial clients and his Charleston good ol' boys network.

That's the company I came home to.

I grew up in Charleston, went to Belmont University in Nashville, and spent seven years in the music industry working in publishing and artist management. It was a completely different creative path.

By 2003, I was back in Charleston with no real plan and a lot of restless creative energy. My mom owned an employment agency, which was her thing, not mine. Gerald had this small promotional products company. Before music pulled me in a different direction, I had originally been on a graphic design track, so at least there was a creative thread I could grab onto.

Logos. Color. Design.

I figured I'd give it a shot.

I had absolutely no idea what I was doing.

I literally opened the phone book and started calling people.

My first sale was a set of water bottles for a gas company owner's kid's hockey team. I had never sold anything in my life.

Then everything changed.

Gerald fell off a ladder. A bad fall.

Suddenly I was running the entire business.

Paying vendors. Managing QuickBooks. Writing checks. Talking to clients. Solving problems I wasn't qualified to solve. I didn't know what I was doing then, and some days I still joke that I don't know what I'm doing now.

But I learned enough to keep things moving.

Along the way, I started changing things. Different software. Different processes. A different approach to client relationships.

When Gerald returned, he looked around, saw what had been built, and simply said:

"Go."

That was 2004.

He never really came back to the day to day.

What I Learned

The promotional products industry I entered was largely a commodity business.

Catalogs. Logos. Bulk orders. Price competition.

The problem was, I didn't know that.

So I didn't operate that way.

When a client came to me with a generic request or a logo that wasn't serving them, I'd push back.

Why are you doing this?

What's the actual goal?

What if we approached it differently?

I assumed everyone in the industry worked this way.

They didn't.

It took nearly ten years to find my people, the small group of professionals who viewed merchandise as a creative and strategic challenge rather than a procurement exercise.

When I found them, I realized two things at once:

We'd been approaching this work differently all along.
We should be positioning and pricing it accordingly.

That's when Karst Kreations became Karst.

What's Changed in 30 Years

Everything and nothing.

The industry today is almost unrecognizable compared to 1996.

Brand teams can source products themselves. The best ones aren't looking for vendors anymore. They're looking for creative partners.

They want programs, not orders.

They want branded shops, curated drops, thoughtful packaging, memorable unboxing experiences, strategy, design, and execution that feels more like product development than merchandise purchasing.

We've evolved around that reality.

Today we run on EOS. We follow an 8 Step Proven Process. We use AI where it genuinely creates value and avoid it where it doesn't.

But the fundamentals haven't moved an inch.

Gerald's principles still guide everything we do:

Be ethical.

Deliver quality.

Be accurate.

Pick up the phone.

Don't ship something you wouldn't want yourself.

Treat the production floor with the same respect you give the C suite.

Most of our client relationships started small and grew over years, sometimes decades. Twelve years. Fifteen years. Twenty years.

That's the whole game.