In 1984, BDS Connected Solutions was originally founded as a field marketing agency. Our founder, Mark Dean, had a vision to provide an excellent working environment for employees, and believed that by focusing on putting employees first, they would in turn take great care of their clients. With two other founders, BDS was born in Marks garage, and the group of three formed BDS: Baker, Dean and Sherwood. The rest was history.

 

In the early years, BDS was a boutique agency that ran customer promotions and sampling events for a few clients. Since then, we have grown to be the leading, privately-held, retail marketing agency in the U.S. We support world-class brands, manufacturers, and retailers with a streamlined suite of integrated sales and marketing solutions, 18 specialized services, award-winning in-house experts, and a field team of over 7,000 representatives. To get where we are today, we made a number of partnerships and acquisitions throughout the years that allowed us to meet our clients needs and service the entire retail value chain.

 

The first major addition to the BDS family was in 2006, when we acquired Channel Partners to enrich our Training, Assisted Sales and Product Launch offerings. The following year, Keystone Marketing Specialists was purchased, which added the Flex Force shared model, along with the Retail Access training platform, into our mix of capabilities. In 2013, BDS brought RMSe on board to offer retail installation and construction services as an in-house capability, furthering expanding the retail value chain to include retail environments. Most recently in 2016, BDS partnered with Apollo Retail Specialists and its equity partners to form BDS Solutions Group, LLC, a platform organization that has allowed us to significantly expand our field team and service offerings to further influence purchase decisions throughout the entire customer shopping journey.

 

While the agency has evolved over the years, one thing has never changed: our culture. Throughout all these years, we continue to have a work hard, play hard mentality. On top of that, we are proud to staff an amazing team of people who we call co-workers and friends.