Tanya Ickowitz (‘12) jokingly says that when she earned her Master of Science in Communication and Information, she didn’t know she’d be using it to “fold boxes.” But folding boxes is by far not all the College of Communication and Information alumna does at Patdome Promotions, a Knoxville-based creative agency and promotional product company she co-owns with her husband, Mike Ickowitz.
Together the two took their hobby of selling promotional higher education products online and grew it into a flourishing business that took the 21st spot on the 2025 Rocky Top Business Awards. They recently moved the business out of their home and into an office on North Broadway—a move that allows them to continue expanding and doing what they love: building relationships, creatively solving problems, and helping clients get just the right products to promote their brand.
While Ickowitz says she missed out on the undergraduate University of Tennessee, Knoxville, experience, partnering with various UT departments to create promotional items has let her have a little taste of that fun on-campus energy.
“I got to go to one of the local tailgates at Neyland right before homecoming last year and my mom and aunt came into town. We went to the tailgate on campus and my mom doesn’t necessarily know what we do, but when I could walk her through the tailgates and show her the cute UT sunglasses, the friendship bracelets, the stress balls that came from us, that was great,” she said.
A Path to Promotional Products
Ickowitz’s career went through a variety of iterations before she decided to pursue a master’s degree, starting with a job as an admissions counselor at George Mason University—which is where she met her husband, who also worked in admissions. They eventually moved to Knoxville when he took a job in admissions at the UT Graduate School, and she found a job doing outreach for a student loan company.
“There were so many students, especially in Tennessee and especially in rural areas, where they don’t even consider going to college because the perceived financial burden was enough of a barrier. So, we would talk to them about how with the combined options that it could be affordable,” said Ickowitz, noting that she has always highly valued higher education and she enjoyed making it accessible to others.
When that business bought a bank, her job shifted and became much more of an outward-facing public relations role. She was responsible for creating brochures, websites, and advertising, essentially becoming a traditional corporate public relations specialist. That’s when Ickowitz decided it was time to shore up her skill set by earning a degree at CCI.
It was 2006 and around the same time she began her master’s program, the men’s basketball team at her husband’s alma mater, George Mason University, worked their way up to the Final Four in one of the first Cinderella stories in the NCAA Men’s Basketball Championship.
As excited as they were for their underdog team to be so close to winning a championship, the couple realized they couldn’t show that support with a university-branded T-shirt because the only way to get one was in the physical bookstore at the Fairfax, Virginia, campus. So, they decided to start an e-commerce website to sell Final Four shirts to other George Mason Patriots fans.
“It was my husband’s idea, we are yin and yang, he is the dreamer and I’m the wet towel, so I’ll give him all the credit for that,” she said. “We started the website, and it was just a side hustle. Really a way to give all the people celebrating the university a chance to show their school spirit. It wasn’t even a hustle it was more of a hobby.”
That hobby organically took on a life of its own as departments at George Mason realized the couple were licensed to make university-branded items and began asking them to collegiate offices at the institution. For about a decade this work was in the background as both Tanya and Mike were working their full-time jobs.
Taking an Entrepreneurial Leap
In 2017, Ickowitz said she was ready for a change and wanted to see what would happen with their promotional product side business if it received her full attention. Her husband followed in her steps a year later.
“It was sort of an accident. We were looking to start over and do something different, but we have this thing on the side that we can do until we land on the next adventure,” she recalled. “But then we started treating it like a business because it had been a hobby, and it just went crazy. The phone never stopped ringing.”
Just as Patdome Promotions started to take off, the COVID-19 pandemic hit and left the Ikowitzes wondering if they’d made a mistake investing in an event-based business. Ever the creative problem solvers, they decided the best course of action was a pivot.
“We started thinking about who our clients were and as soon as we regrouped for a second, we realized they have the same issues. Right as they were admitting new classes, about to have open house events, and welcoming people to campus, this happened. So, we thought, ‘What can we do to help them?’ and we came up with the idea of ‘open house in a box’ and for the rest of the semester we, were packing boxes,” she said.
In 2020 and 2021, Patdome Promotions sent out 90,000 packages through UT. It was a family affair at times, with the business operating out of their house and their kids helping fold and pack the boxes up.
For a while, Ickowitz reveled in her work-from-home business and wasn’t planning on moving into a brick-and-mortar office. But, as the stacks of inventory filled their garage to the brim (they didn’t park in their garage for at least two years) and the orders kept coming in, the wife-husband team realized it was time to take the next big step in Patdome Promotions’ evolution.
They intentionally picked a location in an up-and-coming part of Knoxville, just down the road from the brand-new baseball stadium in the Old City and next door to new breweries and other businesses popping up all over the place. Opening a physical location allowed them to expand their workforce and they now have several employees, all of whom boast UT degrees.
Becoming a Rocky Top Business Awardee
Good communication skills have always been an intuitive part of Ickowitz’s makeup, and she gravitated to it throughout her academic and professional careers.
“I was not an athlete, I was not a musician, but the computer keyboard was my instrument, my sport. It came naturally to me,” she said.
While she is a natural communicator and always excelled at English and writing, Ickowitz said reading her first academic article was daunting. It was unlike anything she had done before but she soaked up research methodologies, theories, and more until it all began to click into place. She said one of the biggest impacts was doing case studies in courses taught by Tombras School of Advertising and Public Relations Professor Michael Palenchar, who specializes in crisis communications.
“I think that there is value in having to learn about a subject that might not necessarily interest you or be a cause you would have taken up, and having to navigate through it, form an opinion, and articulate your thoughts on it cohesively and persuasively. That is what CCI can do to prepare somebody for any type of career,” she said.
Her Ickowitz said that course informed one of the first collaborative papers she co-authored with faculty and other graduate students, which focused on people’s perceptions of communication from the Tennessee Valley Authority around the 2008 ash spill disaster. That paper was published in an academic journal, a point of pride for her. But she took away a lot more from that experience as the process taught her how to do market research, conduct surveys and interviews, and analyze the data—all of which she applies to her work today.
In addition to those skills, the topic itself was a learning opportunity, Ickowitz said. What she learned, and what she wrote about, was that people want an answer when something goes wrong. Even if the answer is, “We don’t know,” it is a better practice to communicate than to say nothing at all.
“The thing that rings in my head is that if you don’t give a narrative, someone else well, so just being transparent as much as you can and I think that approach has served me well,” she said. “Luckily, we don’t find ourselves in that position often but just in dealing with contracts, issue resolution—that has followed me through every aspect of our business. Just being forthright in communicating.”
Though she had focused on PR for her master’s, Ickowitz finds herself doing less marketing and promotions for her business these days and more interpersonal communication and relationship building. While anyone can go on their website and make an order, her preference is to sit down and get to know a client to better understand their goals and challenges.
“I do not like sales. I am not a salesperson, but I am a helper. Most of the time when we have someone come in here, I don’t feel like a salesperson, I feel like I’m part of the team. We’re looking at the challenges and helping them to do what they want to do. We are a solution for a need that they have,” she said.
She said they’ve also built on-going relationships with the vendors they use for their products, which allows them to get items out quickly even when it hinges on whether an athletic team wins or loses a game. One such example is when they were gearing up for both the UT softball and baseball teams potentially heading to a championship; and when the baseball team did go to Omaha, so did some swag from Patdome Promotions.
“For Omaha, we did the credentials and the lanyards for the tailgate, and it’s just really cool when you’re watching TV and see Peyton Manning and Josh Heupel and Rick Barnes sitting in a box wearing them. When we see our stuff show up on TV, I get random texts from people saying, ‘Hey did you make that?’” she said, noting it’s one of her favorite parts of the job.
As proponents of higher education and now Vols for life—as Mike also went to UT for not one, but two master’s degrees—they love being immersed in the fandom and helping university offices transfer that energy to diverse audiences via promotional items. Whether it’s a special gift for a celebrity alumni or a box welcoming new students to a program, Ickowitz revels in the opportunity to be part of the Rocky Top fun.