Mike & Tanya Ickowitz are #MadeForKnoxville.

It all started because they couldn’t buy a t-shirt. As the George Mason Patriots made their historic Final Four run in the 2006 NCAA men’s basketball tournament, Tanya and Mike sought out a way to display their school pride and cheer on their team to victory. At a time when product options were few outside of the immediate DC area, this driven pair of alumni started providing officially licensed team gear and logo apparel for fans all over the country from their Knoxville, Tennessee homebase. In the years since, Patdome Promotions has become a Cinderella story in its own right. 

Patdome Promotions is a brand marketing and promotional products company run by business power couple, Mike and Tanya Ickowitz. Founded in Knoxville in 2006, the business began as a part-time endeavor, servicing fans and later networking with university offices that needed promotional items for their events. Word of mouth spread beyond the university community, leading Tanya and Mike to now collaboratively create complex marketing campaigns through promotional products and logo items for universities, businesses, and organizations throughout the US (and beyond!).

In 2017, Tanya left her corporate job in marketing and public relations to devote her full-time attention to the couple’s small business. The company grew rapidly during the first year, and Mike followed suit by transitioning to work full-time at Patdome in 2019. They are thrilled to have experienced such growth and have just purchased a physical office in the Old North Knoxville Broadway corridor, expected to open later in 2022.

“Create the things you wish existed.”

In Their Own Words…

Mike and I definitely have opposite but complementary personalities, and we’ve learned that it takes both types to run our business successfully. He’s the dreamer and visionary with the confidence to try new things and expand our footprint, and I’m the rational perfectionist who keeps the ship running smoothly. This balance has helped get us through speed bumps, especially as the pandemic changed the landscape of event-based marketing and our clients needed solutions, not products. We try to establish ourselves as flexible and forward thinking extensions of our clients’ creative team, and we form true partnerships that integrate with their strategies more than the typical vendor/customer relationship.

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