Comet Corner: How a Promotional Pen Fosters Community
By: Jeff Joiner | June 5, 2025
Being a local business means more than just having a storefront and waiting for customers to come in. Just ask Monica Scott BS’87, MBA’97 who, with her sister Paula Frykolm, own the Richardson, Texas, promotional business Logotology. For them, being local means relationships.
“I think one of the most important things about Logotology is that we’re ingrained in the community,” Scott said. “We do a lot of donating to causes like the Network of Community Ministries and we do a lot of volunteer work. I think that’s very important for any business to be connected to its community.”
Logotology and two sister companies sell and produce promotional items for a wide range of businesses and nonprofits, 80% of which are local to the North Texas region. Scott says they sell just about anything that can sit still long enough for a logo to be printed or embroidered on it — apparel, blankets, coffee mugs, pens, awards, name badges, signs and banners just to name a few items they offer.
Scott and her sister also own two other businesses that work primarily online, golftournament.com, which sells promotional items and manages the logistics of hosting fundraising golf tournaments, and Classroom Apparel, which sells school uniforms.
“Logotology is our brick-and-mortar business that is grounded here in the community while Classroom Apparel and golftournament.com are businesses with national audiences,” Scott said.
Scott earned a bachelor’s degree and a Master in Business Administration from the Naveen Jindal School of Management at UT Dallas and worked for several years in telecom at its height in Richardson when the city was known for its rapidly growing telecommunications industry.
She worked for the pager company PageNet, which grew from 300,000 pager accounts to more than 5 million, becoming one of the largest pager service companies in the world. With the onset of cell phones in the 1990s, the pager business waned and with it so did PageNet. Working on her MBA at the time, Scott said witnessing the demise of a huge company from the inside became an interesting case study for her business school studies.
Scott left PageNet and worked for the financial services company KPMG for a time, but both her and her sister, a nurse, began thinking about starting a business together. In 2006, the pair bought an embroidery company franchise that Frykolm operated while Scott continued to work in the finance industry. Five years later, they decided to drop the franchise agreement and opened their own business in a location in Richardson where they could maintain a showroom for their products.
“With my job it was a matter of needing to move into management and I had just had a child and wasn’t really interested in that,” Scott said. “But Paula operated the business herself, and I continued to work for about 10 years before I quit and joined her full time.”
The bread and butter of the business is working with local companies and organizations to provide promotional items that recognize employees and customers and promote brands. Scott said the promotional items business is one of the most unique advertising and marketing services available.
“There are all kinds of ways to use promotional products,” Scott said. “Sometimes it’s client appreciation or it could be for employee loyalty. Promotional products are really the only form of advertising that people thank you for. People don’t thank you when you drive by a billboard.”
Scott said her company places a business logo in the hands of customers or employees who use or wear products that can carry that marketing message.
“If I give you a pen with a logo on it, you’re going to see my logo every time you use that pen or coffee mug or wear a polo with a logo,” Scott said. “It really has an impact that’s significant. And there’s also the way people feel when they receive something ― you’ve done a great job and here are some kudos. That’s really cool.”
With a showroom available in Richardson to show off Logotology’s products, Scott said her business is more closely related to face-to-face business ties with local customers than the large, national online promotional companies. That makes her business much more tied to the community.
“It’s about relationships to us,” Scott said. “It’s more about networking than just providing products that you can browse online. Our customers walk around our showroom and touch and feel things. That’s what our customers like.”