Aerospace and defense marketing built Aerogear’s visibility from a one-person effort into a recognized brand that keeps its name in front of the industry every week.
| Client | Stephen Hainline / Aerogear — aerospace and defense manufacturer |
| Industry | Aerospace and defense |
| The problem | Highly technical products, no time for marketing, and a previous hire whose “marketing” was just sending out pictures with no real strategy or depth |
| The solution | eLuminate Effect™ ongoing content management — email distribution and social media built around Aerogear’s actual technical products |
| The result | Nearly two years in, multi-million dollar jobs traced directly to consistent email visibility, trade show recognition industry-wide, and a brand that now reads as a “multimedia institution” instead of a one-person operation |
Aerogear was founded in 2002 by Joel Weber and two fellow engineers who walked away from a larger company to strike out on their own. For years, growth came the old-fashioned way — through relationships they’d already built in the aerospace and defense industry. There was no marketing plan, no content calendar, no brand presence to speak of. It simply wasn’t part of how the business ran.
That changed when Stephen Hainline joined the company 14 years ago. With a background in radio broadcasting, Stephen became the one who got Aerogear’s marketing off the ground — largely on his own, and largely without the time to do it properly.
The Before: No Time, No Real Expertise
“I never had any time to do anything,” Stephen says of running email distribution and social media alongside his other responsibilities. Aerogear had brought on a young hire at one point to help, but her approach leaned entirely on graphics — sending out pictures rather than the kind of detailed, technical content the business actually needed. It wasn’t a professional marketing operation. It was a stopgap.
Adding to the challenge: Aerogear’s world is deeply technical. Stephen was skeptical that any outside marketing partner could really understand the products, the engineering, or the aerospace and defense market well enough to represent the company credibly. That skepticism is exactly where eLuminate came in.
The Work: Nearly Two Years In
Aerogear has now worked with eLuminate for almost two years, partnering closely with Adina on email and social media. Stephen’s biggest surprise has been how quickly and accurately she’s picked up the technical side of the business.
“She picks up stuff and puts together things that sends to me for prior approval that a lot of times I didn’t even know,” he says. “She is brilliant on gathering information, the right kind of information, and putting it together in a very visually appealing email and social media for us.”
The Results: Visibility That Turns Into Revenue
The impact hasn’t stayed abstract. Stephen points directly to new business: “There’s been several multi-million dollar jobs that we got because they keep seeing our emails.”
At trade shows, that consistent presence has translated into recognition on the floor — “everybody knows us because we make a presence,” he says.
“Everybody sees our emails and our social media, and that’s what we want. We want that branding so everybody knows if they have an issue, they want to come to us.”
The One Thing That Made the Difference
Asked what single change had the biggest impact, Stephen didn’t hesitate: professionalism. “What you guys have done has changed it from a local kind of one person putting it together to where it looks like a multimedia kind of institution has gathered up all this information and professionally presented it to people.”
A Shift in Mindset
Working with eLuminate changed how Stephen thinks about marketing for a company operating in as specialized a space as aerospace and defense. “I didn’t think that you would be able to understand and handle our technical aspects,” he admits. “But Adina is phenomenal. She goes to the websites for the products, she pulls out just the right kind of information, and she understands our products and our market very well.”
Why It Sticks
For Stephen, the value of consistent branding in aerospace comes down to timing. “In the aerospace world, things move at a snail’s pace,” he says. “So you have to keep your name in front of the people. By the time they do need your products, it’s just a second thought for them — ‘yeah, those Aerogear guys, I see their stuff every week.’ And they reach out, and we start the process rolling.”
It’s a big part of why Aerogear has stuck with eLuminate well beyond the initial engagement. As Stephen puts it, looking ahead: “We look forward to a continued long relationship.”
The Takeaway for Other Technical Businesses
Stephen’s advice to another business owner in a highly technical niche who assumes marketing won’t work for them is simple: it will, if the branding is consistent and the partner actually understands the industry.
“I don’t know if there’s too much more of a higher level technically than we are,” he says of Aerogear’s engineers and rocket scientists — “and eLuminate has been phenomenal for us.”
