One brand, one platform, 75% adoption

By consolidating purchasing, approvals, and licensing into one SmartSite integrated with JAGGAER, Rutgers protected its brand, captured every royalty automatically, and saved 52% against MSRP, with more than 75% of departments and student organizations now ordering through a single portal.

The challenge: a brand leaking out of a fragmented process

Like most large universities, Rutgers bought branded merchandise everywhere and nowhere at once. Hundreds of departments, schools, and student organizations ordered apparel, giveaways, and gear through their own contacts, on their own terms. The result was the kind of fragmentation (rogue spend, in the industry's terms) that quietly costs an institution real money and reputation: inconsistent pricing, scattered payment terms and collections, and, most visibly, brand abuse.

For University Communications and Marketing (UCM), the brand problem was the one that kept surfacing. Across campus, the Rutgers identity was being stretched in ways no one could fully see or stop. Incorrect versions of logos. Made-up logos that existed in no official library. Endless hunts for the right vector file. And no reliable way to know which marks were even approved for a given school, team, or department.

Underneath the brand issues sat a procurement blind spot familiar to anyone in higher ed. Ask “What does your school spend on branded materials?” or “What kinds of items are people buying?” and the honest answer was usually “I don’t know.” Royalties owed on licensed merchandise were easy to miss. Spend was impossible to analyze. And every order moved through manual steps that drained staff time.

What Rutgers set out to fix

UCM wanted to take control of how the Rutgers brand was used without becoming a bottleneck for the thousands of people who needed to buy. The goal wasn't to slow ordering down. It was to make the right way to order the easy way: approved logos, correct trademark usage, captured royalties, fair and consistent pricing, and a clear record of who bought what.

Procurement and Trademark and Licensing wanted the same outcomes from their own angles: visibility into spend, a defensible audit trail, automated approvals, and a process that tied cleanly into the systems Rutgers already ran.

Choosing Consolidus

Rutgers established its contract pricing and terms through a formal RFP, then selected Consolidus to design and build the solution. Work began in January 2020.

This was never treated as a marketing side project. UCM owned the contract, but Procurement played a major role in development alongside Trademark and Licensing: three groups with three sets of priorities, building one system together. That cross-functional ownership mattered. The platform had to satisfy brand protection, procurement efficiency, and licensing compliance at the same time, rather than solving for one group and frustrating the others.

The real question: would it hold up at scale?

Consolidating a spend category this decentralized is not a small bet. Thousands of buyers across hundreds of departments already had their own way of doing things, and the reasonable concerns wrote themselves. Would people actually adopt a new portal, or route around it? Would the brand controls survive contact with real-world ordering? Would a procurement integration deliver a genuinely seamless experience, or just add another step to an already busy process?

Rutgers and Consolidus answered those questions deliberately rather than optimistically. The portal went live on June 1, 2020 as a soft launch with a small pool of users from the university's network of communicators. That early group surfaced real needs and let Consolidus make final adjustments before the official rollout on July 1, 2020, the start of the 2021 fiscal year. Confidence was earned, not assumed.

What Consolidus built

The Rutgers SmartSite solved the brand problem and the procurement problem in a single workflow.

On the brand and licensing side

A searchable logobank, loaded with the official Rutgers logo library, gave users a fast way to find approved marks by keyword, favorite them for later, and send the correct vector file straight to the design team. No more incorrect versions, no more invented logos, no more uncertainty about what was approved.

A built-in second approval process routes every proof to the Trademark and Licensing Office for a final review before production, confirming correct branding, adequate safe space, and proper trademark usage down to the ® and ™.

Royalty capture became automatic and transparent. The system shows royalty costs up front as a user builds a quote, applies them by default, and lets Trademark and Licensing toggle them off when they don't apply. Consolidus also tags each logo for clean CLC reporting and submits royalty payments on Rutgers' behalf through CLC Brand Manager 360, taking yet another task off the UCM team's plate.

Administrative controls give the approval team a full archive of past orders, the artwork used, and when it was approved, invaluable for tracking repeated logo use over time.

On the procurement and finance side

Consolidus built a full punchout inside Rutgers' JAGGAER Marketplace. Once a proof is approved, the user punches the quote directly into Marketplace and submits a requisition: no files to save, no artwork to collect, though everything is stored in their order history with downloadable PDFs if they need them. When the requisition is approved, the purchase order flows automatically back to Consolidus, the order goes to production, a tracking email reaches the buyer at shipment, and the final invoice returns through Marketplace for approval and payment.

Reporting finally answered the questions Rutgers couldn't before: how much is spent in any time frame, what's being purchased, who the top buyers and departments are, which products perform best, and what users think of the experience.

And because pricing follows the contract established during the RFP, every user sees the same fair pricing regardless of order size, with clear checkpoints showing exactly how quantity, imprint colors, setups, accessories, shipping, and royalties affect the all-in total. No surprises at the final cart.

Where Consolidus exceeded expectations

The technology did its job. Two things went beyond what a platform alone could promise.

The first was adoption. A new system only delivers if people choose it, and Rutgers' community did, overwhelmingly.

The second was the relationship behind the software. Consolidus didn't disappear after launch. The Program Team shows up: monthly review calls, an Annual Business Review with UCM and Procurement to walk through sales, savings, and category trends, plus roadshows and appearances at university events like Rutgers Day and the Winter Chill 5K. As much as the technology streamlines the process, the people are what make it stick. One user's reaction after finally meeting the team in person said it best:

When the initial three-year contract came to a close in 2023, renewing was an easy decision.

The results

Over the first three-plus years on the platform, Rutgers achieved:

The difference

Before Consolidus, branded merchandise at Rutgers was a fragmented, brand-leaking, hard-to-see expense. After, it's a single, governed, fully visible process that protects the Rutgers identity, captures every royalty owed, and routes cleanly through the systems the university already trusts.

The brand is no longer something to hope about. It's something Rutgers controls. Procurement can finally answer the spend questions it couldn't before. Licensing compliance is automatic instead of aspirational. And buyers across campus get an experience that's faster and easier than the workaround it replaced.

That's the Consolidus difference: not just better technology, but a partner that turns one of higher ed's messiest spend categories into one of its most managed, and brings a team people are genuinely glad to work with.