Have you got Gary Lineker's ears

Did you or a member of your family end up with a pair of Gary Lineker's ‘ears' as part of the Red Nose Day promotion a couple of years ago?

If you did, you probably didn't realise the promotion was handled very close to home - from here in Uckfield.

Footballer turned BBC-TV pundit Lineker, who advertises Walkers Crisps, made fun of his own large ears by working with Comic Relief to giveaway a million Walkears.

And that's where RMI Services, of the Blackberry Business Centre, Brambleside, Bellbrook Business Park, comes in.
The firm, originally known as Kersten Promotions, came to Uckfield in the 1980s.

It works in the sales promotion business and has many household companies as clients, including Nestle, Express Newspapers, Dulux, Early Learning Centre, Mothercare, Pedigree Pet Food, Tropicana and Walkers Snack Foods.

Fifty per cent the firm's business is the fulfilment of promotional items while 50 per cent is clearing money-off coupons clipped from newspapers, packaging or other sources.

Adam Rawat, RMI managing director, said the Walkears promotion saw them sending out forty to fifty thousand items a day over a four-week period.

RMI was also involved in the Walkers' Do us a Flavour promotion which was designed to find the company a new flavour of crisp. The firm had to moderate more than a million entries to the competition to ensure no rules or regulations were broken. [Builder's Breakfast was the winning flavour].

RMI, which employs around 50 people, certainly keeps its home town in the public eye: "Uckfield is a very famous town. It is advertised on millions of packets weekly as the address where you send for your promotional items," Mr Rawat pointed out.

(Added to site Friday, August 7th, 2009)