Styrofoam Hamburgers, a Legend Named Flag Man Jimmy, and a Career in Marketing: Amber Ginop's First Gig
by Ryan Brown
Somewhere in West Michigan there is a grown adult who, twenty years ago, cried in the outfield at a Whitecaps game because another kid jumped on him too hard during the hamburger race. I don't know his name. I don't need to. What I do know is that the woman who helped strap him into that styrofoam bun costume went on to build a career that took her from a minor league dugout to Nike in Los Angeles to a newsroom in Alabama to the executive team of a global safety equipment company. That's the kind of detour only a first gig can set in motion.
Amber Ginop is the director of marketing at HexArmor, a Grand Rapids based leader in personal protective equipment. She's spent her whole career being a storyteller, a coach, a brand builder, and pretty much everything in between. But when she sat down with me on My 1st Gig, we didn't start in a boardroom. We started on a baseball field, with a college soccer player who had absolutely no plan to end up there.
Flag Man Jimmy Changes Everything
Amber went to Grand Valley State to play soccer and figured she'd end up in athletic training or physical therapy. Then she took her first chemistry class and, in her words, learned real quick that it wasn't for her. Back to the drawing board. She loved writing. She loved sports. She had no idea those two things could be a job.
Enter Flag Man Jimmy.
For years, Jimmy ran around West Michigan Park with a giant flag after every Whitecaps home run, a full-blown legend in his own right. What most fans never knew is that he also happened to be taking a class from Amber's stepdad, an exercise science professor at Grand Valley, who mentioned his stepdaughter was trying to figure out her next move. Jimmy made an introduction. Amber showed up dressed for what she thought was a formal interview, and the director of promotions took one look at her shoes and told her they weren't going to work for what they were about to do.
What followed was less an interview and more an audition: a group of hopefuls running through every between-innings bit the Whitecaps had. A couple of weeks later, she had a start date. She had no idea what she'd just signed up for, only that it beat a desk job.
Life in the Dugout
For three seasons, Amber was part of the promotions crew, the people sprinting around the field between innings, coordinating the chicken dance, and yes, occasionally overseeing a hamburger race that involved actual styrofoam toppings and two people jumping into a bun costume together. She learned to show up early to scout contestants for the dizzy bat race. She learned that opening day in April in Michigan is miserable, and you bring the same energy anyway, even when there are ten people in the stands.
She also learned, almost by accident, that every promotion on that field was sponsored by a business paying to put its name in front of a crowd. It sounds obvious now. At the time, it was a lightbulb moment. She went back to her academic advisor, described what she'd just experienced, and heard four words that reset her entire path: advertising and public relations—no more chemistry required.
From there it was the Detroit Tigers as an events and promotions intern, a role she landed the unglamorous way, by finally swallowing her pride and asking the Whitecaps front office if they knew anybody. They did. Different level, same lesson: talk to people, use your connections, and show up like you mean it, because energy is the one thing that separates you when everyone around you is tired too.
The Long Way Around
Nothing about what came next was a straight line, and Amber will tell you that herself. A contract gig with Nike pulled her to Los Angeles, an experience she wouldn't trade, even though it left her homesick for Michigan. Stints followed at the Gilmore Collection, then MLive, then a move to Alabama when her husband's job relocated the family, where she ran content marketing for a media company and took on her first real leadership role.
That's also where her years coaching youth and travel soccer started paying off in an unexpected place: managing adults. She'd learned from her own college coach, Dave DiIanni, now at the University of Michigan, what it looks like to cast a vision for someone and watch them grow into it. Turns out that's leadership, whether you're coaching a midfielder or a marketing team.
Full Circle
Eventually, the family moved back to Michigan, and Amber found herself freelancing, coaching at Aquinas, and even working a stretch at Ferris Coffee before deciding she missed being part of a team. A friend sent her a job posting at a company she'd never heard of, in an industry she knew nothing about. She had to Google what PPE even meant. She interviewed for a copywriter role at HexArmor anyway, and the hiring manager, Todd Mellema, essentially told her later that after seven underwhelming candidates, she just seemed like a normal, solid person worth taking a chance on.
Ten years later, she runs the brand.
Ask Amber what she'd tell her younger self and she doesn't hesitate: don't be afraid to try new things, and don't panic when the path isn't linear, because it almost never is. She spent years bouncing between sports and media and coffee and coaching before it all clicked into a single career built on the same skill she picked up wrangling a hamburger costume at the ballpark: show up, read the room, and make it a good time for everyone watching.