When the subject of suppliers selling direct surfaces in the promotional products industry, the same name continually comes up: BEL.

“I despise companies like DiscountMugs (aka: BEL Promo/Hurricane Line) undercutting distributors,” wrote one distributor in the comments section on an industry blog.

“DiscountMugs.com is BEL Promo and they’re selling to the end-user to cut you out!” read a card given out by an anonymous (and angry) individual or group at the PPAI Expo a few years ago.

Top 40 distributor DiscountMugs.com (asi/181120) and BEL Promo (asi/39552), a supplier firm, are owned by the same company: BEL USA. Some in the promotional products industry view that arrangement (and others in the industry where a supplier and distributor are owned by the same entity) as a kind of unfair double-dipping. They get particularly annoyed because they believe BEL Promo is selling directly to end-buyers.

Except it’s not true that BEL Promo sells direct, says Alan Tabasky (pictured), vice president and general manager of BEL USA. DiscountMugs and BEL Promo are siloed, Tabasky adamantly insists. “They’re totally separate business divisions with separate P&L’s, management, customer service, sales and accounting,” he says.

DiscountMugs started in 1995 as a vertically integrated business, importing a small amount of drinkware products directly from China, imprinting them in a 1,000-square-foot facility, and selling the items to anyone who ordered through the website, Tabasky says. “The founders had no knowledge of the ad specialty industry – neither distributor or supplier,” Tabasky explains. Still, over time, distributors discovered DiscountMugs. “They wanted a level of service that DiscountMugs couldn’t provide – terms, catalogs, dedicated reps and more,” says Tabasky.

Seeing a chance to serve this customer base, BEL Promo was formed in 2005 to act as a supplier to distributors, he says. It operates as a true supplier, not sharing distributor or end-client information with DiscountMugs and not selling directly to end-buyers, Tabasky relates. “It wouldn’t make sense to do things otherwise,” he says. “If you want to be in both the wholesale and retail businesses, you have to treat them differently and respect their differences.” 

Another criticism is that DiscountMugs only sells BEL Promo products and is used as a kind of backdoor for BEL Promo to sell direct. Tabasky says that’s a misconception. “It doesn’t work like that,” he adds. Tabasky maintains that BEL USA, the parent company, has a merchandising and purchasing department that stocks items, and that both divisions pull from that same inventory. The direct-sourced stock for DiscountMugs is an extenuation of the distributor’s long-running vertically integrated business model. While DiscountMugs’ direct sourcing remains the distributor’s norm, it “has evolved and also markets and sells thousands of items from industry suppliers as well,” Tabasky says.