Counselor’s exclusive ranking of the suppliers with the most revenue in the promotional products industry.

Polyconcept North America (asi/78897)

The industry’s largest hard-goods supplier experienced a state of flux due to more than just COVID in 2020. Respected industry veteran David Nicholson stepped back from his role as PCNA’s president, as CEO Neil Ringel brought in new team members at the executive level of the company. With a drop in sales of 37% last year from $818 million to $512 million, the company notes it did less than 5% of PPE, a strategy that Ringel maintains was by design. It begs the question as to why one of the companies with the most robust global sourcing networks in the industry didn’t leverage that and inoculate itself with a steady stream of PPE sales. “Our strategy at its core is that we’re a decorator of product, and while it’s tempting to chase something like PPE to bolster the business, I look at other suppliers now with piles of inventory,” Ringel says. “We decided early on during the pandemic that we didn’t want PPE to define who we are.”

Ringel also points to the concerted strategy of taking the time during the pandemic to look inward at PCNA’s infrastructure and procedures, overhauling the company’s website, upgrading its reporting processes and equipment, and “staying focused on our SLAs and our client commitments: great decoration, easy, reliable ordering and phenomenal service where the customer is always our first priority – rinse and repeat,” he says, revealing that PCNA is currently “down 10%, all in, from this point at 2019.” And for this year, after an industry-wide sales hangover in January and February, Ringel reports PCNA’s sales in April and May were robust. “I talk to a lot of our customers and from everything I see, the 3rd and certainly the 4th quarters will be gangbusters,” he says. The company predicts its sales for 2021 will be approximately $624 million and already this year one of its entities – ETS Express, led by CEO Sharon Eyal – is up double-digits.

“When other companies in the industry were laying people off and cancelling inventory orders, we wanted to ensure we were in it for the long game,” Ringel says. “We could have chased sales during COVID and gotten in to PPE. But remember, in those first few months, nobody knew quite what we were all dealing with… how long the lockdown would last, and how extensive the damage to business would be. So we made the decision to keep our focus on our long-term vision, which is promo. And I’m glad we didn’t veer from that to PPE.”

Previous Rank: 4

2020 Revenue: $512.3

All revenue figures shown in $millions