7. Matthew Eckhouse & Anne McKeough

Staples Promotional Products (asi/120601)

Matthew

2019 Rank: N/A

Title: Vice President/General Manager

Industry Experience: 1 year

Anne

2019 Rank: 16

Title: Vice President of Global Sales

Industry Experience: 16 years

Matthew Eckhouse has been in charge of Staples’ promotional products division for only a year, but what a year it’s been.

The 2004 Harvard grad (who also has an MBA from Dartmouth) joined the Staples team in 2013, steadily moving up the ranks. He was initially attracted to helping the iconic office supply brand reinvent itself, moving away from its retail roots to become a business-to-business supplies delivery powerhouse. “It was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to make a meaningful contribution to that kind of work,” he says. “It’s been an amazing pivot to see and to be a part of.”

Little did he know the pivot that awaited him when he took the reins of Staples Promotional Products mere months before a pandemic struck. “Your first year on the job, you learn a lot about what a business is really capable of,” Eckhouse says. “Going through the kind of challenging situation that we have here, it feels like it’s been five years, not just one.”

Like many distributors in the industry, the Top 40 firm leaned hard into selling PPE early on during the pandemic, and thanks to “a whole lot of people working a whole lot of hours” to figure out how to source and sell masks and other personal protective equipment, Staples Promotional Products is “looking at probably the best year in company history,” Eckhouse says. “Without that pivot toward PPE, it would not have been a good year.”

It’s an impressive feat for the third-largest distributor in the industry, which already boasted an estimated $601.6 million in North American promotional products sales last year.

Eckhouse gives all the credit to his team. “A lot of people threw out their job descriptions and just dove in on what was needed,” he says. “They showed a willingness to come in every day and reinvent themselves and do something totally different. Pretty soon, it turned into a lot of wins.”

Part of that winning team is McKeough, vice president of global sales at Staples Promotional Products and Counselor’s 2019 Distributor Woman of Distinction. The glass-ceiling shattering exec, who joined the Power 50 list last year, says she thrives in high-pressure environments: “I love to be challenged – to always raise the bar, to strategize with clients and teammates, and to mentor others to grow and thrive.”

Witty, smart and strategic, McKeough shows genuine care for her team members, and part of her responsibilities include recruiting and mentoring top talent, as well as creating a vision that facilitates the continual enhancement of a platform that supports the needs of high-speed global customers.

Eckhouse, McKeough and the rest of the Staples Promotional Products leadership group have stayed in close contact throughout the pandemic, despite everyone working from home. “There’s a good chance I talk to the leadership team more than my family,” Eckhouse, a father of two, jokes.

Luckily, however, it’s the employees that have kept Eckhouse at Staples. “You stay at a job because you get to work with great people,” he says. “I’m really impressed with the culture. It’s obviously a big company, but it can actually feel pretty small in terms of how people treat each other. Everybody at Staples can reach out to anyone else. It’s an open place like that.”