Bill Bywater wasn’t originally thrilled with the idea of joining the family business – Bankers Advertising, the Iowa City, IA-based distributor that’s been around for more than 125 years and was the recipient of Counselor’s Distributor Family Business of the Year award in 2021. Instead, he says, he went to school to become a mechanical engineer.

But the draw of what was then a fourth-generation family business was too strong and after completing a short stint with the military, Bywater went all in with Bankers in the early 1960s. There’ve been opportunities over the years for him to flex his engineering muscles – particularly when he decided to move his facility from an antiquated downtown building to a climate-controlled industrial site in the mid-1980s. But he also discovered a great love for the promo industry and the people involved in it that’s kept him active and engaged for more than six decades.

Though his son David has taken over as firm president and general manager, Bywater is still chairman of the board and active in a sales role. “I’m watching my friends retire and ask me when I’m going to,” Bywater says. “They don’t understand why I haven’t, but when I come to the office, each day is like Christmas morning: What’s going to be under the tree? It isn’t all fun and games, but the things that don’t go like you want them to, that just means that those things that do are more meaningful.”

Retirement, the octogenarian says, is not likely in the cards for him. Just as his father continued going into the office until the day he died, Bywater says he plans to have a hand in Bankers Advertising in some form as long as he’s able. “Watching the exciting things going on in this business, I think that’s the lure,” he adds.

For Linda Martinelli, it’s always been about going the extra mile to give clients the personal touch. “I’m willing to take on those things that other people aren’t,” she says. An example? Martinelli recently put together an employee award gift for a company that required her to ship 7,000 high-end water bottles to 7,000 individual addresses – to virtually every country in the world. Many of the addresses provided to Martinelli were incorrect or incomplete, so she stayed up late into the night for weeks working with DHL and contacting individual recipients in India, China and other locales to correct their shipping addresses. “That was a huge project,” she recalls, but “we did it.”

Martinelli has had that same can-do attitude since “back in the day” when her father owned a printing and office supply company. She helped him add promotional products to his lineup of services, then went on to work at several other office supply and printing companies. Eventually, however, she got tired of having to go through “such a chain of command to get anything done” and decided she could meet customers’ needs more quickly and efficiently by striking out on her own. So, she started her own promo firm in 1998 and never looked back.

“There are people in this industry who want to take that extra step, and people who want to do the very basic minimum,” Martinelli says. “I was always someone who wanted to take it a little further.”

Robert Collins found the promo industry by accident. He was in a phone booth (remember those?) to follow up on an interview with a prospective employer, when he looked down and saw a classified ad for an opportunity with Paper Mate. “I’m a pen lover,” Collins says. “I have been for years. I love writing instruments.”

He became West Coast regional manager in Paper Mate’s advertising specialty division, and hasn’t looked back, starting his own multi-line rep business in 1980. “It’s been magical ever since,” Collins says. “It’s not just my livelihood; it’s my life.”

Being on the road – going from hotel to hotel – has been one of the biggest challenges of his career, but overall, the positives have outweighed the negatives. The biggest positive? “The friendships I’ve made over the years,” Collins says. “Most of these people, they’re like family.” Some of those friendships, he adds, are going into the second and even third generations of promo families.

Though there have been a lot of changes in promo over the nearly five decades Collins has been part of it, he believes there’s always going to be a need for branded items to support advertising efforts. “Regardless of what business you’re in, if you don’t advertise that business, sooner or later you’re going to advertise that business for sale,” Collins says.

Back in the 1970s, when the printed T-shirt began its meteoric rise to pop culture dominance, Ira Neaman took note. “T-shirts were just starting to become a communications vehicle, and the feeling was that there should be a market for better apparel – like a polo shirt with a logo – that could be used in a corporate sense,” he says. “That was the inspiration, and then it was just a question of figuring out how to make the garment, how to get the decoration done and find the customers.”

In the early days, Neaman would purchase fabric, have shirts made-to-order locally and then customize them with a direct embroidered logo. He also had a lot of seemingly simple business lessons to learn: “At my first trade show when I exhibited, I didn’t know you had to buy a booth. I thought it was included,” Neaman recalls. “That’s the amount of naivete I had early on, which I guess I made up for by my enthusiasm.”

Apparel made up a much smaller portion of the industry in those days, with many uninterested in dealing with hassles like sizing – things that can be avoided when you focus on hard goods. But as technology advanced and more people understood the power of being a walking billboard – not to mention the growth of casual apparel – the wearables segment of promo mushroomed, bringing suppliers like Vantage Apparel along for the ride. Polo shirts are now the third-largest product category in the industry – tied with caps and headwear – representing 9.4% of distributor promo revenue. (Number one? T-shirts, of course.) Vantage is a stalwart on the Top 40, and Neaman himself has made an appearance on the Counselor Power 50 list 17 times.

Norman Stalarow got his start in the promo industry in the late 1970s. He saw a heat-printing business in the mall and decided that’s what he wanted to do as well. “I built my first screen-print one-color machine in my dad’s garage and would use their oven to dry my heat transfers,” he recalls.

Business “just kind of grew” from those humble beginnings, the Houston man says. “I got in at a time when it was good to get in,” he adds. Today, Buffalo Specialties boasts about 65 employees, and Stalarow has led his team to take on national accounts and large-scale projects through what his son Micah calls a combination of “grit and wit.”

Stalarow describes himself as a natural salesperson, recalling how he was once known as “the doormat king” because he came up with the idea of selling doormats to apartment complexes – with the thought that six months after the first order, rental companies would place reorders to swap out worn doormats, turning it into a sort of annuity for the salesperson who had closed the initial deal. “We used to do almost every doormat for every complex,” Stalarow says. “I used to tell everyone in this industry, you’re only limited by your pocketbook and your imagination.”

What’s helped him thrive over the last 40-plus years is a willingness to adapt and change, a penchant for forging lasting friendships across generations and the habit of surrounding himself with smart people. “Anybody can be president of this country,” he says. “All they’ve got to do is be smart enough to know you don’t want to be the smartest person in the room.”

Les Dorfman began his career in promo in the late 1970s, when his family launched AITG Inc., a supplier of business gifts and crystal awards. He eventually became president and CEO of the firm before selling it to Visions (asi/93986) where he served as senior vice president of sales and business development from May 2007 to May 2015. Later, he served in executive roles at High Caliber Line (asi/43442) and Top 40 distributor iPROMOTEu (asi/232119), among other roles.

When COVID hit and business came to a standstill, Dorfman thought he’d give retirement a try, but quickly discovered it wasn’t for him. “After six months of playing golf, working in the yard and being with friends, I said, ‘I can’t do this. I need to keep my mind active,’” he says. “The old adage of being a workaholic, I don’t know if that’s necessarily a bad thing.”

So, Dorfman opened a promo consulting business. “The phone just kept ringing off the hook,” he says. One of those calls was from Galaxy Balloons, the Cleveland-based supplier that Dorfman was named president of late last year. Dorfman, who’s based in California, is in the office every day at 5 a.m. and flies out to Ohio several times a month. “I can’t wait to get in my office, and I can’t wait to get on a plane to Cleveland; business is my hobby,” he says. “I plan on helping get Galaxy to another level.”

Maggie Guglielmo has been in the promo business since the early 1980s, as a partner in a Houston firm that did sign supplies and offered promotional products on the side. Thirty years ago, she moved to Ohio and dove into promotional products full time. A few years ago, she was ready to hang up her distributor hat, but as Guglielmo notes: “You never retire out of this industry.”

She had been buying wristbands from a small supplier, and every time she placed an order, she would ask the owner whether he wanted to sell his business to her. Eight years ago, he finally took her up on her offer, and after several years of negotiations, Guglielmo found herself the proud owner of a supplier of Made-in-the-USA silicone wristbands.

“It’s a nice little cottage business,” she adds. “My sister-in-law works for me, and we have so much fun together.”

Guglielmo tries to keep things lighthearted with her business. For instance, she had an order recently for dark blue wristbands with the phrase, “Don’t be sh***y” printed on them. She decided to create her own version of the profane wristbands, printing instead on brown silicone. “I give those out all the time,” she adds. “It’s a fun industry.”

Back in the late 1970s, K.C. Fields was working for Holloway Sportswear, selling letterman jackets and other sporty apparel to schools. One day, Fields recalls, the boss called him into the office and told him he’d just discovered something called “advertising specialties” and asked Fields to figure out what this market was all about. So, Fields hopped on a plane from his native Columbus, OH, to head down to a trade show in Dallas – the plane ride and the trade show both firsts for the young salesman. “I went out and found a whole new market for us – a whole new world for Holloway Sportswear and myself,” he says.

In 1981, Fields decided to strike out on his own, founding the multi-line rep business he still runs today. “This industry has been really good to me,” he says. “I’ll never forget those early days.” In 1997, Fields and his wife decided to launch their own apparel supplier, Eversole Run, in addition to being multi-line reps. The decision brought a certain amount of stability, Fields says. “As a multi-line rep, you could lose a line anytime,” he says. “We lost a pretty big line, and that’s when I decided to become a supplier too.”

Over the next few years, Fields says, he expects to move more business responsibilities over to his son Michael. Eventually, he’ll retire and perhaps buy a place in Florida to stay warm in the winter. “I see that happening in the future, but not the near future,” he says.

For now, he still enjoys all the relationships he’s made in the industry and seeing the way end-users’ faces light up when they receive branded merch, whether it’s a nice sweater, cap or something else. “They love having a promotional product to use and wear, and I like seeing that,” Fields says.

Rick Land got his start in the promo business in the early ’80s. A recent grad with a degree in journalism and advertising, he had been working at a radio station when he met a man who sold coffee mugs – and discovered selling promo items was much more lucrative than radio work. “I had no idea up till then the industry existed,” he recalls. “I was really interested in selling stuff. I thought it was fun.”

Something just clicked for Land, who was featured in a 1985 issue of Counselor magazine as one of the winners of a “New Faces in Specialty Advertising” contest. According to the writeup, Land took to promo “like the proverbial duck to water” and peers described him as having a “dynamic, entertaining and rapid-fire personality coupled with creativity, good instincts and an incredible persistence.”

By the early 1990s, he had started his own distributorship, Landmark Promotions, focusing primarily on a stable of construction clients. “I would fly all over the U.S. selling little safety programs,” Land says. He remembers setting up company stores for clients, producing a catalog that got mailed out to construction job sites and fielding orders on the fax machine. “I’d come in every morning and get two, three or 20 orders from different places.”

Now in his early 70s, Land says that communicating with the younger generations can be something of a challenge. “They don’t want to talk to grandpa,” he jokes. Still, he adds, he has no intention of retiring. “I would really like to be the oldest guy still working in the industry,” Land says. “I think that would be cool.”

Around town, Paul Kraml is known as “the pen guy.” Everywhere he goes – whether it’s a New Jersey Devils game or dinner at a local restaurant – Kraml leaves a self-branded pen. (He buys a few thousand a year, so he always has one at the ready.) The practice used to embarrass his family, but Kraml swears by it.

“I get business out of it,” he says. “People call me. … People post the pen I gave them on the internet. … On vacation, people tell me they saw my pens.”

The trick, though, is that they have to be high-quality pens; no one will remember fondly the guy who gave them a pen that doesn’t write well, Kraml says.

The power of the self-promo is just one of many lessons Kraml has picked up in his 42 years in the promotional products business. Kraml learned of the industry at an early age: His grandmother worked in the industry when he was a child in the 1960s and would always have “little goodies” around her house. As a teen, he started designing restaurant logos – and it only seemed natural to start selling the products to go with them, whether it was a branded napkin, pen or something else.

For years, Kraml also worked as creative director and public relations manager for the New Jersey Office of the Attorney General. He retired from his government job a few years ago, but has no plans to hang up his distributor hat anytime soon. “Because I’m a designer, it’s something different every day,” Kraml says. “You’re always creating new things. … It’s just a fun industry.”