Erin Reilly and Sterling Wilson are best-friend millennial entrepreneurs who, while still in their 20s, pioneered an industry-unique business model that’s helped propel Pop! Promos (asi45657) to 1,000% growth over the last five years as evidenced by the company’s appearance on Counselor’s Fastest-Growing Suppliers list from 2016-2018.

The roots of that runaway success lie in Wilson’s epiphany at a University of Southern California football game in 2011. A USC student, Wilson noticed the crowd of 100,000, while awash in school-branded swag, was missing a notable SoCal wearable. “No one was wearing sunglasses,” he says. It was a product gap Wilson immediately sought to fill.

Connecting with a factory in China, Wilson got 2,000 pairs of sunglasses in USC’s Pantone crimson created with the word “Gameday.” Undergrad-broke, Wilson bought the sunglasses on credit, then pedaled them out of his backpack at USC tailgates. The supply sold out in three days. “The $20,000 was more money than I’d ever seen in my life,” he says.

Knowing he’d hit on something, Wilson contacted his best friend from high school, Erin Reilly, and asked if she wanted in. Reilly gave it a go, immediately selling 1,000 sunglasses to departments at Johns Hopkins University where she was a student. So was born College Glasses.

Next, the partners discovered the promotional products market and reshaped their company as an industry supplier. Rebranding as Pop! Promos, the pair expanded their product range to include a full line of wearable accessories, including socks, gloves and bags. Sales skyrocketed, and have continued to, averaging 65% annual growth over the last three years. “We recently celebrated our first $1 million month,” says Wilson, the firm’s president.

Pop!’s success is the result of a fanatical commitment to customer service. Before launching a product, Pop! establishes thoroughly mapped supply chains that enable it to provide custom Pantone-matched versions of the offering on every order – the from-scratch fulfillment occurring in 30 days or less. “We call it rapid import,” says Reilly, Pop!’s CEO. “We can deliver 10,000 unique pieces in 15 days without breaking a sweat.”

Clients are big fans, complimenting Pop! not only for its products and fast fulfillment, but also its consultative sales team, creative art department and marketing support that help distributors shine. “What makes Pop! special is the way they took advantage of the changing world and went to market in a new way, specifically, the changes in importing,” says Craig Nadel, president of Top 40 distributor Jack Nadel International (asi/279600). “It wasn’t that long ago that import orders were $10,000 or more and they took 90 to 120 days to produce. However, as importing changed, production times and minimum orders fell and for a lot of products, air freight makes sense. Pop! pioneered a new way to market fast, low minimum, custom import and it works. Erin and Sterling are visionary in that regard.”

Wilson and Reilly have earned similar praise from industry peers. “Their creativity sets them apart in a sea of ‘me-too’ suppliers,” says Jim Martin, president of NUMO (asi/74710). “This is evidenced not just in how they develop products, but also in the way they structure the operational side of their business. They’re doing things very differently than the rest of us. And, it’s working. They’re part of a new wave of suppliers that are shaking up the industry for the better.”

These days, Wilson and Reilly employ about 35 people in a hip renovated warehouse. They employ another 30 around the world, and plan to hire about 20 people this year to help manage the meteoric growth that’s already seen their firm earn the title of fastest-growing company in Philadelphia and a #135 spot on the Inc. 500 list. “We couldn’t have gotten this far without fantastic customer feedback and support from our wonderful clients,” says Reilly. “We’ll keep innovating to provide them with value.”