An Recovery Although 2021 was a comeback year for promotional products as a whole, the “return to normalcy” was not as fruitful for smaller companies as it was for their larger counterparts. By Jonny Auping When PBBpublished the findings of the 2018 Distributor Sales Volume Estimate, there was an impossible-to-overlook development: Small companies were on the rise heading into 2019. The industry as a whole had a 6.27% increase over 2018, but as was reported at the time, “The growth was mainly driven by sales from small distributors,” who increased both their sales and overall representation in the industry’s makeup. Three years and one pandemic later, that trend has stalled. The 2021 Distributor Sales Volume Estimate showed a healthy increase of (12.5%) in sales volume over COVID-riddled 2020, but the makeup of those gains among small and large companies are quite different. Small distributors were barely able to make it to a sales volume slightly under that of 2020. Only 42.7% of the industry’s total sales volume came from small distributors, which is down from 48.3% in 2020. Un e ven FEATURE | 2021 U.S. Distributors’ Promotional Products Sales Survey 14 | JUNE 2022 |
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