town running a pretty irregular company. He and I walk past mazes of cubicles, now almost entirely empty, with most people choosing to work from home. We settle into a basic conference room upstairs, where he offers me a bottle of water and sits down across the table. So, why Oshkosh? Lyons-Tarr starts by professing that he’s been “a Cheesehead” for most of his life. “It’s Wisconsin, right? It’s small-town Wisconsin,” he says. “I like the people. It just comes back to that. And the Fox Valley is beautiful. ... It's a good place for your kids." All but a few dozen of 4imprint's 1,570 total employs live in and around Oshkosh. Roughly 650 of them would be here in the office, the others at a distribution center across the river. Maybe a fifth of the HQ employees work in the office regularly anymore, and in fact Lyons-Tarr himself made a special trip in on this lateMay Thursday. The occasion is obvious. Never mind regaining its spot as the top seller, which everyone has known for months. 4imprint can now officially be called the leading distributor in the promo industry, according to our firstever PPAI 100 calculation. Lyons-Tarr says he loves the approach we have taken for this new yearly project, considering not only last year’s revenue in the industry rankings, but revenue growth over the previous three years and all the other scoring factors. His company raked in $1.12 billion in 2022. It scores among the best distributors for growth since 2019 (up 34% from $839.3 million). Naturally, it ranks for its online presence, innovation, responsibility and the faith the industry has in it – a measure of credit rating for distributors. It is the earning of some of those latter high marks, I tell Lyons-Tarr, that interests me the most, because those represent positives for the industry as a whole. • 4imprint’s online presence, i.e., how many pageviews its website gets, derives from its massive spend on marketing. It is the only distributor airing national TV commercials touting promotional products. • As an innovator in the selling of branded merchandise online, it has spurred other distributors to modernize their businesses over the years, boosting sales for many. Its success has helped to compel others. What’s new at each PPAI 100 distributor? media.ppai.org/ ppai-100-2023 Must Read | Distributors Score equals the total number out of a possible 500. * Estimate. 2019 revenue calculated based on figures reported to PPAI and others. All 2022 revenue figures have been certified by a company representative unless denoted. Rank Score Name 2022 Revenue (Millions) Change Since 2019 1 437.30 4imprint $1,120.5 34% 2 HALO $1,007.0 28% 3 Staples Promotional Products $830.0* 38% 4 BAMKO $387.9 257% 5 Proforma $632.0 26% 6 HH Global $342.0 130% 7 Geiger $327.0 38% 8 VistaPrint/Cimpress $505.0* 6% 9 American Solutions for Business $275.0 36% 10 Nadel $220.0 42% DISTRIBUTORS TOP 50 Revenue Growth Industry Faith Professional Development Responsibility Innovation Employees Happiness Online Presence Distributors Earned HIGH MARKS in The Following Categories 52 • JULY 2023 • PPAI
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