Getting here wasn’t simple. Two flights plus a three-hour drive brought me to the riverside city, where S&S has gathered Canadian sales leaders from both sides of its recent alphabroder acquisition to unveil the integration of operations in this country. It is worth it. My editorial team has spent years trying to make inroads with leadership at S&S. The company’s communications are tightly managed. The internal circle is kept close. But for a moment, at least, the door has been cracked. Myers is friendly, thoughtful, composed and down-to-earth, while also fully aware of the scope of the business he and the team have built. The Climb Myers spoke Spanish before English, owing to his mother’s upbringing in Spain. He grew up in Minnesota, but when he left for college at Northwestern in Chicago, he never looked back. At some point during his studies, he says, a switch flipped in his mind. “It became apparent that there are two ways you could live,” he tells me. “It’s not about money. It’s more just about being fulfilled with work, you know?” His father and grandfather had been business-oriented, and Myers took off down the same path through his studies and work ethic. First a young hotshot in investment banking, and a top analyst in his class, he later joined a private equity firm. He was only in his mid-20s when S&S hired him to run a newly acquired supplier following his evaluation of the company. He knew little of the industry, but S&S’s founding leaders saw something in Myers – sharp, operationally-minded, unencumbered – and sent him west to Los Angeles. It was 2009. S&S had just one location in Illinois, but ambitious plans, too. Myers had no kids, little reason to say no and enough confidence to take on a job that might’ve scared others with decades more experience. The assignment, like much of what followed, moved quickly. Within a few years, Myers stepped into a broader operational role at S&S. He would be CFO and COO. He was president by 2021, then became CEO a year later, when Jim Shannon retired. Myers’ growth mirrored that of the company as a whole. The 2010s brought organic expansion by adding facilities and opening new markets. There were acquisitions in service of that scale, too – not headline-grabbing ones like the alphabroder deal, but meaningful plays that gave S&S enhanced reach and depth. Some helped build out underrepresented regions and new customer segments. But the thread running through it all was to create consistency – of high service systems, of data, of expectations – and replicate what was important to its customers through operational excellence, broad product selections, deep inventory and a rocking sales force. Even before the alphabroder deal, S&S had already grown more than 17-fold since Myers joined the company. For 2024, the combined operation reports $3.6 billion in promotional products revenue, trailing only SanMar in the industry. The recipe, as Myers describes it, was “this relentless focus on what the customer needed from a product standpoint and from a service standpoint. “We always thought of our business as ‘we grow when our customers grow.’ Anything we can do to enable their growth, whether that’s new geographies, new products, new categories, new channels or new technology, that’s where we wanted to invest.” Along the way, Myers says, he learned something less quantifiable. From Shannon and fellow company veterans Jeff Adams and Paul Rohr, he says, he came to understand the value of relationships. “When you’re 25, I felt like you had to win every negotiation and win every single point; it was a loss if it wasn’t a total victory,” Myers says. “There was some personal growth around reorienting for a longer-term view that you don’t have when you’re starting your career in investment banking or when you’ve been in business for three years or five years. … But it made us make the right choices, and that’s why we’re where we are now.” Must Read | Suppliers “It became apparent that there are two ways you could live. It's not about money. It’s more just about being fulfilled with work, you know?” – FRANK MYERS, CEO OF S&S ACTIVEWEAR 40 • JUNE 2025 • PPAI
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