Nearly all promo companies are privately owned and operated – but there are a handful of suppliers and distributors on Counselor’s Top 40 list that represent the industry on the stock market, and even more who are backed by private equity conglomerates who’ve made increased investments into the promo industry in recent years.
ASI Research conducted an analysis of both publicly traded promotional products companies and private equity-backed promo companies on this year’s Counselor Top 40 list using annual revenue data tracked by Counselor and stock prices to assess these firms’ performance compared to the Top 40 as a collective and the industry as a whole.
Here are the key data points to know.
Public Interest
Some Counselor Top 40 firms are just one arm of a larger corporate conglomerate – like the status of BAMKO (asi/131431) as part of the Superior Group of Companies (SGC), or 3M/Promotional Markets (asi/91240) where promo sales are just a drop in the bucket of overall company revenue. Others, like e-commerce giant 4imprint (asi/197045), rely on promo sales for all or most of their revenue.
For publicly traded firms, stock price can provide a mirror for overall company performance. The year-over-year stock growth at Gildan (asi/56842), for example, resembles the pattern of its promo revenue fluctuations since 2019, as tracked by Counselor’s annual Top 40 rankings – and that includes a fair bit of tumult at the firm over the past year as sales and net earnings increased year over year, even as former board members remain embroiled in a proxy lawsuit.
But that similarity is not always the case, thanks to impacts from larger market and economic trends. 2022, for example, was a rough year for the overall stock market because of spiking inflation and raised federal interest rates, but it was a major year for promo growth. That year, promo industry sales spiked 11.4% year over year, tying the all-time industry record at the time – which was set in 2019, the last full pre-COVID year. Counselor’s Top 40 firms – suppliers and distributors together – grew sales an average of 20%.
In contrast, the S&P 500 – the benchmark stock index most often used for assessing the market’s overall performance – was down that year, with its market cap tumbling 19.4% (nearly $8 trillion) between 2021 and 2022.
As a result, even though promo companies may have had sales growth, their stock prices didn’t show it. BAMKO, for example, recorded an 80% year-over-year increase in sales, but the stock price for the SGC, BAMKO’s parent firm, was down nearly 40% compared to 2021.
In some cases, this may be at least partially due to the fact that promo often represents just a portion of these firms’ sales. In 2024, BAMKO represented about 62% of SGC’s overall sales – and that’s on the high end for some publicly traded promo companies. Based on Counselor estimates of calendar year sales for Cimpress (asi/162149), for instance, promotional products sales represent about 9% of the firm’s global sales. And at 3M, promo is less than half a percent.
The lack of continuity between stock prices and sales is particularly noticeable with Stran Promotional Solutions (asi/337725). The Massachusetts-based distributor bucked the industry’s trend toward private equity investment in 2021 when it instead chose to go public.
After an initial spike following Stran’s IPO in November 2021, the firm’s stock price declined quickly and hasn’t recovered – and yet, Stran has put forward significant growth each of the past three years, upping the firm’s annual sales from $47.3 million to $114 million between 2021 and 2024.
What does that mean? Well, it could be an indicator of profitability – despite its steady growth, Stran reported a $4.14 million loss in 2024, though that figure doesn’t account for the company’s acquisition of Gander Group. But Stran said back in 2021 that one of its goals with going public was to fuel acquisitions – and since then, it has done that: five in total, including Gander Group.
Private Equity’s Performance
There’s another group of companies in the Counselor Top 40 worth considering because of their eye toward acquisition: private equity-backed firms. Private equity (PE) has had an outsized influence on the promo industry this century, particularly in pushing toward consolidation – and the real gains for promo firms backed by PE often seem to come through the opportunity for growth through acquisitions, rather than strictly organic sales increases.
HALO Branded Solutions (asi/356000), the second largest distributor in the industry, has undergone an aggressive M&A strategy that included several former Counselor Top 40 firms since the company was sold to Audax Private Equity in 2016, and then to TPG Growth in 2018.
And the two companies with the largest year-over-year sales gains in 2024 by far are both backed by PE firms, and both acquired other Counselor Top 40 firms last year – S&S Activewear (asi/84358) with its acquisition of alphabroder, and iPROMOTEu (asi/232119) with its acquisition of AIA Corporation (asi/109480).
It’s no surprise, then, that both public and PE-backed companies have generally been growing at a faster rate, on average, than all Counselor Top 40 companies taken as a collective. In 2020, that meant that when the average Top 40 firm’s sales dipped nearly 10%, PE-backed companies’ dips were more modest, and public companies barely managed to eke out a sales gain, on average.
And in 2024, when Counselor Top 40 suppliers and distributors notched an adjusted average of 3% sales gains, public and PE-firms’ increases were both more substantial at 10% – likely helped along by the major M&A from S&S and iPROMOTEu, and a generally positive year for the stock market.