Have you ever seen “The Town,” the 2010 crime thriller that’s set in Boston and ends in a climactic action sequence at Fenway Park? Well, strap in, because this story from the Boston Globe is like the real-life version of that, except it’s about a promotional banner and it involves significantly less Ben Affleck…
Read MoreAuthor: Sean Norris
Amazon’s Surging B2B Marketplace Will Top $10 Billion in Sales This Year
Amazon Business, the e-commerce titan’s B2B marketplace for everything from staplers to suspenders, launched in 2015, replacing a previous iteration of the service known as Amazon Supply. That first year, Amazon Business generated a tidy $1 billion in sales. Just three years later, it’s already set to top $10 billion…
Read MoreOne Direction’s Merch Store Finally Shut Down and I Can’t Believe I’m Saying This But There’s a Real Lesson Here
Last week, One Direction’s online merchandise store shut down. That might not seem like a huge deal, but there’s actually one legitimately fascinating aspect to it, especially for promo professionals. Stick with me here…
Read MoreSh*t Happens In Promo—Here’s What to Do When It Does (and How to Get a Lifetime Client Out of It)
In promo, things are going to go wrong. But, believe it or not, there’s a way for distributors to turn mistakes and unfortunate circumstances into big business wins. BrandVia’s Eric Nelsen told us how, sharing an example of a promotion that went off the rails…
Read MoreInc. 5000 Roundup: PopSockets Grows 71,000%, Several Promo Companies Make List
Inc. recently released the latest installment of its Inc. 5000, the always highly anticipated list of America’s fastest-growing companies. SwanLeap, a company that provides software for the logistics industry, topped the list with an eye-popping 75,661 percent three-year growth, but that’s not why we’re here. We’re here to talk about the promo connections…
Read MoreElon Musk Says He’ll Sell Branded Tesla Short Shorts and We Can’t Tell If He’s Joking
You could spend countless words and hours trying to parse Elon Musk’s weird, controversial genius, so we’re not going to do that here. Instead, we’re going to focus on that other thing Elon Musk is: promotional products virtuoso. The latest entry in his oeuvre? Tesla short shorts. Maybe…
Read MoreCafePress Q2 Results: Total Revenue Declines 19% Despite Retail Partner Channel Growth
On Wednesday, CafePress released its second-quarter financials, giving us our first look at how recent moves aimed at offsetting the company’s recent struggles are translating to the balance sheet. The results were mixed…
Read MoreLet’s Review Every Single Piece of McDelivery Day McDonald’s Swag
We’ve seen fast food brands going all-in on promotional products the last few years, but few have gone quite as big as McDonald’s did for McDelivery Day. The event, held yesterday, saw the burger giant dispatch tons of branded merchandise via UberEats delivery—a high-profile, promo-centric campaign that, at least going by social media reactions, was…
Read More2018 Top 50 Distributors: Stats, Trends and Analysis
It was a good year for promotional products distributors. According to our data, the Top 50 totaled $5.033 billion in promotional products sales in 2017, up more than $500 million from our previous list’s $4.476 billion tally. Of the 44 distributors on this year’s list that also appeared on last year’s edition, 37 saw increased promotional products revenue from 2016 to 2017…
Read MoreInfographic: Marketing to Millennials
In opposition to the popular belief that millennials don’t respond to email marketing, 10 percent more millennials, compared to older generations, say that promotional emails are influential “all of” or “most of the time.”
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