PPAI

It had to end sometime—the Great Recession that sent promotional products distributors’ sales plummeting. And it has. PPAI’s 2010 Estimate of Distributor Sales shows industry distributors sold $16,560,162,075 in promotional products last year, a gain of $921,590,607 or 5.9 percent over 2009.

The economic sink hole that opened in 2008 has been hard on the industry. While a recent Time magazine article debated the existence of hell, a lot of salespeople were thinking they spent the last few years there.

Conrad Franey, of Gateway, defines the Great Turnaround: “It’s fun to be in business again,” he declares.

PPAI’s annual survey of member and nonmember firms, conducted this past spring, produced the PPAI 2010 Estimate of Distributor Sales. We find the 5.9-percent gain in business consistent with a similar rise in the fortunes of competing ad media.

Assessing his company’s across-the-board sales pick-up, Franey says, “I think corporate America came to realize that sitting on your hands and firing people isn’t a business strategy.”

Over the past five years, sales performance by large distributors (those selling $2.5 million or more in product) and smaller firms has been fairly evenly divided. Producing $8,467,971,200 in business last year, the smaller distributors achieved a market share of 51.1 percent. The $8,092,190,875 of sales in the large-company cohort represents a 2.9-percent gain over the previous year. As a group, the smaller distributors did even better, posting an 8.9-percent increase.

[Graphic courtesy of PPAI]

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