Counselor’s exclusive ranking of the distributors with the most revenue in the promo products market.

Touchstone (asi/345631)

Touchstone has the distinction of increasing its sales last year by 49% – at a 32% profit margin – while doing “less than $50,000” of PPE, CEO Derek Block maintains. Noting that the company leaned on its recession-resistant client base of financial services, social content and lifestyle retail brands, Block says Touchstone’s team began curating aspirational collections rather than showing disparate products in pitches for their clients’ sites and stores the distributor created. Block predicts 10-15% growth in 2021 for Touchstone and is focused on goals like business development, hiring additional team members, and further improvements on business infrastructure – a continuation of what the company did in 2020 during COVID. “I’m so proud of our leadership because we galvanized the team and targeted customers that fit a very specific profile of the ideal client for us, put an emphasis on developing leaders within the company, and worked on our infrastructure, technology and website to further articulate our brand and set ourselves up from a place of differentiation,” Block says. “We planned early on in the pandemic that we were going to take the time to become even more streamlined and focused so when it ended, we’d be ready to go and not in life-support mode. And because of that, we’re currently $6 million ahead of our budget for 2021.”

Previous Rank: 36

2020 Revenue: $72.4

All revenue figures shown in $millions