Who’s shaking up the industry today and making it a unique, successful, challenging and innovative sector? The members of the 2016 Counselor Hot 25. Check out their stories.

“I guess I’m basically living the American dream,” says Dat Dang, president and founder of supplier firm Chao (asi/48102), which is disrupting the marketplace with artful, customized pop-up greeting cards.

Dang has always been a disrupter. As a child, he turned his $3 lunch budget into an entrepreneurial venture by buying Jolly Ranchers for $.10 and selling them for a quarter. That and other business lessons learned along the way, from his immigration to the U.S. as a 7-year-old following the Vietnam War, to his place as a member whose company is one of Inc.’s 5,000 fastest-growing companies, have informed his outlook on the promotional products marketplace. That lifelong effort has culminated into Chao’s delicate creations, whose pop-up art is well beyond the service of a greeting card, and more a desktop ornament and permanent art piece.

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