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Strategy April 07, 2025

Better Together: Why Counselor Top 40 Suppliers Are Teaming Up

Leading suppliers are forming partnerships to benefit both parties and broaden their offerings for distributors.

By  Jennifer Billock

Suppliers are increasingly realizing they’re stronger together than they are apart.

How else to explain the prevalence of partnerships between suppliers in the past 12 months? Counselor Top 40 supplier Vantage Apparel (asi/93390) partnered with Redwood Classics (asi/81627) in July, Top 40 supplier Starline (asi/89320) in August and iClick (asi/62124) in the beginning of 2025. Starline, in addition to the Vantage deal, announced partnerships in the fall with Rupt (asi/84203) and Pro Towels (asi/79750). Counselor Top 40 supplier Cap America (asi/43792) partnered with a pair of fellow Top 40 suppliers: PCNA (asi/66887) in July and Blue Generation (asi/40653) in December. Gemline (asi/56070) in January announced an exclusive partnership with cap brand Ahead (asi/33220).

And though 2023 was less active regarding supplier partnerships, it did feature a major deal between Counselor Top 40 suppliers Hit Promotional Products (asi/61125) and Stormtech (asi/89864). Hit is now continuing the trend in 2025, having struck a deal with Top 40 supplier Cutter & Buck (asi/47965) to produce hard goods featuring the apparel company’s branding, including notebooks, drinkware, golf items and tech products.

Here’s how the partnerships work: One supplier (or both) will offer the other’s products for sale on their website. A distributor can order either supplier’s products from that site, and then each supplier will create their own product and ship it. Revenue for each order is split based on which supplier makes the product – so if you order a Pro Towels item from Starline along with a Starline item, Pro Towels gets the revenue for their product and Starline gets the revenue from theirs, but the distributor pays only one invoice.

Some of the partnerships come with special perks, too. When PCNA partnered with Cap America, for example, distributors enjoyed free embroidery digitizing, no setup fees and flat rate run charges on all Cap America products ordered through PCNA.

According to Cap America CEO Mark Gammon, the partnerships are a way to achieve higher relevance in the marketplace. “By partnering with leading suppliers, companies can tap into growth opportunities in product categories that they might not have been able to develop on their own,” says Gammon, whose company is based in Fredericktown, MO.

That allows distributors to access relevant products without having to order from multiple suppliers or invest a lot of time and money in creating a relationship with someone new. It also eases the burden of inventory commitment between suppliers and provides distributors with a wider selection of products to choose from.

Vantage CEO Rob Watson says that’s exactly why his company partnered with Starline this year, in addition to helping to build out Vantage’s e-commerce solutions.

“The partnership gave us an opportunity to diversify into a category of products that we weren’t experts in,” says Watson, a member of the Counselor Power 50. “We could offer both hard goods and soft goods under one roof, which was really helping solve the problem for a lot of our distributor customers utilizing our technology platform that needed to show some diversification in the products that they offered.”

Speed to Market

It begs the question though: Why don’t these suppliers expand their lines, introduce their own versions of these products and pocket the profit?

It comes down to expertise and costs. Gammon notes that when Cap America partners with another supplier, it allows that supplier to avoid the investment into machinery to create the new products. For example, if a supplier were to launch their own hat line, they’d have to invest in hat embroidery equipment, whereas if they partnered with Cap America, they wouldn’t have to. (Headwear in particular has proved a popular category for companies to expand into.) Plus, the supplier wouldn’t have to spend years learning about the Cap America line because the headwear’s supplier team already has all the required knowledge.

For Watson, the length of time it would take Vantage to get a new product line to market is a deterrence for the Avenel, NJ-based supplier to add its own unique line of products. “With the speed to market,” he says, “it just makes a lot more sense to find a really strong partner, where we’re not competing against one another and we’re only enhancing each other’s lines.”

These partnerships work if they incentivize distributors to buy from the suppliers. Jeff Lederer, co-CEO of Counselor Top 40 distributor Myron (asi/278980), says that relationships are key for distributors. If Pro Towels partners with Starline but a distributor prefers another towel supplier, it’s no guarantee the distributor will start buying towels from Starline.

“With the speed to market, it just makes a lot more sense to find a really strong partner, where we’re not competing against one another and we’re only enhancing each other’s lines.”Rob Watson, Vantage Apparel (asi/93390)

“It comes down to who you like and your habits,” says Lederer, the former owner of Prime Line who sold the hard goods company to Counselor Top 40 supplier alphabroder (asi/34063) in 2017. “I don’t think the partnerships are a massive motivating factor. It’s incremental and it helps. It makes a lot of sense for suppliers. But I don’t think it’s revolutionary; it’s evolutionary.”

Stacy Garrett, VP of sales and marketing at Lake Oswego, OR-based distributor Ideation (asi/229699), does see some benefits for small suppliers that distributors might not know about. If the supplier fills a particular niche, a partnership with a Counselor Top 40 supplier would open the smaller supplier up to tons of distributors who learn about them through the partnership.

“When you look at promotional products professionals’ groups, there are a lot of people that don’t know companies outside of the Counselor Top 40 suppliers,” she says.

Additional Considerations

Industry pros see some potential downsides. When a customer orders from a supplier, they generally expect the order to arrive together. But with some promotional products supplier partnerships, that’s not the case. Even though it comes in as one order, each supplier might produce their own items and ship them separately in two different boxes, which will possibly arrive at two different times. If distributors want to kit those products together or simply deliver them at the same time, they might have to wait. Otherwise, they’ll just have to manage the expectations of buyers.

Distributors also might struggle over where the products are actually coming from, particularly newer sales staff or smaller distributors, says Garrett. “If I’m having to train new people and explain to them, ‘Well, yes, you can get that same item from two different places,’ why would we choose one over the other?” she says.

There’s also the matter of pricing. Everen T. Brown of Everen T. Brown Advertising (asi/147570) in Salt Lake City recalls an order he placed through Hit for Bluetooth tracker cards from Powerstick.com (asi/51566). The order for 50 pieces ended up costing nearly $400 more than if he had purchased it directly from Powerstick. “If they’re going to have an arrangement where I place an order with Supplier A and it’s sent to Supplier B,” says Brown, “if it’s the same price, I don’t have a problem with that.” (Hit declined to comment when contacted by Counselor.)

At Vantage, the company applies an 8% markup to cover administrative tasks, including order processing, artwork, shipping details, and tracking. “For example, a $10 item becomes $10.80 – a small fee considering the overhead savings,” says Watson. “Distributors are able to markup the items to ensure they continue to receive healthy margins.”

“By partnering with leading suppliers, companies can tap into growth opportunities in product categories that they might not have been able to develop on their own.” Mark Gammon, Cap America (asi/43792)

Garrett explains that her company has preferred partners and businesses she’s had a longer relationship with, and if all things were equal (like price and decoration charges), she would order from the preferred partner. “But it is confusing … because you do a search in ESP and you’re going to come up with the same item number in two different places,” continues Garrett, a previous ASI Media Salesperson of the Year finalist. “Sometimes the people writing the orders are kind of coordinators, and they’re sitting there going, ‘I don’t know which one to choose. How do I vote?’”

Watson has a strategy to avoid this particular downfall, though. When Vantage and Redwood partnered, the products received entirely new ESP numbers under a company with a new ASI number called Redwood by Vantage. That way, no one would be confused about where they were ordering from, or if one product was a mistake.

Also, suppliers who partner together are relying on more than just themselves to uphold quality and consistently deliver. “You have to rely on another organization to get the job done,” Lederer says, noting that you can’t just go into your own factory and ask the employees to get an order out if your company isn’t the one responsible for the product. From a process perspective, he said, you’re now “reliant on someone else to perform well, to have the inventory, to have the technology connections and to make the customer service experience good. It’s easy to say hey, we have this alliance with another company. It’s not easy to make it work.” On the supplier side, executives emphasize the need for more training when partnerships arise.

“The challenges include slightly extended processing times and the need to train sales staff on an additional supplier,” Gammon says. “While the partnership offers mutual support, it’s expected that our distributors will have questions about product lines in which the partnering supplier may not yet have extensive expertise.” Given the plethora of partnerships the last six months, however, it’s clear that for suppliers these are minor concerns compared to the tangible reward of expanding their product offerings.