Randy Carr is on the hunt for a successor.

The 53-year-old dynamo who built Counselor Top 40 supplier World Emblem (asi/98264) from the ground up just hired a firm to create an agentic AI model that will “basically replace my entire job.”

It’s the kind of provocative, on-the-verge-of-unbelievable statement that’s de rigueur for Carr.

World Emblem CEO Randy Carr has led his family-owned company to tremendous success by being unafraid to make risky choices.

So, will he actually retire in three years when the artificial intelligence project is contracted to be complete? When pressed, Carr admits it’s unlikely.

But, he says, the hope is that agents purpose-built for him and his entire executive team will “remove every single thing that’s repetitive and that’s consistently beating the s--- out of my staff, making us work 70 hours a week.”

Creating a robotic replacement does make a certain amount of sense for a man whom friends have described as “a machine.” “Randy’s very disciplined, like in an insane, psychotic way,” says Robert Morcos, founder and CEO of custom mobile device company NEXA and a member of Carr’s Young Presidents’ Organization cohort. “I don’t think Randy eats carbs; he’s never eaten a cookie. He works out more than seven times a week, and that discipline is reflected in his business.”

The all-in investment in agentic AI is, in many ways, emblematic of Carr’s visionary leadership style and frenetic personality.

Counselor Person of the Year Randy Carr discusses his approach to leadership and the qualities that will define success for promo companies in the future.

Carr is book-your-flight-on-the-way-to-the-airport impatient. He once jumped the curb and sped down a sidewalk to avoid a traffic jam on a business trip in the Dominican Republic, where the supplier is opening a 100,000-square-foot facility. (Jim Kozel, World Emblem’s chief operating officer, was in the car too and remembers thinking, “We’re going to get arrested for this.”)

He’s blunt. His 24-year-old son JC Carr, who heads up the East Coast service team, recalls a recent event when his father got up in front of a group of old-school uniform industry professionals, stunning them by saying they’d be wiped out if they didn’t adapt to the AI age. Randy’s brother, Jamie Carr, a shareholder and director of strategic brand partnerships at World Emblem, explains: “He’s a good guy, a great-hearted guy, but he’s not a nice guy. … He’s not a pat-you-on-the-back type of person.”

He’s intense. Consider the time a few years ago when a hurricane was approaching South Florida; Carr loaded the company’s servers right into his Mercedes, driving them hundreds of miles nonstop in heavy traffic from World Emblem’s Hollywood, FL, headquarters to Atlanta to keep them safe. “When Randy is locked in on something,” says Phil Jarvis, chief information officer at World Emblem, “the whole organization feels it.”

He’s willing to take big swings – like devoting three years and several million dollars to a 3-D printing venture that, Carr says, “blew up in my face.” He adds: “Everybody was telling me it’s stupid; you’re throwing your money away.”

But he’s also constantly learning, adapting and evolving. That failed foray into 3-D printing, for example, gave him insight into how to incorporate additive manufacturing successfully into a different product. He reads dozens of business books a year, and if something resonates, he’ll immediately “take what he learned from the book and actually do something with it,” Kozel says.

As JC Carr sums it up: “My dad is uncomfortable with being the same person he was yesterday.”

“We’re in the midst of the greatest economic change in the history of mankind right now. So, you have to take big risks.” Randy Carr, World Emblem (asi/98264)

That mindset has translated into extraordinary business growth. Since 2018, World Emblem has increased its estimated annual promotional products revenue fourfold, from $42 million to $168.2 million. And while other executives were bemoaning last year’s onerous tariffs, Carr was doing something about it: laying plans for that Dominican Republic facility and opening a new 72,000-square-foot factory in Houston that included 50 reshored jobs from Asia and up to 100 additional new jobs as demand increases.

It’s that mix of bold action, nonconformist leadership and business success that earns Carr the title of 2026 Counselor Person of the Year.

‘Fear Built My Company’

There’s a clear through line from Carr’s leadership today to the tumultuous origins of World Emblem. “Fear built my company,” Carr noted in a May post on LinkedIn, where he’s become something of a business influencer (a MrBeast for the C-suite, if you will). “The fear of losing everything is with me every day.”

In 1962, Jerold Carr, Randy’s father, bought Joel and Aronoff Inc., a New York City-based emblem business founded in 1945 and focused on the industrial laundry industry. By 1975, J&A, which had relocated to Ridgefield, NJ, was bringing in $6 million a year. “We thought it was a big business,” Jamie Carr remembers.

But when Randy and Jamie were teenagers, as their parents were going through a divorce, the company’s fortunes turned, and annual revenue took a nosedive to less than $400,000, Jamie says. “It was down. It was out. It was done,” he adds. “We had to leave college because the business wasn’t doing well.”

Randy and his son Jayden (third from left) share a meal with other World Emblem employees.

Jerold, along with Randy and Jamie, moved to South Florida, launching a new business called Emblem Service Center, which was renamed World Emblem in 1993. “We were broke. We were all living in a one-bedroom apartment and had nothing,” Randy says. “We rebuilt the business with three people.”

Jerold passed away in 2000, two years after Randy and Jamie formally took over leadership of World Emblem, not living long enough to witness the scale of what his sons would eventually create. The company now boasts more than 4,200 embroidery heads, encompasses about 1 million square feet of manufacturing and office space globally and employs about 1,500 people. It manufactures and ships more than 250 million products a year for a roster of clients that includes Counselor Top 40 distributor Cintas (asi/162167), Counselor Top 40 supplier Cap America (asi/43792), Aramark and Levi’s.

How did World Emblem achieve such impressive growth? Initially, it was all about prospecting with individual locations of large uniform companies. Once they had a foot in the door, they would leverage the influence they’d gained to reach out to the location in the next city over. “Basically, what we were doing was going after our competitors’ business, one at a time, by going after each of their customers,” Jamie says.

About a decade ago, World Emblem diversified into fashion patches, offering dozens of varieties, from classic embroidered to high-end debossed leather to nostalgic chenille to textured FlexStyle 3-D emblems. That’s also when the supplier found its niche in the promo world. “Big brands are where we really excel,” adds Jamie.

Carr with Giovanni Bustamente, a 27-year veteran of World Emblem.

Randy Carr’s infectious intensity ensures clients are treated with white-glove levels of service. For instance, earlier this year, a client needed emblems for a photo shoot. They called Carr late in the evening, and he ensured the patches were produced overnight and had an employee from World Emblem’s Mexico facility jump on a plane to hand-deliver the order the following day.

Or, Kozel says, if a customer needs a very specific color of thread for a project, Carr will have thousands of cones of that precise shade air-shipped from China to meet the client’s exact needs.

“That kind of stuff is a very normal directive,” he adds.

Jon Page, chief production officer and owner of Fredericktown, MO-based Cap America, raves about World Emblem’s “professional, responsive, collaborative and truly service-driven” employees.

“The level of consistency across the organization speaks volumes about the leadership, culture and standards that Randy has established,” Page adds. “We’ve had more last-minute rush situations than we can count, and their team continually comes through to ensure we receive emblems on time.”

Dan Parenti, senior vice president of product development at Bourbon, MO-based headwear brand Imperial (asi/75945), calls World Emblem “a true partner that understands the complexities of our business and listens to our needs.”

“There’s a push not only to be innovative, but to be innovative at scale,” he adds. “Process is just as important as product. That flows down through the company.”

A Candid Voice on Tariffs

What’s really boosted Carr’s profile in the promotional products industry – elevating him to the Counselor Power 50 for the first time last year – has been his frank, public discussion about how to navigate the seemingly ever-shifting tariff landscape that’s been a hallmark of the second Trump administration. He’s been profiled by The New York Times and shared his supply chain diversification strategy with CNN, among other outlets.

He’s spoken at length, for example, about how he fast-tracked plans to open a facility in the Dominican Republic. Last February, a week after President Trump put 25% tariffs on Canada and Mexico – a tariff that was subsequently exempted for goods associated with the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement – Carr and Kozel were on a plane to scope out Guatemala, Nicaragua and the Dominican Republic as potential nearshoring sites. “Within three weeks, we were negotiating a lease, and within a month, I had a lease signed, and a couple of weeks later we were breaking ground on a facility in the Dominican Republic,” Carr says of the 10-year, multimillion-dollar investment. Tariff turmoil also spurred Carr and his team to open a new facility in Houston to reshore business for domestic production.

In 2026, tariff news has slowed somewhat, though Carr notes that World Emblem is still dealing with tariffs on Chinese and Vietnamese imports, thanks to the entrenched supply chain of Hero’s Pride, a first-responder emblem company World Emblem acquired in 2024. Layered on top of tariff challenges, which Carr says continue “to drive inflation and up costs,” has been the conflict in Iran, affecting things like energy costs and supply. “It’s chaos all over the place,” Carr says.

The Heart of World Emblem

For as laser-focused as Carr is on scaling World Emblem – working evenings and weekends is the rule, not the exception – there’s a softer side to the straight-talking CEO. Eric Freeman, a Toyota veteran who came out of retirement to advise World Emblem on how to adopt the car company’s production principles, calls Carr “blunt with love.”

“You can be in a meeting with him talking about implementing a strategic approach, and the next thing you know, he’s picked up his dog and is loving on him,” Freeman explains. “Everybody that really knows him knows that underneath his bluntness is someone who cares.”

Another example? When Freeman’s father was in hospice care, Carr would check in several times a week to see how he was doing, telling Freeman: “Don’t worry about anything; take care of your dad.”

He’s also generous with advice. “Randy is super hands-on with helping people,” Morcos says, “whether from a manufacturing perspective or building a business.” Specifically, Morcos says Carr has helped him add critical structure to his company NEXA to ensure that it can scale successfully.

Carr, shown here with (from left to right) his son JC, wife Amy and son Jayden, is highly involved in Mothers Against Drunk Driving after Jayden was hit by a drunk driver at the age of 2 and suffered severe traumatic brain injury.

On the philanthropic side, World Emblem is an executive sponsor of Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD), a cause that’s close to home for Carr and his wife, Amy. Their son Jayden was hit by a drunk driver when he was 2 years old, resulting in severe traumatic brain injury. “Doctors told us he would not walk or talk,” Carr recalls. “We were told to expect very little.”

The road to recovery was long, but Jayden, now 22, officially works full-time at World Emblem, helping out in the accounting department, with catalog fulfillment and other “odds and ends,” Carr says.

And, in April, Jayden successfully completed the MADD Dash Fort Lauderdale 5K, which raised $259,000 this year – and more than $4.2 million since it was established in 2011 – for MADD. “Jayden crossing that finish line,” Carr wrote in a LinkedIn post about the race, “meant something I can’t dress up with better words.”

An Eye to the Future

Though there’s plenty to be proud of in building a business against long odds – surviving and even thriving in the face of operational curveballs like COVID-19 and tariff-related upheaval – Carr has little interest in resting on his laurels. The past is mainly relevant as a lesson in avoiding making the same mistake twice.

Even as World Emblem has sped beyond the $100 million mark, Carr has already set his sights on the next big goal: crossing the threshold to $250 million in annual revenue. Kozel, who’s been with the company for 13 years, starting back when sales were around $21 million, believes that day is imminent. “We’re probably in a better position than we’ve been in years,” he says. “And I honestly see no reason why in five years we can’t double revenue.”

Indeed, Carr shows no signs of slowing down. His strict diet, exercise regimen, daily meditation and other healthy habits are all part of his plan “to live forever.”

“I’m taking care of my health, so I can take care of my family, so I can take care of the business,” he says.

And he’ll continue to make bold moves and nimble strategy shifts, whether it’s building a new factory or making another major investment in AI tools.