William Lovelace may only be 31, but he’s already been in the promotional products business for more than 15 years. Usually someone has a family connection to work in the industry that young. Not Lovelace, though the entrepreneurial spirit does run in his blood, courtesy of his dad, a Harvard graduate with a master’s degree who has started about a dozen companies.

So it was at 14 that Lovelace officially began his first business: Lovelace Custom Pens. “I started making handcrafted pens in woodshop when I was in high school,” Lovelace recalls. “They taught me how to make pens, but I took it a little bit farther.”

He decided to begin selling the pens to people at school, but quickly realized he didn’t have the capacity to meet demand just by using the woodshop.

“I went home to my dad, and said, ‘Hey, I’m selling all these pens, but I can’t make enough in school,’” Lovelace says. “So, he gave me my first loan to buy the equipment to continue making them when I was outside of school. I probably made 3,000 pens and sold them while I was in high school.”

If it sounds hard running a business at such a young age while being in school full-time, it only gets more complicated from there. When Lovelace was 16, he signed up with a volunteer fire department and decided he wanted to be a firefighter. After he graduated high school, he went to the fire academy in Lubbock, TX, and joined a nearby fire department. And all of this while he was still running that pen company and working IT for his dad’s company, because pay at the fire department was unsustainable.

The day he turned 18, Lovelace went to the bank and got a $10,000 loan for equipment to begin engraving his pens, and Diamondback Branding (asi/49546) was officially born. Oh, and he also got married at 18 and had his first child a year later.

“I love the fact that the industry shows we can all grow and change, and do better in every way we can.”– William Lovelace, Diamondback Branding

“We have pictures of our one-and-a-half-year-old running around a concrete trade show floor in her little walker because it was me and my wife in the very beginning,” Lovelace says. “We would work the booth, and our little girl would just run around and hang out. We were the cutest little family at trade shows.”

Today, Lovelace has grown that small pen company into a thriving supplier (with an expected $18 million in sales this year), supplying many products ranging from lighters and pet bowls to brand-name tumblers and coolers. Diamondback has also become one of the largest branded YETI customization dealers in the world – a feat attributed to Lovelace’s persistence.

Despite being unable to land a direct wholesale account with the brand, he formed more than a dozen relationships with existing YETI dealers, bought the blanks from them, and engraved them for a small markup. The volume grew too large to continue that way, and Diamondback was finally able to become an authorized dealer for YETI in 2020.

William Lovelace (second from left) and his wife Joni (center) would work trade show booths by themselves in the early days of the company.

“We’re big enough to support any distributor on any order, but we’re small enough to care,” Lovelace says. “The biggest thing that sets us apart is speed, quality and our brands.”

His customers agree. Angie Fish, senior manager of strategic sourcing at BDA (asi/137616), works with Lovelace for drinkware and coolers. She notes he’s able to meet short lead times, provide great product options, and generally does everything he can to make orders successful. “William doesn’t want to be another supplier,” Fish says. “He wants to be your partner. It’s great to have people like that in our industry.”

And he intends to carry that mindset into the future, even as the company grows and expands its product offerings. At the moment, Lovelace is looking into adding more decoration options like glass engraving, and diversifying the company’s product line.

“I love the fact that the industry shows we can all grow and change,” he says, “and do better in every way we can.”