Top 100: The best of 2006

Upon first examining this year’s Top 100 Suppliers’ sales numbers, the BFL&S staff discovered a $241 million decrease in overall sales compared with last year. This sent the team scrambling for answers. However, deeper analysis revealed a simple explanation.

As our readership may have noticed, in 2004 and 2005, Quality Park, Englewood, Colo., ranked number one and two respectively on the Top 100 Suppliers list with sales peaking at $430 million. This year, the Quality Park brand no longer appears on the list at all.

In years past, Quality Park consisted of six companies: DealerLabel, Discount Labels, Lancer Label, PrintXcel, Wisco and Quality Park Products. However, a discussion with Mike Vejar, senior vice president of sales and marketing, revealed the decision to separate Quality Park’s statistics into the individual companies while leaving Quality Park Products out of the reported data since it does not serve distributors. Nevertheless, these companies continue to be large players in the industry as this year’s Top 100 list proves. Thus, a simple twist in information reporting accounted for what appeared to be an estimated $200 million discrepancy.

Consequently, consistency is key and the printed products industry is holding steady with robust sales of $2.92 billion for the last fiscal year completed. The sales can be broken down to represent the various printed products sectors. Forms continue to dominate at $1.08 billion in sales (accounting for 37 percent of the industry); labels and tags came in at $477 million in sales (accounting for 16 percent of the industry); commercial print sales totaled $239 million in sales (accounting for eight percent of industry totals); direct mail generated $119 million in sales (accounting for four percent of industry sales); promotional products totaled $164 million (accounting for six percent of industry sales) and the “other” category –– which includes apparel, plastic products and envelopes –– totaled $747 million (accounting for 26 percent of industry sales).