New Fiery CEO takes reins for next growth chapter
Fiery have appointed previous chief financial officer Micah Kornberg as its new CEO, following the departure of longtime leader, Toby Weiss
In this guest article, Pratik Shah explains the importance of SKUs and vendors in enabling print MIS solutions to automate the full lifecycle of a print job
North American promotional products sales hit a record $27.7 billion in 2025. Growth like that tends to hide a quieter problem. Most distributors still build quotes the way they did a decade ago, with half a dozen supplier portals open in the browser and a spreadsheet doing the sums.
For a promotional products distributor, the product was never really the mug or the tote bag. It's the ability to source that item, price it correctly, and get it decorated and delivered before the margin leaks out along the way. That coordination is where print MIS software earns its keep, or where it quietly fails. And the difference usually comes down to two things most buyers underestimate when they shop for a system: stock keeping units (SKUs) and vendors.
A mid-sized distributor might pull from ten or twelve suppliers. Each one carries tens of thousands of SKUs, and each formats its data differently. Colours named their own way. Size grids that don't line up. Pricing in tiers that shift without much warning.
That last point is getting worse, not better. Nearly three-quarters of the largest suppliers reported higher procurement costs through 2025, which means prices move more often. Every one of those changes has to reach your quote before you send it. Manage that by hand across a dozen catalogues and something eventually slips.
So here's a fair question to ask yourself. How confident are you that the price you quoted this morning is still the price your supplier will honour this afternoon?
A print MIS, or management information system, sits at the centre of the operation. Quoting, order handling, purchasing, production status, and reporting, all working from the same data. For a promotional distributor, two parts matter most: the estimating engine and the purchasing side. Turn a client enquiry into an accurate quote in minutes, then turn the won job into supplier purchase orders without anyone re-keying a thing.
Done well, that collapses a quoting cycle that used to take hours into something you can finish while the client is still on the phone. Purchase orders raise against the correct supplier, at the correct cost, with decoration and setup charges already built in.
Here's the part the demos tend to skip. A print MIS is only ever as good as the SKU and vendor data feeding it. Bolt a polished system onto a set of messy, out-of-date supplier catalogues and you've automated the chaos rather than fixed it. The quotes come out faster, sure. They're just built on stale costs and stock levels no one trusts.
This is why the data layer between your suppliers and your MIS matters more than the screens everyone gets excited about in the sales meeting. Before the estimating engine can help you, something has to normalise every supplier feed into one consistent format, keep it current, and flag the moment a style is discontinued or a price shifts. Get that layer right and the MIS does what the brochure promised. Get it wrong and you've bought expensive spreadsheet software.
This won't apply to every distributor. If you work with two suppliers and a few hundred lines, a spreadsheet is honestly fine. The maths only changes once you're juggling ten-plus vendors and a catalogue that runs into six figures.
Vendor management is the other half of the job. A print MIS worth using should hold each supplier's catalogue, trade pricing, lead times, and decoration options, then route purchase orders automatically once an order is confirmed. Drop-ship handling belongs here too, since most promotional distributors carry little or no stock and lean on the supplier to fulfil.
The platforms built specifically for print handle this natively. At PrintXpand, we've watched distributors connect their supplier catalogues through a normalisation layer like PrintXpand Connect, so that SanMar, S&S Activewear or PF Concept data all lands in the same schema before it ever reaches the quoting stage. From there it flows into a print MIS and ERP built for print for estimating and purchasing.
One caveat worth stating plainly: that supplier sync runs on a schedule, not in real time. Stock and pricing refresh on a set cadence, so you're always working from data that's current to the last sync rather than the last second. For most distributor workflows that's perfectly workable. It's still worth knowing where the line sits before you promise a client same-minute stock accuracy.
The feature checklists all read the same after a while, so focus on what actually removes manual work:
Underneath all of it sits one question. Does this system reduce the manual coordination between your suppliers and your quotes, or does it just make the same coordination look tidier?
For a promotional products distributor, print MIS software was never about owning another dashboard. It's about closing the gap between what a supplier charges today and what you quote a client this afternoon. Get the SKU and vendor data flowing cleanly into it, and the quoting speed and purchasing accuracy follow, with margin finally becoming something you can see per job. Skip that groundwork and no amount of software rescues the spreadsheet.
We've watched this play out across print businesses in the UK, Europe, and North America. The distributors who pull ahead aren't the ones with the flashiest online shop: they're the ones who got their suppliers and SKUs speaking the same language as their quotes.
Pratik Shah works with print businesses and promotional products distributors at PrintXpand, a web-to-print and print automation platform serving 350-plus businesses across 40-plus countries. His focus is helping distributors and brokers modernise supplier catalogue management, quoting, and production workflows. Visit printxpand.com to learn more.
