He doesn’t usually drink caffeine, but coming off an 11-hour overnight flight from Tokyo with his family, Jim Hilt does indulge himself with a Diet Coke. Yet he has more than enough discipline to avoid stress calories in his lunch order: a seasonal salad. He adds grilled chicken and asks our waiter to hold the beets.
He must be tired, but he makes absolutely no show of it and has plenty of energy to carry the conversation. My questions meander to buy him time for a few bites, but he pushes the salad away after eating just about half.
HALO’s new CEO optimizes in life and business. I mention how the company’s announcement last August that he would succeed Marc Simon noted his “operational discipline,” as all CEO hiring press releases now do.
Hilt gets the joke but says it’s a real thing.
This is what it looks like.
We’ve met at a resort in wine country while HALO conducts a sales leadership off-site. It’s about an hour from Hilt’s home in San Francisco. This is the kind of place designed to slow things down. The landscape suggests leisure – rolling vineyards, sweet air, a place of quiet escape.
Vacation is over for Hilt, though. He is attentive and deliberate, answering directly while connecting the industry’s biggest concepts. We’ll only meet for lunch, but he’s not at all rushed.
There’s no performance to it. No need to prove anything.
He wears a HALO-branded Vineyard Vines vest over a crisp polo, the uniform of a leader who understands both where he is and what’s expected of him. Fifty years of age, he’s comfortable, but not casual. Professional, but not rigid. Everything feels intentional.
This is his first spring leading HALO (PPAI 106462, Platinum), the Sterling, Illinois- headquartered distributor that has spent decades establishing itself as one of the most powerful and consequential organizations in the branded merchandise industry. For much of that time, HALO has been defined by its leaders, their relationships and an entrepreneurial sales force capable of delivering for clients through a combination of experience, instinct and, often, sheer effort.
Hilt doesn’t reject any of that. He seems to respect it deeply.
But sitting across from him, it becomes clear that he is focused on something else entirely.
Not what HALO has been, but what it must become.
The Constant
HALO is not a new story.
Founded in 1952, it has lived several lives, from a local outfit to a fast-growing public company, through an aggressive acquisition run in the 1990s, into Chapter 11 bankruptcy, and, under Simon, into one of the most successful turnarounds the industry has ever seen, snowballing through still more acquisitions and attraction of account executives.
Marc Simon
Former CEO, HALO
When Simon stepped into the CEO role in 2001, HALO was, by most accounts, in existential crisis. The company had expanded too quickly, taking on debt and far-flung operations it couldn’t control. Within about two years it found stability, and two decades later it became the first distributor to announce annual revenue north of $1 billion (although 4imprint would reach the mark in the same year, 2022).
Since that banner year for HALO and the industry itself, sales have flattened. The company drops to No. 3 in the 2026 PPAI 100, down from No. 2 in each of the measurement’s first three annual editions. Stalling sales are the explanation. It posted $964.4 million in 2025 revenue.
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But Hilt believes HALO is positioned to reach multiples of that number within the foreseeable future. Within years, $2 billion or $3 billion may be in sight, if all goes as planned in a vision he calls “HALO Forward.”
The recently flattened sales curve certainly doesn’t make the totality of Simon’s tenure any less impressive. And the future is very much built on the foundation he and his teams built.
Since the mid-’90s, HALO’s core has been the decentralized model it pioneered and many others in the industry have replicated. Roughly 1,000 account executives operate with the independence of entrepreneurs, building deep, durable client relationships. Under Simon, the company expanded its capabilities across branded merchandise, uniforms and recognition programs, assembling an offering that could serve some of the largest and most demanding organizations in the world.
Its industry impact has been unmatched over the past 25 years. Simon served as PPAI Board Chair in 2012. Another mainstay of the company, Dawn Olds, MAS+, held the seat in 2022. Former PPAI President and CEO Paul Bellantone, MAS, currently holds a senior VP position at HALO, and throughout the organization, its leaders and employees have been active participants in industry volunteerism at PPAI as well as their regional associations, with more than a dozen currently serving. Its work, elevating the industry, has frequently won PPAI Pyramid Awards, including two for marketing programs in 2026.
READ MORE: PPAI Unveils New Strategic Plan To Elevate Branded Merch In Marketing
For the first time, PPAI 100’s scoring now recognizes the industry-elevating volunteerism and Pyramid-worthy contributions. HALO earns PPAI 100 High Marks this year for its revenue, of course, but also its Online Presence, Professional Development commitment, tech-focused Innovation and Industry Faith, based on its credit rating.
From the outside, it is easy to look at HALO and see a finished product – a mature organization that has already figured out how to win at scale.
Except with scale, it turns out needs and expectations change.
A Generational Shift
Nearing 80, Simon retired last summer, and the keys were handed to Hilt. The company was not only large but profitable, respected and deeply embedded in the industry’s fabric.
But for any firm, especially those held as investment capital, the future is more important than the past. HALO had several ownership transitions during Simon’s tenure and was last acquired by private equity firm TPG in 2018.
Hilt’s previous CEO role, at collector metal company Asset Marketing Services, involved positioning the brand for market expansion and culminated in a sale to new investors.
One can imagine the reason for urgency in the work at HALO.
“There are leaders that can get it to $100 million, and there are leaders that can get it to $1 billion,” Hilt says. “When you get north of a billion, you start to get into issues of scale that are just incredibly different.”
Jim Hilt
CEO, HALO
Different, in this case, means something closer to a shift in how the business actually operates.
For years, HALO’s success had been built on the strength of its people – particularly its account executives, who drove growth through relationships, persistence and, at times, individual brilliance. It was a model that rewarded initiative and delivered results.
That tension between what made HALO successful and what can allow it to continue growing steadily is where this next chapter begins.
“You can’t rely on just the heroics,” Hilt says. “You have to replicate it.”
It could be that the very traits that built HALO, and maybe the entire merch industry – autonomy, entrepreneurial drive, the ability to solve problems in the moment – are no longer enough on their own. Not if a company intends to operate as something more than a collection of successful individuals.
Not if it intends to function with operational discipline.
No More Heroes
It happens in every organization. A key client emerges with an immediate need or a deadline tightens, maybe a program expands beyond its original scope. Somewhere, a person or a small team steps in, solves the problem, delivers the result and moves on. They get polite applause at the all-staff meeting for saving the day.
And it works until it doesn’t. Heroics are, by nature, uneven. They depend on the individual, the timing and circumstances. They produce moments of award-winning excellence, but not always consistency.
And so the shift begins. Operational discipline means the creation of systems that can extend what heroes do best or automate their brilliant instinct.
“That starts with leadership, hiring the right people, having the right technology,” says Mitch Mounger, HALO’s executive vice president of strategic accounts, who himself led a large and growing distributor for nearly 25 years – Sunrise Identity – before selling it to HALO when facing a scaling plateau of his own.
In a resort meeting room, I speak to Mounger and others from the leadership team, all professing alignment with the new direction.
“It’s a mindset change that [Hilt] has been preaching for six months,” Mounger says. “And I bet everybody understands where we’re going as a company. Like, we’re not debating our goals and objectives.”
Mitch Mounger
Executive Vice President, Strategic Accounts, HALO
This is where professionalism, as Hilt and his leadership team describe it, takes on a more concrete meaning. Some of the highest executive presence in the industry resides at HALO and through its sales ranks. But this is not merely a matter of polish or speaking tone or dress shoes. It is about building an organization that delivers its best work not occasionally but always, and without slowing down.
The new HALO expects more of itself and more for itself, and more for the industry as a whole. This means more comprehensive thinking about how physical expressions define brands. It’s more consistency in how clients are served, more structure in supporting or supplementing a sales force and more intentionality in how decisions are made and executed.
The need for more changes the standard.
This is the shift inside HALO and, if its bet is correct, the entire merch marketplace. For decades, industry progress has been defined by the products themselves, the sourcing, the logistics of getting from concept to delivery with a smile.
Inside the industry, the work has always been more complex than it appears. That gap is becoming harder to sustain. HALO’s response is to reposition what it provides for clients based on their needs, an attempt to become a more comprehensive agency than a servant.
“We’re not order takers, we’re solution sellers,” Mounger says. “The goal is to get to the table prior to [clients] thinking, ‘I need product for this.’”
It’s scheduling the strategy meeting, not answering the call. Mounger continues: “Understand their objective.”
The objective, in this context, is not an item. It is the outcome the item is meant to support – a brand moment, an employee experience or a customer connection. The product becomes one part of a broader strategy, which HALO and other distributors thinking broadly can help clients drive.
Hilt describes it as a need for the industry to change the dialogue.
This version of the work requires deeper understanding, greater preparation and further alignment across teams. It demands capabilities that go beyond sourcing and fulfillment into creative, technology, data and strategy.
And it changes where value is created.
In a transactional model, value is often measured in efficiency and cost. In a strategic model, it is measured in its impact on the brand, on the campaign, on the client’s ability to connect with its audience.
The People Business 1.0
If there is a place where HALO’s evolution is most delicate, it is here.
HALO’s account executives operate with the independence and expectations of true business owners. They drive relationships and succeed on their own terms.
“[Simon] was a firm believer that the account executive is the customer – the seller is the customer,” says one HALO leader. “Jim comes at it completely different and says the [final] customer is our customer.”
And so the original decentralized distributor platform is to become more centralized again.
“By and large, the account executives have been pretty welcoming,” the same leader says. “They know that their customers have become more sophisticated. And they want more support on how to win them and how to go vertical.”
In a near-future state envisioned by Hilt – part of the HALO Forward plan – that will mean marrying the traditional, personalized, relationship-based approach with the e-commerce model that has been so successful for the likes of 4imprint. He believes the two can coexist in one firm, beyond the realm of existing platforms like company stores. High-value clients receive the high-touch experience. Others may require only a simulation of the same.
A shift like this, marrying distributor models that previously competed, would potentially reset the marketplace. But HALO has done that many times in its history.
“We’ve defined ourselves and the industry in kind of a very low-growth to no-growth market, versus actually saying that there is a bigger opportunity that many of us are already doing,” Hilt says. “I just think that we need to redefine the industry that we’re playing in. And when you do that, suddenly the growth opportunity is pretty substantial.”
Building The Engine
With our time together beginning to wind down, Hilt laments that we haven’t talked more about tech. It’s really his specialty. Further improvement here will underpin all of the possibilities we’ve discussed. To outrun its reliance on heroics, HALO needs technology capable of scaling the superior judgment that has historically resided with its best sellers.
That makes Erin DeCesare the most important hire of Hilt’s tenure. She was announced as HALO’s new chief product and technology officer just weeks before we meet in a side room off the resort lobby. And her ability to translate tech complexities to a layman such as myself does inspire confidence.
DeCesare has done this kind of work before. Most recently, she helped evolve the marketplace platform at ezCater, and she previously held leadership roles within the merch industry. Her early mandate is clear: Find the fastest ways technology can create value for HALO’s sellers, then begin building toward something larger.
The first step was Glean, a Gartner-recognized internal AI platform DeCesare describes as a safe version of ChatGPT for HALO users. It honors permissions across the company’s file stores, allowing employees to search emails, documents, messages and knowledge bases without exposing proprietary information outside the organization.
This security step in the age of AI was the lowest-hanging fruit and probably something most organizations of any size have in their sights, if they haven’t already accomplished it.
“Now it’s just a matter of how do we keep configuring it to understand the use cases of our sellers?” DeCesare says. It’s one of the things up for discussion with HALO’s sales growth council here in wine country.
More complicated work will define whether HALO can bring the human touch to the e-commerce experience.
DeCesare spent years at VistaPrint, which gives her a useful industry frame of reference.
“I better appreciate now, having been at HALO, why there was a certain part of the market that VistaPrint and the other consumer players can’t touch,” she says. “It’s at a certain point of complexity – the orders are actually just that big or that unique – where there isn’t an obvious manufacturer, and somebody needs to get on the phone and search and figure this out. It’s very difficult to just code a solution for this, and there’s so much human intelligence involved in the process.
“Now that AI is so much more mature, translating that human thinking and reasoning into a set of agentic workflows like this is sort of the magical project ahead of us. And even if we can solve this at all, this is where HALO will step out ahead and compete in a way that really nobody else is trying to do at the moment.”
AI is not being introduced to eliminate that human judgment. It is being used to capture and repeat it. This is the real bridge between HALO’s past and future in client service.
“You want the feeling that someone is an expert talking to you and guiding you through this purchase,” DeCesare says. “We have sellers that are doing that today. … So, we can start to turn that into a set of conversational prompts:
“‘OK, I have this event where I have to order a bunch of merchandising products.’ That’s all I know as a consumer. ‘OK, talk to me. Is it a summer event, a winter event?’ And then you can prompt them through the series of meaningful questions to get down to the assortment of products that make sense.”
Erin DeCesare
Chief Product & Technology Officer, HALO
In this brave new future, clients get some of the self-service ease they expect from e-commerce while preserving the expertise that makes an agency experience feel premium.
That is how the company gets closer to Hilt’s goal of no more heroes. But, in an era when every professional in the world is wondering on some level whether AI will replace them, is hero just a euphemism for human?
The People Business 2.0
Along with the new leadership – and the dot-connecting on private equity horizons and the universal threat of AI replacing people – one might think the rank and file behind the scenes of HALO are personally concerned.
But conversations with back-office employees reveal this isn’t so much the case. If anything, people are energized, they say.
Certain positions have been eliminated, including departing executives. But the result has been greater corporate agility. One employee said projects have gotten done in six months that not long ago would’ve taken two and a half years.
For a new leadership regime, the wins are crucial to establishing trust.
“We try to instill in people to think positively,” says Chief Human Resources Officer Kimberly Sandifer. “Give it an opportunity and step outside your comfort zone a bit.”
Kimberly Sandifer
Chief Human Resources Officer, HALO
These kinds of transitions are not unique to one organization, of course. “This is not just a HALO thing, you know,” Sandifer says. “It’s a world thing.”
But change is change, and executives recognize it’s happening quickly.
HALO Forward
With a rapid transition like HALO’s, there is much to do. For Hilt, the comfort with high stakes and immediate goals was ingrained early. He grew up with it.
“I sat around a dinner table that had a lot of work,” he says.
His father was a banker and entrepreneur, someone who approached business with discipline and consistency. He had a stay-at-home mother whom Hilt describes as extremely well-read and intellectually curious. “There was a lot of intersection, just like learning new things, trying new things, being willing to take some level of risk,” Hilt says.
Most of Hilt’s childhood was spent in Minnesota. He remembers going into the office with his father on Saturday mornings, in a high-rise building overlooking the Metrodome – where the Vikings and Twins played then – and imagining himself jumping to bounce atop its marshmallowy roof.
Work ethic conversations on those Saturdays would help shape who he became. Hilt studied political science in college, but his father talked him out of moving straight to Washington upon graduation.
“He said to me, ‘Could you please just do one’ – what he called – ‘one real job interview,’” Hilt recalls. That one real interview landed him in IBM’s still-young internet services division. He moved to California and worked within the team that helped set up the e-commerce infrastructure for L.L.Bean, one of the first major brands to bet that customers would provide their credit card information online.
The early experience in e-commerce brought bigger opportunities working for companies like SAP, Sears and Barnes & Noble. He was living in New York when he met his husband, Derek, more than 20 years ago. They’ve made it through moves to Chicago, back to New York, toward Luxembourg, to Colombus, Ohio, and eventually toward Silicon Valley, where they’re raising their son.
When TPG began to court him for the CEO role last spring, Hilt was in the midst of saying goodbye to his father. He shares that some of their last conversations proved to him that he truly wanted the role.
“He was in hospice at the end of June, and we were talking about it. I was going to be flying to Chicago to meet with TPG to share with them my vision of what I thought the company could look like,” Hilt says. “And finally, as I was talking about what I was going to share at this meeting, I found myself getting really passionate about it.
“So, I kind of take that away. My dad was there with me in this last decision, as he’s always been.”
Hilt spent just two and a half years in his prior CEO role. The personal meaning behind the decision to join HALO could be a reason to think he isn’t approaching the new job as a quick flip to satisfy investors.
“I have never gone into a job thinking that it would be a moderate or short opportunity,” Hilt says. “I believe in brands. I believe in building great teams, and I believe in building platforms that connect. This is a company that has a massive opportunity to scale for a very long time, and $1 billion is just the beginning of what we’re trying to get done.
“This is kind of my sweet spot, personally, where I thrive, and also where I think that I can add the most value as an individual leader. And just work.”
Jim Hilt
CEO, HALO
Our waiter pulls Hilt’s half-eaten salad away. He’s scheduled to speak to the sales leadership group in an hour.
Today brings just one step among many more on the way to the goal. HALO’s new growth stage will be focused less on acquisition and more on taking market share.
Not every leader or company is built for what comes next.
