When I entered the promotional products industry nearly seven years ago, I knew I was stepping into unfamiliar territory.

My career up until then had been spent in consumer products manufacturing, with the likes of Procter & Gamble, PepsiCo and Newell-Rubbermaid, as well as a few private equity-backed and privately held companies. I’ve had more than four decades of experience (you can do the math on my age) shaping products, building brands, leading people and driving growth in highly competitive, global environments. Yet, when I joined Gemline as president at the beginning of 2019, I was most definitely an outsider to promo.

In fact, in an industry where leaders tend to rise from within, my path was an exception rather than the rule.

Looking back, the journey has been one of both synergy and challenge, leveraging the transferable skills I had honed across consumer products while adjusting to a business model and industry structure unlike any I had encountered before. That combination has shaped my leadership at Gemline and has reinforced some best practices that can benefit others.

The most powerful advantage of coming from outside the industry is perspective.”

Frank Carpenito

President/CEO, Gemline

Leveraging Transferable Skills

The most powerful advantage of coming from outside the industry is perspective. In consumer products, certain disciplines are non-negotiable, with many principles deeply ingrained into the DNA of the larger companies I worked for early on in my career. Those include:

  • People leadership: Building strong, empowered teams is central to sustainable growth. At Gemline, I rebuilt our leadership team and have applied those lessons to foster a culture that values collaboration, inclusion, accountability and bold thinking.
  • Product manufacturing expertise: With decades in manufacturing operations, sourcing, quality control and process optimization, I brought an understanding of how to scale operations efficiently, while maintaining the highest quality standards.
  • Branding discipline: At P&G and Pepsi, products are not just objects – they represent brand promises. Translating that to the promo industry meant ensuring that our products always elevate our customers’ brands, not just fill catalogs.
  • Global sourcing: Having worked extensively in overseas supply chains, I knew how to manage complexity, balance cost and quality, build supplier partnerships and navigate destabilized globalization to deliver reliability, innovation and peace of mind.
  • Customer excellence focus: In consumer goods, customer centricity is everything. I brought that mindset to Gemline, understanding that our success depends on making our distributors’ jobs easier and their clients’ brands shine.
  • Growth orientation: From the start of my career, growth has always been the measure of progress and success. At Gemline, growth has been not just about revenue, but about building stronger relationships, expansive capabilities, a deeper branded product offering and a more meaningful industry presence.


Although I would argue that these skills are portable, they most certainly didn’t need to be reinvented. That said, applying them in the promo industry absolutely required translation.

Adjusting To A Different Playing Field

The unique and complex characteristics of the promotional products industry posed (and continue to pose in 2025), challenges that required me to rethink old habits:

Completely Different Customer Base: Instead of selling directly to Target, Walmart, Costco, CVS, etc., and end consumers, we strictly sell through our distributor partners to clients whose needs range widely, from Fortune 500 companies to small local businesses, schools, hospitals, youth teams and more. Understanding that very different ecosystem was essential to crafting the company’s go-to-market strategy.

ICYMI: Gemline Teams With Dutch Supplier To Launch Transatlantic Merch Program

Intermediated Selling Process: The distributor sits between supplier and end client, which can dilute feedback loops and complicate selling relationships. Navigating that structure required patience, creativity, transparency and trust-building.

Fragmented Industry: Unlike consumer goods, where a handful of giants dominate, promo has relatively little concentration on either the supplier or distributor side. That makes for opportunity, but also for massive inefficiency.

Limited Commitment to Sustainability: Coming from industries that directly served the consumer where sustainability was increasingly core, it was surprising to see how many products in promo were destined for landfills. This remains an area where change is both necessary and possible and requires our industry leaders to be bold.

The adjustment was less about accepting these realities and more about challenging the status quo by driving behavior towards best practices I had seen succeed elsewhere. When you do that effectively, everybody involved wins – customers, employees and suppliers.

Leading With Conviction & Boldness

From day one, I approached my role with conviction and a willingness to take risks. I didn’t want to simply replicate what had successfully been done before. I wanted to raise the bar in a company with a great reputation that preceded me, but was underperforming. That meant:

  • Challenging the status quo: I was willing to question long-standing practices in the industry, even when it made people uncomfortable (and even me at times).
  • Applying Best Practices: Whether a process came from a prior CPG employer, private equity playbook or my own observations, if it worked, I brought it to Gemline.
  • Being direct and transparent: I have always believed in calling a spade a spade. Sugarcoating issues only delays progress, and nobody likes surprises. I am like this with customers, vendors and employees alike, and thus far, it has worked for me.
  • Breaking old paradigms: From how we think about product development to how we onboard new brand partners to how we engage with customers, I encourage my team to think beyond the industry’s inherited limitations, and attempt to forge new paths.


Being an outsider also meant respecting the institutional knowledge of those who had spent their careers in promo. At Gemline, I’ve been fortunate to work with many talented and successful people who have had decades of experience, including our owner, my boss and industry visionary, Jonathan Isaacson.

RELATED: Ultimate Honors: PPAI Hall Of Fame Welcomes Isaacson, Jenkins

Two years into my tenure, Jonathan said to me, “You have made a number of decisions that made me uncomfortable at first because they were different than what I would have done, but fortunately, most have worked out quite well.” That balance of bringing in fresh thinking while leveraging seasoned expertise has been invaluable.

Best Practices Have No Boundaries

If there is one lesson my journey underscores, it’s that best practices are universal. They don’t belong to one industry or another. Whether in traditional consumer products or promotional products, strong leadership, operational excellence, customer focus and growth orientation are always relevant. What differs is the context, and leaders must have the courage and conviction to adapt proven approaches and behaviors to new environments.

For Gemline, that has meant growing while staying true to our values, raising standards for customer service excellence, product quality and sustainability, and further enhancing our reputation as a supplier that does more than just deliver products. We deliver solutions that promote community and help brands connect meaningfully with their target audiences.

Looking Ahead

The promotional products industry is at a crossroads. Clients are demanding shorter lead times, greater customization, more responsible product options and full transparency. Technology is reshaping how we process orders, decorate product and engage distributors. Competition is fierce, but opportunities are abundant for those willing to evolve.

As someone who came in from the outside, my greatest contribution has been a willingness to bring fresh eyes to an established industry, to impart discipline from my consumer products days and to challenge old paradigms. But none of this would have mattered without the dedication and support of our amazing Gemline team, the trust we have earned with our distributor partners and the openness of ownership to embrace growth.

Seven years in, I no longer feel like an outsider. I feel like a leader in an industry with untapped potential, which can continue to grow, innovate and make a positive impact on the organizations and communities it serves if we collectively have the courage to do things differently, and the willingness to make bold decisions that will benefit the industry long-term.

Carpenito is the president and CEO of Gemline, PPAI 100’s No. 13 supplier.