“This industry is my identity – it’s who I am professionally and personally,” says Shape. While he has about 30 years in promo, Shape’s eyes brighten and he speaks with the sincere excitement of a newly launched start-up founder when he talks about the envisioned future for Stran and promo following the public filing. “We felt going public gave us the best chance to go from being a roughly $30 million company to a multi-hundred-million-dollar company,” says Shape, a member of Counselor’s Power 50 list of promo’s most influential people. It was one of the boldest moves by a promo company in recent years – an ambitious leap forward that’s come with some mixed results so far, but also potentially massive long-term rewards.
Still, Shape’s combination of guts and entrepreneurial acumen was never more prominent than when the CEO took Stran public in late 2021, listing the company on the Nasdaq stock market. As co-founder and CEO, Andy Shape has built Stran & Company from a basement start-up to a $64.3-million-in-revenue publicly-traded distributor.Īnd it was clear in the calculated forward-thinking risks he took in building that distributorship, Quincy, MA-headquartered Stran & Company (asi/337725), into a Top 40 industry powerhouse.
