4/bENSUSSEN DEUTSCH & ASSOCIATES, INC.

It was 25 years ago when two kids, Jay Deutsch, 16, and Eric Bensussen, 19, believed they could start a sports marketing company. The two lived three houses away from each other in Seattle, and each scraped together $500 to get the startup going. They made their first call to the National Football League.

The boys bet that because Alaskans rooted for the Seattle Seahawks (since they didn’t have an NFL team of their own), they’d be likely to buy some branded merchandise. They asked the NFL for a license to create a Seattle Seahawks logo on a sweatshirt to sell in Alaska. When the sweatshirts began to sell, they added trading cards and pom-poms. The rest is history.

More than two decades later, the two are still best friends and have amassed a branded merchandise agency, Bensussen Deutsch & Associates, Inc., that last year ranked No. 1 on the Advertising Specialty Institute Counselor’s Top 40 Distributors list — this in an industry that generates $19 billion in annual sales.

BDA has more than 500 employees who work in 27 locations worldwide. It is a one-stop shop offering creative, supply chain management, procurement, fulfillment and distribution. It works with a diverse roster of Fortune 500 companies spanning sports and entertainment, gaming, pharmaceutical, financial and many other industries. It is the official merchandise agency for Major League Baseball and Fremantle Media, the producer of “American Idol.”

“We look at merchandise through a different set of glasses than anybody in our industry,” President Eric Bensussen says.

In one example, Bank of America wanted to eliminate the use of Styrofoam cups to cut expenses and to align with its initiative of environmental stewardship. BDA came up with the idea to replace the Styrofoam cups by providing each bank employee with a branded, recyclable mug. The team created the product design and identified a supplier who could handle the order for 191,000 mugs.

In another example, Sharp Electronics wanted to create a collectible for the 2008 World Series that connected with the prestigious Hank Aaron Award, given to the league’s top hitters. BDA constructed a custom-minted collectible coin emblazoned with design elements of the award, Major League Baseball and Sharp. It used its global purchasing system, a division dedicated to complex sourcing needs, to identify factories where quick construction of the coin and packaging could take place.

Since the facility was new to BDA, its quality assurance department worked with a third-party agency to test preproduction samples of the coin and packaging for lead and phthalates to ensure that the product was compliant with the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act. Some 60,000 fans received the coins.

“We look at merchandise as a very personal extension of the brand,” CEO Jay Deutsch says.

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