#50 Michael Scott Cohen
& Jon Alagem

Harper + Scott (asi/220052)

2021 Rank: N/A

Michael Scott Cohen – CEO

Industry Experience: 11 years

Previous Appearances on Power 50: 0

Jon Alagem – President

Industry Experience: 8 years

Previous Appearances on Power 50: 0

Michael Scott Cohen and Jon Alagem have told the story countless times before, but when it’s the origin story of a fast-growing company boasting big sales and big promise, it’s worth telling again.

Before they had built a distributor now totaling over 100 employees and racked up accolades ranging from Inc. 5000 to Counselor’s Best Places to Work, Cohen and Alagem were friendly but not particularly close, linked by their wives who had been college roommates and best friends. Cohen was leaving the distributor he had worked for, and Alagem asked him what he planned to do. Cohen expressed his desire to stay in the promo industry and start his own firm, explaining to Alagem that promo companies sell things like branded water bottles and tote bags.

“My advice,” Alagem recalls saying, “would be to go to another industry because that sounds really boring.”

Undeterred, Cohen sold Alagem (who at the time had started a social network for fashion) on his vision of shaking up an industry that was long-established but also antiquated in many respects. Combining Cohen’s sales skills and Alagem’s design acumen, the pair launched New York-based Harper + Scott (asi/220052) in 2014 with a mere $50 investment. In the eight years the duo have been in business together, they haven’t wavered from their philosophy of frictionless user-experience, innovative ideas and top-notch service.

“We need to be the experts and early adopters,” says Cohen. “We do more than take a logo and put it on a water bottle. It’s about the user journey that starts from the time they’re even thinking about placing an order, to the ideation to sample to the delivery.”

That philosophy has pushed Cohen and Alagem to position Harper + Scott on the industry’s leading edge in several areas, including technology (launching a metaverse division and incorporating photorealistic 3-D renders of products) and sustainability (B Corp certification).

Today, Harper + Scott (the name combines the middle names of Cohen and his wife) counts 65 U.S. employees, but for the first few years it was just Alagem and Cohen, working together in the classic foundation of partnerships: shared goals, different mindsets. Alagem (creative, more easy going) and Cohen (measured, strategic) have their disagreements, the duo say, but they never fight. “We work really well together,” says Alagem. “Perhaps because we focus on different parts of the company. That’s one of the key reasons for our success.” Calling him a “friend for life,” Alagem jokingly tells Cohen to “pull out a tissue” before declaring “I couldn’t ask for a better partner in building this company.”

“I couldn’t ask for a better partner than Michael in building this company.”
Jon Alagem

That partnership has stayed strong even as Alagem moved to Los Angeles in 2020, and as the company has expanded. They both have young families and side hobbies (Alagem enjoys cooking and owns a restaurant in Manhattan; Cohen admits to being a passionate but “terrible” golfer). Beyond that, they’re dedicated to growing the business for the long haul while still maintaining a start-up mentality. Both Cohen and Alagem credit their team and are adamant that the distributor operates as a bottom-up business where growth and evolution are driven by its people. “If you can nominate 65 people instead of two [for the Power 50],” Cohen says, “we’d like to nominate the people at Harper + Scott.”

In total, it means big things for that “boring” idea. Cohen and Alagem are all in on the world of branded merchandise and the future of Harper + Scott. “We still feel,” says Cohen, “like we’ve barely scratched the surface as a company.”