While COVID certainly gave the industry more than a few lemons, forward-looking companies made lemonade.

That’s the story out of Phoenix-based Zing Manufacturing (asi/99025), which successfully pivoted to PPE in the first few months of the pandemic and then started 2021 off with an exclusive industry contract with retail drinkware brand S’well, a certified B Corp. That move, along with infrastructure expansion and imprinting innovation, catapulted the company from $1.4 million in revenue in 2020 to $8.4 million in 2021, a 500% increase in just one year.

Rich Corvalan, senior vice president of sales at Zing, recently joined Executive Editor Sara Lavenduski for a livestreamed edition of Promo Insiders to discuss the big year the company had in 2021, the exclusive S’well contract and what’s next as the industry looks beyond COVID.

“We’ve committed to the partnership [with S’well],” says Corvalan. “They’ve done a great job, through us, in really focusing on the promotional products industry.” Corvalan says they’re now focusing on low minimums, fast turns, quality decoration and healthy distributor margins, particularly for the feature-rich products in the S’well line.

“To go from $1.4 million in 2020 to over $8 million in year one has been remarkable,” he says. “We couldn’t do it without our distributor partners.”