Blue Ridge announced that Prime Line, a privately-held Bridgeport, Conn. based promotional products wholesaler, has selected Blue Ridge technology to streamline its extensive North American supply chain operations, which include a network of more than 10,000 promotional product distributors and 1,700 stock keeping units (SKUs), across 15 product categories.
 
Prime Line has been a leading promotional products industry supplier since 1980. In 2017, it merged with alphabroder and is now its hard goods division. The product line is sold exclusively through industry distributors and other resellers. While operating primarily in North America, the company can ship anywhere in the world. Prime Line’s inventory includes bags, drinkware, tech accessories, gift items, desk items, stress relievers, apparel, headwear, executive toys and writing instruments. The wholesaler is the exclusive industry supplier for MopToppers™, Leeman New York, BUILT and Rubik's® brands.
 
With such an extensive inventory catalog and large-scale supply chain operation throughout North America, Prime Line selected Blue Ridge as its technology partner because of their proven history in optimizing across channels, synchronizing planning processes and executing seamlessly so wholesalers can keep customers and win new business.
 
Increased availability, reduced delivery or shipping times and returns management are considered basic expectations, not differentiators, in today’s marketplace,” said Jeff Lederer, president, Prime Line. “We’ve invested in upgrading and expanding our warehousing and production facilities in recent years and partnering with Blue Ridge was the next step in streamlining our North American operations.”
 
Prime Lime offers a comprehensive assortment of products available with deep inventory and 24-hour production. Some of these items are part of the company’s Prime Plus inventory program of best sellers, which offers production of large quantity orders in days, instead of the standard two to three months required for overseas orders.
 
According to Blue Ridge, advanced techniques that consider the granular information available of an item or location can enhance abilities—precisely predicting and accurately planning demand, avoiding stock outages or excess inventory.
 
“Our partnership with Prime Line utilizes state-of-the-art capabilities that holistically leverage attributes such as price changes, types of promotions and event dynamics —combining them with advanced machine learning and big data strategies to enhance the accuracy of forecasting. That’s a differentiator,” said Jim Byrnes, chief executive officer, Blue Ridge.