Matt Bruno and Nathan Goldberg join Richard Romano for WhatTheyThink’s LunchNLearn webinar “Don't Call it ‘Brokering’: A Look at the Distributor Market” this Wednesday at 1pm ET. Register here.

The print distributor market has evolved quite dramatically in only the past two decades, and nowhere is that more evident than in what exactly we call these businesses. Traditionally called “trade brokers,” that term has become passé, and “distributor” has become the preferred term for referring to what can be described as “non-asset- based sellers of print.”

“One thing that differentiates our manufacturers from other print manufacturers is that most, if not all, of them work as trade-only manufacturers,” says Matt Bruno, Executive Vice President of the Print Services & Distribution Association (PSDA). “So they don’t sell direct to end users for the most part. And I think that the term ‘broker’ sort of diminishes what they do. It commoditizes their business. On the manufacturing side, they don’t like to look at their partners as brokers. They like to look at their partners as strategic partners to get their product to the end users. From just the outside looking in at the distributors, the term broker I think also trivializes what they do.”