Imperial Brady operates more than 3,000 trucks and boasts roughly 20 million square feet of warehouse space, with over 2,000 sellers serving customers across the United States and Canada. About 13,000 people receive paychecks from the company.

When CEO Jason Tillis was asked to describe the operation in plain language, he kept it simple: “The short answer would be that it is a leading distributor of food service, janitorial and industrial packaging supplies,” Tillis said.

The longer answer is where it gets interesting. It runs back nearly two decades. Imperial Bag & Paper was founded in 1935 and operated out of Jersey City, New Jersey, when Robert Tillis bought it in 2007 and brought his son Jason into the business. It was a single facility. What followed was one of the most aggressive acquisition runs in the distribution industry, starting with Borda Products in 2009, Burke Supply in 2011 and accelerating with the 2017 combination with Miami-based Dade Paper, which created Imperial Dade.

“The business today is now 100 times the size of that original business,” Tillis said. “And to be fair, it was 50 premerger. The merger basically doubled us again.”

A merger the industry felt

That merger closed March 12, 2026, joining Imperial Dade with Las Vegas-based BradyPLUS, itself the product of a 2023 combination of BradyIFS and Envoy Solutions.

Announced the previous August, the deal brought together two of the companies on Modern Distribution Management’s 2025 list of top jansan, packaging and disposables distributors, creating a platform with roughly US$10 billion in annual revenue.

In May, the combined business adopted a single name: Imperial Brady. Tillis leads it as CEO. Manny Perez de la Mesa, the former Pool Corp. CEO and a longtime Imperial Dade director, holds the chairman’s seat.

Size, on its own, was never the pitch.

“The entrepreneurial mindset still remains, and we think that’s super powerful,” Tillis said. “We used to refer to the fact that ‘it’s not the big that eat the small…it’s the fast that eat the slow.’ The business we’re building, we believe, can be big and fast, and we think that’s an incredibly powerful thing to bring to the market.”

Where the sleepless nights really were

A transaction of this size invites the obvious question about anxiety. Tillis puts his own sleepless stretch back two decades earlier.

“In 2007, we had the single facility. The business back then was undercapitalized. Basically, 50% of the business had direct New York City exposure, and we almost immediately entered the Great Recession,” he said. “We used to meet every Friday to decide what vendors to pay. That’s when I was losing sleep.”

Whatever sleep the merger cost him came from excitement, rather than doubt, he said. His worry sits with the unknowns.

“I worry more about things that I don’t know about. What can’t we properly plan for?” Tillis said. “If we have a capacity issue, we add capacity. If we have a tech issue, we make the necessary technology investment.”

“At no point did I lose sleep over: Hey, is this a good idea or not?” he added. “That’s because there’s no question that bringing these companies together made a ton of sense.”

The vendors from those early Friday meetings largely stayed. “We had a much smaller vendor community back then, but our vendors have been incredible partners to us throughout the whole journey, and continue to be today,” Tillis said.

Letting the actions do the talking

Speculation has followed the company for years, and Tillis has learned to sit with it.

“For a long time, it was, oh, we’re going to sell. And then when we started making a lot of acquisitions, it’s, oh, we’re going to go buy this one or that one,” he said. “There were rumors that were so powerful. My father and I would talk. Did we miss something that everyone’s so certain this is happening that we weren’t involved in?”

His answer to the noise is communication volume paired with visible follow-through. Imperial Brady has held companywide town halls since the close and held a large partner conference in Las Vegas.

“We’re obsessed with letting our actions speak,” Tillis said. “We wake up every day, we do what we think is the right thing, we communicate a bunch. We can’t control the rumor mill and maybe what people are going to speculate on, but I think over time people will see who we are and what we want to do.”

Respecting what came before

Integration is where mergers earn their reputation, and Tillis argues the last 20 years amounted to rehearsal.

“On the Imperial side, we had done 98 acquisitions pre-merger,” he said. “Legacy Brady had done, approximately, 70 or so, including some really big ones. We’ve spent the last 20 years respecting the legacies and honoring these really tremendous businesses while innovating and integrating.”

WAXIE Sanitary Supply is one example he returns to. Founded in San Diego in 1945 by brothers Harry and Morris Wax, WAXIE joined with John Miller’s North American Corporation in 2020 under FEMSA (Fomento Económico Mexicano, S.A.B. de C.V.) ownership, moved into BradyPLUS, and now sits inside Imperial Brady. Charles Wax, who led the family business for decades and received ISSA’s Honorary Lifetime Achievement Award in 2025, still trades ideas with Tillis.

“I maintain contact with Charles Wax and John Miller, and we’re sharing ideas still,” Tillis said. “I don’t think it’s as hard as people think if people are willing to listen and take the best of what was, while finding ways to innovate and get to the next level.”

Evolutions, not revolutions

Employees at both legacy companies had reason to wonder what a combination of this scale would mean for them. Tillis says the volume of past deals shaped expectations in an unexpected direction.

“To me, people would get more nervous when we weren’t making an announcement,” he said. “Across 98 deals, there were days we announced three or four deals on a Monday.”

“I’d be naive to think across 13,000 folks there’s not a certain level of anxiety,” Tillis acknowledged. “But we’re very candid in our communication. So much of what we do isn’t changing. We believe in evolutions, not revolutions.”

The point lands hardest at the customer level. “If we have a salesperson that’s calling on Joe or Susie’s deli, there’s almost no reason that relationship would change,” he said. “Depending on what your job is in the business, that job that was important last week is still incredibly important this week, and maybe even more so with all the other noise in the market.”

Tillis has logged roughly 50 facility visits since the close. “I’ve started every meeting by saying how grateful I am around the employee response, and it’s been unbelievable,” he said.

Sustainability, and why it pays

Sustainability arrived at Imperial well before it became a standing agenda item, according to Tillis, and the company now staffs the work directly.

“I remember talking 15 years ago, when we were primarily just food service, about how our food service packaging offering was the most sustainable, and we had all the alternatives,” he said. “We’ve now dedicated more resources to that, folks that wake up every day thinking about sustainability, and the reporting around that. But that makes good business sense. That’s what the market wants, and we’ve always leaned into it.”

Fair wages and hard conversations

Labor pressure gets a similarly blunt answer.

“We want to be the best employer in the country, in the world, depending on how you think about our scope,” Tillis said. “We want to pay fair wages, provide good benefits and we want to treat people properly.”

Then he draws a line under what kindness in a workplace actually requires.

“We should be kind to each other, and kind doesn’t mean not having tough conversations,” he said. “It actually means having the difficult conversations upfront, directly, so people know where they stand and can do what needs to be done. And I think that has translated well.”

Automation with a 100-year ROI

Automation gets talked about as an inevitability. Tillis measures it against the math on his own operation.

“We have plenty of runway until robots are delivering 25 deliveries in downtown Manhattan,” he said. The company watches the technology closely and works the trade show floors, though the numbers have not moved yet. “The last time we looked, it was something like a 100-year return on investment (ROI) on warehouse robotics for our full case program.”

Practical innovation is the standard, and he credits the people currently doing the work with the customer relationship.

“We are absolutely obsessed with our team of drivers. They’re probably our best salespeople in a lot of ways, and we have so much respect for what they do,” Tillis said. “We think we have best-in-class warehouse and operations folks, and we’re doing everything we can to be the best possible employer for those people.”

Why the $800 order matters

For a company measured in billions, the number Tillis keeps in front of him is small.

“Keep in mind, our average order size, as big as we’ve become, is still $800,” he said. “Our focus isn’t on any single transaction—it’s on being the best partner over time.”

That framing shapes how he defines success for the merged company.

“We only win if our customers are winning,” Tillis said. “If our customers grow, we grow. If our customers don’t grow, we don’t grow. So, we are obsessed with helping our customers be as efficient as possible. We are obsessed with doing what we say we’re going to do and really leveraging our infrastructure and scale to be the best partner we can.”

Employees and supplier partners land in the same equation. Workers at the combined company “should thrive here; they should have opportunities for growth,” he said, while suppliers gain a route to market he believes has no equal. “There’s just no better way to bring their goods to market than through Imperial Brady.”

Reputation is the scoreboard he watches.

“If we get this right, the marketplace will look to Imperial Brady as truly the best distributor there is, bringing a ton of value to folks,” Tillis said.

Built On a Strong ISSA Relationship

Imperial Brady’s legacy companies built extensive ties to ISSA over several decades before Imperial Dade and BradyPLUS completed their merger in March 2026. The combined company introduced the Imperial Brady name two months later.

Imperial Dade developed particularly deep ties to the ISSA Hygieia Network, an ISSA Charities signature program dedicated to advancing and retaining women in the cleaning industry. Laura Craven, then Imperial Dade’s vice president of marketing and communications, served as a Hygieia committee member, council member and co-chair before joining the network’s Executive Advisory Board. She received the ISSA Hygieia Network Mentor of the Year Award in 2023.

Craven’s involvement extended beyond Hygieia. During an approximately 30-year relationship with ISSA, she also served several years on the association’s board of directors. After spending 22 years with Imperial Dade and its predecessor, Dade Paper, she joined ISSA in 2026 as vice president of marketing and communications.

Training carried similar weight. Bill McGarvey, then Imperial Dade’s director of training and sustainability, became the inaugural recipient of the ISSA Trainer of the Year Award Honoring Marion Ivey in 2025. An ISSA Cleaning Management Institute Master Trainer since 2011, McGarvey served on the committee that developed ISSA’s Cleaning Industry Training Standard.

On the BradyPLUS side, WAXIE Sanitary Supply brought its own long ISSA history. Charles Wax, WAXIE’s former president and CEO, received ISSA’s Honorary Lifetime Achievement Award in 2025 after more than five decades in the industry. In 2016, the ISSA Hygieia Network presented a special award to Wax and then-WAXIE President and Chief Operating Officer Jeff Roberts, recognizing WAXIE’s commitment to promoting gender equality in the jansan industry. Roberts later received the network’s 2023 Ally of the Year Award.

That involvement also extended into advocacy and emerging leadership. Keith Schneringer of BradyPLUS was named a 2024 ISSA Advocate of the Year. In 2025, Imperial Dade’s Caleb Lindsey and BradyPLUS’ Megan Russo were selected for ISSA’s Emerging Leaders class.

That record, and more, now carries forward under the Imperial Brady name and with an even stronger connection with ISSA as its valued association partner.