How Imperial Dade Built a JanSan Giant, Then Renamed It

Part of Distributor Playbooks — strategy teardowns of every company on the 2025 MDM Top Distributors lists.

In 2025, Imperial Dade ranked No. 2 in the JanSan vertical on Modern Distribution Management's Top Distributors list, the annual accounting of North America's largest distributors, with more than $5 billion in trailing revenue. That ranking turned out to be a snapshot of a company mid-transaction. Within a year, Imperial Dade would close the largest merger in janitorial and sanitation distribution history, and then do something a company that spent nineteen years building a name rarely does: retire it.

A storefront that never stopped acquiring

The company started in 1935 as Imperial Bag & Paper, a single paper-supply business selling into what would become the jan-san trade decades before "jan-san" was a category name. It stayed a modest regional operator for most of the twentieth century. The transformation began in 2007, when father-and-son operators Robert and Jason Tillis bought the company with backing from Cyprium Partners and started running it as a consolidation platform rather than a family shop to be preserved as-is.

The pace of that consolidation is the real story. Audax Private Equity made a growth investment in 2016, and in June 2017 Imperial Bag & Paper merged with Miami-based Dade Paper & Bag, adopting the combined name Imperial Dade. By the time Bain Capital Private Equity agreed to acquire the company in 2019, with Audax staying on as an investor, Imperial Dade had completed 19 add-on acquisitions since the Tillis purchase, 13 of them in the three years under Audax alone, according to PE Professional's coverage of the Bain deal. At that point the company ran 27 branches across 13 states plus Puerto Rico and the Caribbean, with more than 620 fleet vehicles serving over 40,000 customers, per Bain Capital's own announcement. Acquisitions kept coming for years after, adding regional players like Edmar Cleaning Corp. in the New York tri-state area.

The part that doesn't fit the private equity script

Here is the detail that makes Imperial Dade unusual among PE-backed distributors: the operators never left. Most founder-led distribution businesses that sell to a financial sponsor see the founding family cash out and step back within a cycle or two. Robert and Jason Tillis instead stayed operationally in charge through four separate ownership eras, from Cyprium to Audax to Bain to, eventually, a consortium that added Advent International, Warburg Pincus, and Kelso & Company alongside beverage giant FEMSA as shareholders. Jason Tillis is CEO of the combined company today. That is nearly two decades of the same family running the business while the equity behind them turned over completely, more than once. In a sector where PE ownership usually means professional managers replacing founders, Imperial Dade ran the opposite playbook: use each new sponsor's balance sheet to keep buying, and keep the people who know where the branches and the customer relationships actually live.

The megamerger, and the name it cost

In August 2025, Imperial Dade announced a merger with BradyPLUS, itself the product of a 2023 combination of BradyIFS and Envoy Solutions and, by then, a roughly $5 billion jan-san and foodservice packaging distributor in its own right. The deal united the No. 2 and No. 3 companies on MDM's 2025 JanSan list, according to MDM's report on the announcement, creating a combined distributor with more than $10 billion in annual revenue. The transaction closed on March 19, 2026, per MDM's coverage of the completed merger, with Jason Tillis remaining CEO of the combined entity and Ken Sweder, BradyPLUS's former chairman and CEO, joining the board.

Then, in May 2026, the combined company launched a new brand entirely: Imperial Brady, described in the launch announcement as a single North American distributor for cleaning and facility care, foodservice, and industrial packaging. The company that spent two decades and 19-plus acquisitions building "Imperial Dade" into a recognized name in the channel gave it up at the exact moment that name reached its widest scale.

The timeline

What the rebrand actually signals

The obvious reading is that a merger of equals needed a fresh name to avoid one side feeling absorbed by the other. That is probably true and also incomplete. The deeper signal is what Imperial Dade's own history says its value was built from in the first place: not a brand a customer would ask for by name, but branch density, fleet capacity, vendor relationships, and account coverage accumulated one acquisition at a time. A company willing to walk away from a name it spent two decades earning, right after that name hit its highest ranking, is telling you plainly that the name was never the asset. The infrastructure underneath it was, and that infrastructure transferred intact under a different sign on the door.

That is the pattern worth remembering from Imperial Dade's arc: the operators who build a distributor through serial acquisition rarely build a brand as durable as the branch network itself, and the smartest ones know the difference well enough to trade the name for scale without blinking.

Distribution's biggest stories rarely happen at the point of sale. They happen in the catalogs, branches, and fleets built up acquisition by acquisition, the unglamorous infrastructure that a merger like this one is actually paying for.