What started with two college students and an idea for a new beer pong table concept is now a thriving Irvine-based consumer goods distributor with north of $100 million in annual revenue.
That marks a nearly 220% jump in revenue in two years for P&P; Imports LLC, now a diversified designer and distributor of outdoor games, pool floats and sporting products.
Co-founder Peter Tanoury partly attributes year-over-year company growth to “keeping the focus on customer experience and making quality products.”
The firm has a solid track record of evolving its product line to keep up with consumer demand, he says, from the first beer pong concept to more family-friendly games, like cornhole sets, now its best-selling product.
This helped P&P; Imports break out of the midsize category in this year’s Fastest-Growing Private Companies list; it ranks No. 3 in the large companies category, for companies with over $100 million in annual revenue. P&P; earned $104 million in the past year.
Balboa Start
P&P; Imports had a casual start.
The idea for the first product—“we wanted to make a freezable beer pong rack that could keep drinks cold”—was sketched on the back of a pizza box at the University of Colorado, Boulder.
Upon graduation, Tanoury and co-founder Peter Engle—who represents the other P in P&P; imports—turned that sketch into a product that quickly caught national attention, prompting a call from Amazon, now its largest source of sales.
“They approached us to buy our products wholesale,” said Tanoury, who was working as a marketing executive in San Francisco at the time, while Engler worked in finance.
“We then got into other beer pong tables, and the business really started to pick up.”
As a result of this growth, Tanoury and Engler decided to quit their jobs at the time and move to a Balboa Peninsula apartment that would serve as an interim headquarters for the company.
Online SalesÂ
P&P; Imports, which designs its own products with manufacturing partners in Asia, struggled initially at breaking into the brick- and-mortar market, prompting the company to take an online sales only approach that proved to be beneficial.
“We couldn’t just have a shiny box and hope customers wanted to buy it, we had to make great products that would deserve great reviews,” Tanoury said.
The pandemic helped bolster online sales growth, as well as demand for its second product line: cornhole sets.
“Cornhole has absolutely blown up as a game,” Tanoury said. “It’s now our bread and butter.”
P&P; Imports now counts three main brands: GoSports, GoPong and GoFloats.
The first, GoSports, is the company’s largest and includes outdoor games and sporting goods; the second includes party supplies and games; and the third includes swimming toys and inflatables.
“We were one of the earliest to design giant inflatable pool swans and flamingos that are very popular now,” Tanoury said.
Irvine ExpansionÂ
P&P; Imports has grown from a two-person operation working out of an apartment in Newport Beach to a 50-employee operation with $104 million in 2020 revenue.
The firm moved its headquarters in 2019 when it made one of the larger industrial leases that year, signing a deal to occupy a 132,545-square-foot building in Irvine, a few miles from John Wayne Airport.
The location at 17352 Derian Ave. marked a big jump in size for the company; its prior facility a few miles away spanned 37,000 square feet.
“We love being based in Orange County. It’s a great place to have a work-life balance, and there’s a really talented employee base here,” Tanoury said.
Another real estate expansion could be on the horizon, as P&P; Imports continues to dream up new consumer products.
“We are working year-round to try and design as many products as we can,” such as a line of snow sleds for this coming winter.Â
