What Essendant's Exit Means for Independent Office Supply Resellers

In the fall of 2025, Essendant told its customers that it was winding down its traditional office products business and stepping back from the independent dealer channel it had served for more than a century. By November, the wind-down was real: discontinued items flagged, returns halted, last-order dates on the calendar. 

For a wholesaler that thousands of resellers built their entire operation around, this is the biggest distribution disruption the office supply vertical has seen in a decade. The question for independent dealers isn’t whether the Essendant exit reshapes office products distribution. It’s what it means for you, and what the dealers who barely felt it did differently. 

What Happened?

The Essendant exit didn’t come out of nowhere, and it didn’t happen in isolation. Three forces hit the channel at once:

Essendant Left the Independent Dealer Channel. 

The news surfaced in the trade press on September 4, 2025, then became real through a customer letter in early October. Essendant, owned by Sycamore Partners, the group behind Staples, said it would wind down its office products business to focus on faster-moving categories like janitorial, sanitation, food service, and technology (per Distribution Strategy Group). Facility closures and last-order dates rolled out through the fall, effective in November. 

ODP Went Private.

In the same stretch, the ODP Corporation, which is the parent of Office Depot and OfficeMax, agreed to be taken private by Atlas Holdings for about $1 billion. The deal was announced in September 2025 and completed that December (per Retail Dive). 

SP Richards Became the Channel’s Anchor.

With Essendant gone, S.P Richards is the major national wholesaler still serving the independent Office Supply distributor channel, and it’s now absorbing the displaced demand. 

Why did Essendant walk?

The Math. 

US Office Supply sales totaled $11.5 billion in 2024, a 5% drop from the year before, with unit volume down as well and further declines expected before the market levels off (per Circana). 

A shrinking market is hard to share, and a full-line wholesaler serving thousands of small dealers eventually has to decide where it can still win. With Amazon Business pulling more procurement onto its own rails, and the pressure on the traditional channel is hard to miss. 

Who Got Hid the Hardest?

The exit was a back-end footnote for some dealers and a five-alarm fire for others. The hardest hit:

Wrap and stockless dealers. 

These dealers hold little or no inventory and rely on the wholesaler to pick, pack, and ship under their own label. When that wholesaler is Essendant, its exit isn’t an inconvenience; it's existential. 

Essendant first resellers. 

Anyone who built their catalog, pricing, product data, and order routing primarily around Essendant’s feed had to rebuild all of it on a new source, with new pricing and minimum order quantities, under a roughly 60-day deadline. 

This is a stark contrast. 

Dealers already running two or more distributors with automated routing simply re-pointed their orders to another source and kept selling. As Beth Freeman, EVP of independent dealer FSIoffice, told OPI, “the disruption is enormous, and a lot of independents are feeling very betrayed.” Her shop had a cushion. SP Richards was already its first call. Many dealers were first-call Essendant and had no such backup. 

What Are the Options?

If you’re rebuilding your sourcing, you have three realistic paths, and they aren’t equal: 

Move to SP Richard. 

The natural like-for-like swap, since it’s the remaining national wholesaler. 

The catch: it re-concentrates all your risk in a single supplier, exactly the position that burned the channel. 

Diversify your distributor stack.

Add multiple sources like SP Richards specialty and regional wholesalers, manufacturer direct, so no single exit can take you down again. This is the real lesson of the Essendant exit. 

Automate the connection.

Diversification only works if you can manage several feeds without drowning in manual work. Automation is what turns a multi-supplier stack from painful into practical. 

Most dealers underestimate how concentrated their sourcing really is until they write it down. If any single supplier carries more than half your volume, that’s your risk and your first project. 

What Automation Actually Looks Like 

Running several distributors by hand creates tax. The same item shows up on multiple feeds at different costs and stock levels, and every manual routing decision risks overselling, eroding margin, or shipping from the wrong source. Automating the connection removes that. In practice, it means:

One master catalog.

Live cost and stock feeds from every distributor are pulled into a single source of truth. 

Deduped SKUs.

Every version of the same item is tied to one master record, so overlap stops being a daily guessing game. 

Rule-based routing.

Each order is sent to the best source by your rule in stock first, then 3PL, then the lowest-cost distributor that actually has it. 

Automated POs and tracking.

The purchase order fires to the right supplier in the format it speaks, and tracking flows back on its own. 

The payoff shows up most at the peak. When back-to-school volume spikes, a manual operation needs more hands and still ships late; an automated one barely notices, because no one is typing orders. Platforms like Flxpoint exist to be that connection layer, several distributors in, one clean catalog out, so the next supplier shake-up becomes a setting you change rather than a quarter you lose. 

The Takeaway 

Essendant’s exit hurt because so much of the channel was still moved by hand. The dealers who barely felt it weren’t lucky; they were built for it, running more than one supplier through automated routing well before the letter arrived. You can become one of them, and you can start with a single supplier.

Flxpoint – Powerful Dropship and Ecommerce Automation Platform