A Next Generation Education E‑Commerce Company

 

We expect and deliver astonishing e-commerce revenue results

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Stroll & the community

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At Stroll we’re about helping individuals realize and maximize their potential. That’s why we recently donated $10,000 to the Tacony Academy Charter School, which will be taking 35 of its students to China next spring. This group of students is comprised of young adults from inner city Philadelphia, who have been studying Mandarin for the past two to three years. Their commitment, their drive, and their hard work are undeniable and we’re extremely proud to be an underwriter of their trip!

OUR CUSTOMERS LOVE US

MILLIONS OF PEOPLE GOT STARTED WITH THE PIMSLEUR APPROACH

AND LOVE IT!

  • Geri Zacks experienced the “wonderful feeling” that comes from using The Pimsleur Approach successfully on his first try. By his 10th lesson, he was already speaking Hebrew in complete sentences! His goal has always been to travel to Israel and communicate with the locals; thanks to Pimsleur Approach Hebrew, his goal is now in reach!
  • Firefighter Tyrone K. found out firsthand how important it is to know a second language when he went on what he thought was a routine call. When he arrived, he found a mother in labor who did not speak English. Luckily, Tyrone had been studying Pimsleur Approach Arabic. He was able to communicate with the mother and get her to the correct hospital on time while his co-workers stood by in total surprise!
  • Joseph Cortese Senior, at 86 years of age, is studying Italian for the first time. He’s so impressed with the program, he felt compelled to thank us for “doing such a comprehensive easy course in learning 'la lingua Italiana.'"

We Discover The World's Best Educational Products… And Bring Them To You

 

Stroll is a next-generation marketing analytics and advanced internet marketing platform committed to driving triple-digit growth for the products we own or license. We're next generation in that our magic happens online, where every dollar can be monitored and tracked, continually optimized to maximize ROI. Visit our flagship product line, Pimsleur Approach at PimsleurApproach.com.

What We Do

 

Our mission is to transform lives by discovering the world’s best educational products and turning them into best-sellers. Our vision is to grow to being a large, $1 billion+ company by 2020 by building a portfolio of consumer education businesses. We’ve set high-growth expectations because we’ve always been a high-growth company. Using analytical decision making, we’ve been growing at a compounded annual growth rate of over 70% since 2002! Our process is systematic, proprietary, and quantitative. There’s no reason why the best products shouldn’t also be best-sellers. We uncover what works and then define, refine, rinse, and repeat to squeeze the most possible value and growth out of the products we represent.

What We Do

Our standards are exceedingly high

We seek only the most motivated, highest-energy employees who want to thrill our customers and learn the science behind digital marketing and high-touch sales. We mentor and coach them on our proven processes, task them to contribute and grow, listen carefully to their input and suggestions, and always challenge them to understand the data and trust the analytics to optimize our ROI.

Our Story

 

What started as a dorm room business at the University of Maryland funded through personal credit cards has grown into a success story that is growing at a compounded annual growth rate of over 70% since 2002.

From The University of Maryland

Dan Roitman, an American who grew up in Germany, founded Stroll in 2000 to market a Swedish study aid to fellow students. Bright, entrepreneurial, and aggressive, Roitman flew to Sweden and convinced the manufacturer to partially finance the marketing of the product, which he planned to introduce at 20 colleges and universities.

University of Maryland

But when the company withdrew from the U.S. a year later, Roitman, a double major in German and international business, was left with no product to sell. A love of language led him to an all-but-forgotten language learning system called The Pimsleur Approach, owned by publishing giant Simon & Schuster. In 2001, Roitman started selling Pimsleur. He was so successful that in 2005, Roitman convinced Simon & Schuster to license him the rights to the product.

To learn quickly and pay back his credit card debt, Roitman devoured all the information he could find on growing a business, marketing, and management. Roitman contacted a number of world-recognized marketing thought leaders and convinced them to mentor him. He quickly became a regular at their conferences and seminars.

He realized that online marketing presented a unique ability to apply scientific methods to track and monitor each dollar spent. Such analytics allowed him to finance and invest in marketing according to the carefully determined lifetime value of each customer. Using complex analytics and advanced internet marketing, he created a highly effective marketing engine to incite customer interest online and convert that interest into purchases through a high-touch sales platform.

From Maryland to Sweden and back
From Maryland to Sweden and back

To Philadelphia

His test case became The Pimsleur Approach where he has ignited sales, creating a compounded annual revenue growth rate of 70% since 2002 and achieving year-over-year revenue growth in 2011 alone of 105%. Today, Stroll is Simon & Schuster's biggest seller of audio programs, and Pimsleur is a strong #2 to the industry leader—Rosetta Stone—which did $268 million in sales in 2011.

Along the way, Roitman has created a high-energy, results-oriented culture of over 160 professionals, where performance is taught and mentored, success is celebrated and rewarded.

The end result is a phenomenally successful marketing process, firmly founded on analytics and advanced internet marketing, with an ability to accelerate at breakneck speed the sales of products that impact and enhance the lives of customers.

And the quest is only beginning. With his business model perfected, Roitman is looking for other products like The Pimsleur Approach that can benefit from his company's analytical abilities and grow exponentially.

Leadership Team

 

Along the way, Roitman has created a high-energy, results-oriented culture of 160 professionals, where performance is taught and mentored, success is celebrated and rewarded.

  1. Dan

    Dan Roitman

    Founder and Chief Executive Officer

    Dan is responsible for the broad corporate vision, the Company's intense commitment to analytics and web optimization, and overall execution. Roitman founded Stroll in 2000 while a senior in college and has led the firm from startup to its present status as of one of the leading internet retailers of lifestyle information products. He is an active member of the Smart100, a local network of Chief Executive Officers. Roitman holds a BS in International Business and a BA in German from the University of Maryland at College Park. Dan can be reached at: DanR@Stroll.com.

  2. Ajay

    Ajay Segal

    Chief Operating Officer

    Ajay is responsible for the company's new customer acquisition and customer retention strategies, development of operating plans and day-to-day execution oversight. Prior to joining Stroll, Segal was Founder and Principal Analyst at avant|marketer, an industry trade publication covering online advertising and marketing. He is a board member of AD:TECH, the online advertising and marketing industry's defining event. Segal has also served as a board member of Frost & Sullivan's Internet Strategies Executive Summit series, and is a member of the OneHundredClub, an invitation-only insider's club of the nation's one hundred "finest minds in the area of non-traditional advertising." Segal holds a BA and MA from University of Maryland at College Park.

  3. Ron

    Ron Pirollo

    Vice President of Finance

    Ron is responsible for the preparation of financial statements and projections, participates in the strategic planning process and handles bank, accountant and funding relationships. Pirollo has extensive M&A experience, including due diligence and post acquisition integration for 120 acquisitions. He has played a key role in the assimilation of two multi-billion dollar mergers and has proven his ability to handle complex problems and difficult situations as demonstrated by successful management of two start-ups, one involving 60 acquisitions and increasing the market cap from $7 million to $1.3 billion in two years. Pirollo holds a BS and MBA from Villanova University.

  4. Dan

    Avik Roy

    Vice President of Operations

    Avik is responsible for building out operating capacity and capabilities while supporting performance of the business infrastructure and implementing strategy aimed to drive aggressive revenue-driven profit growth. Focusing on a wide range of strategic and operational priorities, he increases “performance transparency” by emplacing the right metrics to monitor and drive performance. Avik served as the Senior Vice-President of Corporate Development and Operations at Kaplan EduNeering (now UL EduNeering). He has held leadership roles at Bristol-Myers Squibb, Ernst & Young LLP, and McKinsey & Co. Avik is a co-founder of MedAvante, and holds an MBA from The Wharton School, MS degrees from Harvard and MIT in planning and design and a Bachelor of Architecture from The School of Planning and Architecture in New Delhi, India. He is the Board Vice-Chair at the Asian Arts Initiative.

Awards We Have Won

 

We've been named to Inc. magazine's ranking of fastest growing companies four years in a row. And we have been recognized as one of America's fastest growing inner city companies by the Initiative for a Competitive Inner City–four years running.

Timeline of Achievements

In the News

 

Browse our recent news items or download the archive.

  1. Stroll partners with local charter school to support Chinese-language students

    Stroll Press Release

    Thirty-five students at Tacony Academy Charter School in Philadelphia will soon be on their way to China as part of their Mandarin language education program. Stroll is helping them get there by donating $10,000 to fund their trip.

    Read the Full Release | Read the Full Article

  2. Stroll sprints to keep its marketing machine growing

    The Philadelphia Inquirer

    Dan Roitman’s company is called Stroll, a most ill-fitting name. From a growth perspective at least, Stroll’s evolution has been anything but a leisurely pace.

    Born 12 years ago in a Maryland dorm room, the Center City company is an impressive display of the potential of any small business, though perhaps...

    See the Video | Read the Full Article

  3. Dorm room entrepreneur creates hyper-growth business

    Examiner.com

    The company was founded in 2000 when Dan convinced publishing powerhouse Simon & Schuster to license him the rights to the Pimsleur Approach, an audio-based language learning product.

    In an effort to speak to the brightest movers and shakers, this series of interviews continues. Recently we spoke with...

    Read the Full Article

  4. Dorm-room start-ups that last

    The Ride

    Established dorm-room entrepreneurs might know something about survival. Fred Meyers, the 1982 founder and owner of The Queensboro Shirt Company in Wilmington, N.C. (www.queensboro.com), and Dan Roitman, the 2000 founder of the e-commerce Stroll LLC in Philadelphia, Pa. (www.stroll.com), started during college. When Meyers opened, the word “entrepreneur” wasn’t part of our vocabulary.

    Read the Full Article

A Mission to Transform Lives

Our mission is to transform lives by discovering the world’s best educational products and turning them into best-sellers. We aren't a traditional e-commerce company. We don't build or create the products we sell. Rather, we are a revenue accelerator—a finely tuned marketing machine that can supercharge the sales growth of products through the scientific application of analytics and the art of marketing.

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