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Two Northwest Arkansas companies are ranked in the Top 100 on a publication’s list of the nation’s fastest-growing private companies.

The 2017 Inc. 5000 includes Fayetteville women’s apparel retailer Lauren James at No. 53 and Fayetteville services company Givington’s at No. 61. The news website Talk Business & Politics was among the publications to highlight those companies’ high rankings by Inc.


Registered-nurse-turned-fashion-designer Lauren Stokes and her husband Lance Stokes started the company Lauren James Co. in 2013. (Photos by Kristen Grisham Photography)

Registered-nurse-turned-fashion-designer Lauren Stokes and her husband Lance Stokes started the company Lauren James Co. in 2013. (Photos by Kristen Grisham Photography)

Inc. showed the annual revenue of Lauren James, which has 100 employees, had reached $13.2 million in 2016.

Givington’s, which has 19 employees and was started in 2012, indicated its revenue was $6.9 million.

It was those companies’ incredible rate of growth that put them on the Inc. list. San Francisco-based Skillz topped the ranking, growing by 50,059 percent over three years. Lauren James grew by 6,009 percent in the same time period; Givington’s 5,530 percent growth was incredible, too.

The 2017 Inc. list includes 14 Arkansas companies, and eight of them are based in the Fayetteville-Springdale-Rogers Metropolitan Statistical Area. In addition to Lauren James and Givington’s, the group from Northwest Arkansas includes No. 584 RevUnit, No. 1,055 Limbird Real Estate Group, No. 1,089 Overdrive Brands, No. 1,705 B-Unlimited, No. 2,082 capSpire and No. 3,496 BCS.

Inc. noted that capSpire, a system integration and technology solutions company with 85 employees in six U.S. and European locations, has appeared on the Inc. list five years in a row.

“As a fifth-time honoree, capSpire is part of a very select group of companies. Inc. magazine calls it ‘the honor roll’ because fewer than one-tenth of Inc. 5000 honorees achieve this milestone,” company CEO Lance Laubach wrote on the company’s website. “We are so excited to be included in such an exclusive group and are grateful to Inc. magazine for continuously extending this honor to our company year after year.”

Northwest Arkansas had four companies on the Inc. 5000 list in 2016: Collective Bias, Central Research, B-Unlimited and capSpire. Collective Bias led the way, coming in at No. 977 with 409 percent growth.

 

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