Early Years In The Warehouse

1998 was a big year for School-Pak.

Having outgrown Corpus Christi’s library, we were in need of some warehouse space. What a shock to find out how much that space would cost.

Years earlier I had worked for and with Bill Kesselman (from part 2 of the School-Pak story). As a well connected Milwaukee businessman, he provided us with a list of his friends to see who could help us out.

That brought us to Max Gendelman. Max, I believe, was the founder of National Hardware and, after selling the company, had a lot of warehouse space available. My meeting with Max went well, with him basically saying, “If Bill sent you over, we can make something happen.”

Our first area was a 40 by 40 foot warehouse space. We moved our computers (we now had 2!), our production shelves and all of our stock into the space. A small corner of the room became our lunch area.

We were so excited to have finally “grown up”. And then, our first business crisis occurred.

A phone call from the our rep at a school planner company called and asked when we had opened up a location in Arizona.

Apparently, some one was using a mis-spelled version of schoolpak.com for their website.

We made a number of inquiries and found a company named Innovative Learning Products (ILP) located in Phoenix. We made contact with the owner, Ray Lopez. Ray suggested we meet to see how we could “work together”.

We flew out to meet with him and were not “sold” on his ideas. His hope was to flood the boxes, inside and out, with advertising from different companies. Schools at that time were very much against providing advertising to their students so we walked away. Ray eventually sold his company to Innisbrook and went to work for them.

Innisbrook continued to use the name as they expanded into the kit business. Customers and potential schools that went searching for us ended up with Innisbrook. Repeated attempts to get them to stop were ignored. We spent close to $9,000 in legal fees and were finally advised that, even if we spent $90,000 fighting them, they could simply stop using the address and we wouldn’t be able to recover any damages. The big guys would win. Except…

We registered a domain with "Innisbrook.com" spelled as "Inisbrook.com". We started getting their email requests. It took less than a month for them to contact us and exchange domains. Unfortunately they continue to use “Back-To-School Packs” for their kits. That still causes confusion in the marketplace but we’ve learned to live with it.

So here we were, back in Milwaukee, making packs and growing. But we needed even more space. So two years later, we broke into the next room and actually ended up with some office space.

We had made it. We thought.

The Beginnings of School-Pak, Part 1

I had mentioned on our facebook page that we were entering our 23^rd year. Boy, that time went fast.

Someone messaged me asking how everything began. So I thought I’d share a little bit about our story.

It was August of 1991 when Terri went shopping for our son, Nick’s, school supplies. Like so many people, she grabbed that list and went off to the store. We didn’t have WalMart’s in Milwaukee back then so the first destination was Target. She couldn’t find everything on the list so the next stop was K-Mart. Not good. Office Depot? Office Max? Walgreens? It didn’t matter. No one carried all the things needed.

Back in the 90’s, there was an organization named SHOPA that catered to all the major suppliers. They were the ones who selected colors for the upcoming sales year. Purple colored folders were available in 1990 but not in 1991.

Terri followed a mother and daughter from store to store looking for that elusive purple folder. Finally, the mother grabbed a folder from the shelf and a Sharpie. She wrote “purple” on the folder and gave it to her daughter with the instruction, “She can take it up with me”, referring to the teacher.

Of course, the little girl was in tears realizing she was the only kid in the school without a purple folder. Which actually wasn’t the case in the end.

So Terri came home, sat down at the kitchen table and said, “There has to be a better way for families to enjoy summer than getting into arguments at the store.” And so, School-Pak took root.

We spoke to our son’s principal at St. Catherine’s school in Milwaukee about providing a kit with everything on the teachers’ lists. She agreed to let us give it a try and also let us use her name with some other Archdiocesan schools.

That first year we worked with 7 schools. We still provide kits to St. Catherine’s, St. Monica’s, St. Jude’s, St. Mary Visitation and Holy Family. Unfortunately the other 2 closed, as so many Catholic schools do in large cities.

Buying product was the real issue. If we bought it at retail, we couldn’t make any money selling it to the parents. So we started searching for sources. Our other son, Jason, made contact with a school supply company in Skokie, IL, Swenson’s School Supplies. Karen Swenson was kind enough to help us get started by providing items at a very minimum markup.

We also started shopping the sales at the stores, but we knew that couldn’t work for long. We needed to find a way to buy direct from manufacturers. Our first contact was with Crayola and it was an interesting start.

To be continued

Gene

Random thoughts as school approaches

Kept thinking about the following last night while trying to sleep:

Random Thought 1 

 Our local Walgreens is promoting a free back-to-school supply event. You go into Walgreens, purchase the items (of course Walgreens isn't discounting the items) and place them into a bin. Makes Walgreens look good (and profitable) helping out kids. Why don't they just donate the items?

The same goes for Wal-Mart, now having a special give-away. C'mon. Why not just donate the items and not sell them? It's no different than the food stores that ask for donations at Thanksgiving and Christmas. It's not really coming out of their pocket. Every year we're asked by non-profits across the country for donations. We do donate to a number of causes but we don't sell them the items.

Random Thought 2

Just had to deal with a school that was asking for a specific sketch book, a Strathmore one. They were for all students in the school from Kindergarten to Grade 8. We were able to supply (our price is just under $9 for the book) to those who bought School-Paks. But what about those parents that didn't order from us. Where do they find it?

We found them at an art store for $19.95 each. Do teachers realize what some of these items cost? Does a Kindergarten child need that quality? Just wondering.

The same goes for specialty compasses, protractors, pens, etc. What happened to common products? Parents are not going to find some of these specialty items without making numerous trips to numerous stores. Of course, that makes us look good. :)

Random Thought 3

Since we're limited by inventory and workers, we close our final ordering date in late July. So how should we answer "Hi, I see that you are out of stock and don't have any more packs. Can we still order?"

Huh? If we're "Out of Stock" it means we're "Out of Stock".

Most schools start taking orders in March giving the parents up to 4½ months to place their order. I'm not sure why they procrastinate for that long.

I wish we could keep enough inventory in stock for the entire year but it's just not possible. 

Random Thought 4

Without a doubt our economy is still struggling. According to the "economic gurus" we need to stimulate the economy again to propel consumer buying. If enough people buy items, we'll need more workers goes the story. So Terri came up with a brilliant idea. We've tried sending it to elected officials but our campaign donations are non-existent so we never get a reply.

Terri is suggesting that the next stimulus be the issuance of debit cards to citizens. The amount doesn't matter (we didn't go that deep into it) but there would be a 180 day expiration date. The cards could only be used for purchases and could not be used to put money in the bank or pay bills.

Just think of a few hundred million citizens with a $300 - $500 debit card purchasing items. The Consumer Spending Index should go through the roof.
Remember, you read it here first!

Summer's half over

Summer keeps speeding by and we're getting a lot of orders. Hard to believe that we're at the half-way point. And we're having a problem with a large supplier, Mead. Apparently the "big" retailers (Wal-Mart, Amazon, etc)have items made specially for them by Mead. So when customers go shopping and find something they like, they ask to put it into a School-Pak. But Mead has restrictions on selling the items to us. They have to get a release from these retailers. That takes us out of the running if a school is asking for the product. We have an agreement with Mead for their products but these don't show up in their catalog as they are specially made. I guess exclusivity is what all of us retailers would like. It's hard enough to stay competitive with multi-million dollar companies. We'd just like a level playing field when it comes to product accessibility. On a side note, teachers are still asking for items that haven't been made for years. We keep getting requests for "Spacemaker" pencil boxes. Sorry. These haven't been around for about 5 years. Teachers may be using "Spacemaker" as a generic term. Unfortunately, parents that go shopping will be looking for it. The same with "Duo-Tang" folders. They're history. The company that bought their manufacturer dropped the name. But back to the good news. The temperature today is a little more comfortable in the warehouse and our workers (college and high school students)are doing an incredible job this summer.

What's a Brand name product?

Recently I had a conversation with one of our schools that had been approached by a competitor who had offered prices much lower than ours. I asked for a copy of their list (without their pricing) to see what was being offered. Here's what I found:

The other company used some familiar brands, like Dixon and Fiskars. However, they didn't identify which Dixon or Fiskars product they would be using. While both of these companies offer lower priced items in their lines, we've always used the Ticonderoga pencils (asked for by many teachers) and have always offered the Fiskars For Kids brand of scissors.

We've also found that a number of companies are calling their company brands as Name Brand products. Sorry. Elmers is the name brand for glue and glues sticks, not "S*****S, or *O***** ****t. (I really don't want to promote them. :) )

So what does it mean in the end? If the teachers and parents are looking for the highest quality products from companies they've become familiar with, that's what we do.

"Just keepin' it real" (Randy Jackson)