Sherwood company sees massive growth Promopeddler.com turns $400 investment into $7 million in revenue By Anthony Roberts The Sherwood Gazette Dec 22, 2006 The average desk is littered with logos. There are coffee mugs with magazine names splashed across the side, calculators decorated with bank logos, and pens bearing the names of prescription drugs. There are high-end items too; embossed laptop cases and leather folders, even computer flash drives.
These giveaways are taken for granted in business, but they're part of a growing $18 billion industry in America. And one of the fastest growing suppliers of those promotional items is based in Sherwood. Promopeddler.com is one of the largest, and first, companies to sell promotional items online in a market previously dominated by door-to-door and catalogue sales.
Inside the business Step off of the elevator into suite 300 at 20015 SW Pacific Highway, and you step directly into Promopeddler's offices. The lobby wall is fire engine red, and a five-foot tall fish tank sits just outside the elevator. Other walls are painted bright yellow and blue, and employees walk past in trench coats, jeans and knit caps. Co-owner, founder and CEO Lew Amicone fits the part. The 34-year old sports a leather coat, shaved head and goatee, and his office is decorated with tokens from his hometown, Pittsburgh, including three "Terrible Towels" and a Steelers flag. Promopeddler looks like a remnant of the late '90s tech boom, when investors were throwing millions at dot com companies staffed by 20-somethings with big ideas, but without the plans to implement them. Nothing could be further from the truth. Promopeddler is still privately owned by Amicone and his original business partner, Monte Baumgartner, who started the company with a $400 investment on slightly damaged office items. They worked 16-hour days at multiple jobs, running the business out of their garages in Gresham and McMinnville, before outgrowing two offices. Now they are ranked No. 107 on the "Inc. 500," a list of America's fastest growing private companies, they are set to make $7.5 million in revenue in 2006. They've been in the top 10 or 15 fastest growing companies in Oregon, as listed by the ‘Portland Business Journal,’ for the past three years. The company employs 34 people and has experienced 865-percent growth over that time period, providing items to companies like Google, Microsoft and Ford.
Finding their niche It all started with a trip to the flea market. Amicone grew up in the Pittsburgh suburb of North Huntington in a family of contractors and mechanics. He tried working full-time to pay his way through college at Penn State for a few semesters before deciding to join the Navy. "I want to turn a wrench," he told the recruitment officers. He wound up working as a machinist on the USS Pennsylvania, a ballistic missile submarine. By 1996, Amicone's armed service stint was up, and the Navy was pushing hard for him to return. But over the past two years he had married and had a one-year old and a newborn. He put out a few resumes and within weeks was interviewing with some of the biggest companies in America. He left the Navy on October 26, 1996, and started working in Intel's semi-conductor unit in Oregon on Nov. 11. During a trip home in 1999, he visited a local flea market with his dad, and stumbled upon a woman selling leather portfolios and other high-end office items with minor blemishes at rock-bottom prices. She explained that they were from a distribution company that customized items for businesses. The company was so big, the damaged items filled an entire warehouse. Amicone returned to Oregon and told Baumgartner about the items. The two had teamed on a few small investment projects, and paid $400 for a pallet of the goods. Those items sat for months as Amicone learned to build a Web page that attracted very little attention. Frustrated, they turned to Ebay. Their items "started flying," Amicone said. They laid down $11,000 for a trailer full of the items, and developed a system. Baumgartner would log the orders and deal with buyers during the day, then send a list to Amicone, who had the items stored in his garage and would package and ship them from the tiny Lafayette Post Office. They sold so much on a consistent basis that the post office's numbers shot up, and the district awarded them with new sorting equipment. In 2001, they struck a deal to get new items, versus the used goods, and had the distributor ship direct to customers. Business was so good that Baumgartner quit his job at Les Schwab, where he'd been for nine years, and went full time. That's when they started researching selling customized items to large businesses. "I was selling 1,000 items to 1,000 different people," Amicone said. "I asked, 'How do I sell 1,000 items to one person?' " He found out soon. With business booming, Baumgartner told Amicone he could no longer go full time alone. By this point, Amicone was a lead technician at Intel with relative job security and a good wage, even though the job market in Oregon was pathetic. But he was tired of the bureaucracy of big companies. "If I'm going to work everyday and be frustrated with things, I at least wanted to be in 100 percent control," he said. "I'd rather take a shot at my own thing and fail than not take a shot at all." He joined Baumgartner full time, and after a slow start, the business took off, even though it's competing against 23,000 other distributors. Amicone said part of the success is being ahead of the curve when it comes to the Web. While door-to-door promotional salespeople can show their products in person, Promopeddler is tapping into the youth movement at businesses. An older executive isn't the one ordering bulk promotional mugs, it's that executive's marketing assistant. Those assistants are often recent college graduates more likely to place an order on the Internet than wade through a sea of catalogues, Amicone said. "Face-to-face and catalogue sales is an ocean, and that ocean has developed a leak and it's trickling. It was a mud puddle, and now it's a small pond, and in the next year or so it's going to be a lake," Amicone said of Web-based promotional sales.
 Quote this article on your site | Views: 11
|
- Please keep the topic of messages relevant to the subject of the article.
- Personal verbal attacks will be deleted.
- Please don't use comments to plug your web site. Such material will be removed.
- Just ensure to *Refresh* your browser for a new security code to be displayed prior to clicking on the 'Send' button.
- Keep in mind that the above process only applies if you simply entered the wrong security code.
|
|
Be first to comment this article
