One Good Idea
From a single Hallmark, Ideation grew into a catalog for hundreds of stores, in print and online.
Meredith Schwartz -- Gifts and Dec, 8/21/2010 6:55:21 AM
From a single Hallmark, Ideation grew into a catalog for hundreds of stores, in print and online.
Tom Ungrodt is celebrating his family's half-century anniversary in business. But though he is president of Ideation, it's not exactly Ideation's 50th anniversary - the catalog is a youthful 47. Ungrodt's father opened his first retail store on March 21, 1960.
It was one of the first Hallmarks in Michigan, located an hour south of Ann Arbor. He worked two jobs, and his employer "allowed him the luxury of going down almost every evening," Ungrodt said.
The store was about 2,000 square feet, and in the first full year he did $38,000 in volume. "Needless to say, he lost money," Ungrodt recalls.
In 1962, he built another store in Ann Arbor. But that was only the beginning of the retail businesses' fluctuations. He closed that store, bought and sold others: at its peak the family owned seven, though they weren't all Hallmarks. "We really ran five for a long time. We had some empty space in a building we owned so we put a store of our own in there as a temporary fill, says Ungrodt. The store did reasonably well until it was replaced by a Starbucks. These days, the Ungrodts have three stores, all within 45 minutes of Ann Arbor.
Of course, retail isn't the only arrow in Ungrodt's quiver. "We've been in the store fixturing business, we've been in the import business, we've done a little bit of everything," says Ungrodt. Their single biggest venture is the catalog. In 1963, his father incorporated Ideation with two other independent Hallmark owners in the Detroit area as partners. "My dad bought the Albert Price catalog one year, didn't like it and said, ‘why don't we just do this ourselves?'" Ungrodt reminisces. Today, the catalog goes out to about 400 retail locations, owned by about 150 companies.
Ungrodt isn't planning to rest on his father's laurels. "My dad was of the generation that said, ‘the Internet, forget it, we're not going to deal with it,'" says Ungrodt. "When I bought the business seven years ago, one of my pushes was to get individual stores to get involved and get websites. We're progressing with that nicely. They can take our catalog and put it on the Internet." In addition, Ungrodt is constantly testing new products and vendors in his stores and, if they succeed, adding them to the catalog. At the same time, the company has pared down its vendor list. Explains Ungrodt. "We don't have a rule about repeats or new vendors, it's just our industry is constantly changing and you have to stay ahead of the curve."
Ungrodt is throwing his company a 50th birthday party in October., which will include an invitation-only reception, a silent charity auction, guest appearances and giveaways.
Says Ungrodt. "It's hard to believe it's been half a century in this business. I was just a little tiny kid when it got started."
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