MaverickLabel.com.
Dot Com Label Mavericks? OK, so the real name of the company is MaverickLabel.Com. But the former is more descriptive, because this is an internet company ... supplying labels ... in a different and inventive way. Maverick sees itself first and foremost as a web technology company, providing an interface for the customer into the world of ordering labels--a label "portal"--which can simplify the process of ordering almost any kind of label or tag, regardless of the manufacturing method."Our driving focus is to make label ordering easy for the customer," says CEO Mark Trumper. "We know that there are many different places people can order labels, but finding the right one is difficult enough. Then, having to navigate the vast array of options any one manufacturer may present makes it even more daunting. Only after dealing with a great deal of complexity might the customer realize that there is a mismatch between their needs and the vendor's offerings. Our goal is to fix that problem. We offer a complete set of labeling solutions--virtually any kind of label or tag, produced on all kinds of equipment--in any quantity the customer might want. And we do it with an integrated, consistent interface to a set of intelligent online quoters, for an intuitive shopping experience."
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The company keeps everything close to the vest. They don't reveal any details about their converting equipment. They don't discuss sales figures, the size of the operation, or even how many employees they have. However, they do encourage people to stop on by--not at their Edmonds, WA, USA offices--but online, at the website.
While many label companies have moved some of their sales efforts to the web, Maverick has taken all of its operations online. Through its technology, the company tightly integrates the customer, its Customer Care department, production, and accounting. Each has a "dashboard" through which they can see the current status of any job connected to them. Customers can tap into their own web portal to get updates on progress or find shipping status and tracking numbers: they also can reorder any previous job. Customer Care can get a quick overview of every job they are tracking, including alerts when something requires their attention. Through, their dashboard, each production facility can see every one of the jobs they have in house, update statuses and tracking numbers, or communicate with Maverick's Customer Care department. Accounting gets updates of invoice changes and shipping to trigger billing. All this happens in real time from the moment the customer orders on Maverick's website, until the order is shipped and billed.
Maverick acknowledges that there are companies that offer competing products on websites, but may specialize in one, or just a handful of product lines. "There are sites that offer asset tags and others that offer parking permits, or bumper stickers, golf club labels, control panels, or full color prime labels," says Trumper. "But MaverickLabel.Com integrates virtually anything that sticks, and some things that don't, into one consistent interface. Our patented 'UberQuoter' system can match the customer's needs with the appropriate technology, helping to optimize the product, quantity, time, and cost."
Maverick emphasizes its short run capabilities and speed, with quantities as low as one, and production time often measured in hours. Because of its web technology, Maverick can make a profit on very small orders, where the total invoice might be less than what it costs some companies just to take an order. And Maverick has developed proprietary technologies for producing many of these small orders. But, for Maverick, short runs are often the prelude to longer runs, as customers prototype, do product introductions, and ramp up for full production. Maverick meets those needs, all with the same interface, and the online customer interface. The customer just needs to log in to their account, pick their past job number (usually displayed as a small graphic of the label itself along with job numbers and ordering history), and 'quote' the new order for that job. The UberQuoter will automatically pick the best option to produce that quantity and get it to the customer within their specified time constraints.
MaverickLabel.Com has gone "all in" when it comes to its commitment to technology. Just consider its staffing allocation. While it never make public any absolute numbers, Maverick will go so far as to say that a full third of its staff is dedicated to their IT department. It has no sales force whatsoever; 100 percent of the sales effort is web based. Says Trumper, "Google is our best sales rep, and our website is the only portal into which orders our placed."
This online label presence did not come about by accident. It took a confluence of technologies, timing, and the right people coming together. Maverick was founded in 1994 by Rick Kent, the company's current president and chief science officer. Kent is an MD by education, and Maverick was started as a media company, producing high tech interactive video programming, primarily in the medical field. A need for short run packaging options led to development of media labels. That led to developing other industrial short run labels. And a need for low cost distribution led to what Kent says was the first purely online web quoting and ordering system in the industry. Mark Trumper, a tennis buddy of Kent's, joined Maverick in 2000, bringing 25 years of print and print distribution management experience, along with a whole lot of business acumen. Kent and Trumper saw the opportunity that a full service web portal for labels presented, thus turning the focus of the company to its website. And today's MaverickLabel.Com was the result.
Maverick constantly surveys its customers--electronically of course, using the very same web interface--to look for deficiencies, or places where they could do better. "What we are amazed at is the overwhelmingly super positive feedback we get," says Trumper. "Yes, it happens that we fall down with an occasional order, but the vast majority of our customer feedback is telling us that we are on the right course. And for those rare occurrences where we do not meet the customer's expectations, we strive to make it right, and to fix our system to prevent whatever caused the problem in the first place."
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The result of MaverickLabel.Com's business model has been an average sales growth of more than 30 percent year to year. The customer base ranges from very small businesses to Fortune 100 companies, Kents says, and adds that even with the current recession, though Maverick did experience a downturn in sales, it was very small when compared to the slowdown in the overall economy "I think this may be due to a somewhat paradoxical effect of the recession," says Kent. "The general trend in customer behavior is to move toward purchasing on the web. This has been slow in the label industry in general, due to the complexity of the product, and due to a very fragmented market of suppliers. Recessions however push customers to look for less expensive, shorter runs, and faster alternatives. The natural place to look is on the web. And when they do a search for virtually any label type, they find MaverickLabel.Com."
In terms of future growth, the company is excited about the resurgence in the economy they have seen, and are forecasting international markets expanding at a rapid clip. The IT team is perpetually at work to improve its web interface, and add new choices for customers.
"We have a whole lot of exciting projects waiting to come online. Stop by any time and take a look. The address is www.MaverickLabel.Com," says Kent.
MaverickLabel.com
800-537-8816
www.mavericklabel.com
Growth: 30 percent per year Annual Sales: Undisclosed Employees: Undisclosed Presses: Undisclosed
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| Title Annotation: | Companies to Watch |
|---|---|
| Author: | Katz, Steve |
| Publication: | Label & Narrow Web |
| Date: | Oct 1, 2010 |
| Words: | 1299 |
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