It only took nine years for Centralia’s Quick Quotes Scrapbook Company to grow out of its original garage space into its current 13,000-square-foot facility on Northpark Drive in the Port of Centralia Industrial Park.
The thriving company today has a well-established foothold in the multi-million dollar global scrapbooking market, shipping its products to wholesale and mail-order retail customers all over the world. Yet despite its growth and success, the company remains a surprisingly small, family-owned and operated business, one that’s literally been home-grown in Lewis County.
“We’ve been able to survive (by) changing and adapting and finding new profit centers within our current market, and attracting new customers that way,” Andy Millet, treasurer and business director, and son-in-law of company President Patsy Gaut, said.
Translation: the company’s rise in the scrapbooking industry didn’t happen without careful planning, foresight and a lot of hard work.
Company Born in Glenoma
Most scrapbooking enthusiasts in the U.S. are women — 98 percent, according to LoveToKnow.com, an industry media website. Collectively, they spent nearly $4 billion on scrapbooking in 2009, according to the Craft and Hobby Association.
Scrapbooking has become so popular, there are even entire ocean cruises specifically focused on scrapbooking devotees.
It’s old-school photo albums on estrogen therapy — instead of pages of photos stuck indifferently between cardboard and acetate, the scrapbooking craft adds contextual flair using ribbons, colored and textured paper, tags, quotes and poems, and other craft-methods that add spice to otherwise dry family photos.
Add a dash of modern computer technology and a pinch of good timing to all of this, and an astute entrepreneur might see an opportunity.
Carving a Niche
Patsy Gaut and her daughter, Breezy Jennings, recognized that opportunity and began carving out a niche in 2001 from Gaut’s Glenoma garage when they started a company called Quick Quotes.
Gaut, a sort of local wordsmith, began helping her daughter’s friends with their scrapbooking hobby by writing and printing out her own quotes and poems, Millet said. The hobbyists would then use Gaut’s words to accent and create themes for their scrapbooking projects. It was the birth of “instant journaling.” That initial effort later expanded and grew around the then-emerging digital photography market.
“Without people printing pictures, we wouldn’t be in business,” Millet said of the instant journaling kits they now sell.
“Digital photography can be made into art” Jennings, now company operations manager and vice president, said. “A lot of what we sell is art pieces for the wall.”
Quick Quotes’ niche now includes education and training in scrapbook “instant journaling” — pre-packaged scrapbooking kits that focus on framing customer’s digital photos in a variety of different themes, materials, colors, and ideas, and producing standalone materials for the wholesale market.
The company has maintained a presence in scrapbooking trade shows since before Millet and his wife merged with Quick Quotes. As part of a diversification effort, in 2009 the company launched three-day “Private Reserve Educational Weekends” that was exclusive to the company’s products. They have taught as many as 30,000 scrapbookers each year how to incorporate instant journaling and kit products into their personal hobby. Private Reserve weekends are now 25 percent of the companies revenue.
“When people come to our events we want them to feel part of our family,” Millet said.
“We want to be the number-one educators and resource for people,” Millet said. “We want to be the source and inspiration for what people take photographs of ... and make it easy for people to do what they want with their pictures,” and mementos of their life.
Real Grass Roots
The business of creating vellum strips of poems and quotes for scrapbookers grew quickly. In 2002, after a year working from their Glenoma garage, Gaut and Jennings opened a retail space in downtown Centralia, then later moved the business to Longview. But the wholesale side of the business continued to grow while the brick-and-morter retail end fizzled. The retail side was eventually abandoned, and the company moved into a “little house” with a garage near W.F. West High School in Chehalis to focus on the wholesale market.
“We’ve used a couple of different garages in our move,” Jennings said with a chuckle. “We sometimes ran machines 24 hours a day to keep up with demand.”
Meanwhile, Millet and his wife Stacy, Gaut’s other daughter, were separately making and selling scrapbooking kits that included products being made by Quick Quotes. The couple traveled the country attending trade shows where they held scrapbooking how-to courses. In 2005, in what seemed a natural progression, the Millet’s merged their kit-and-education business with Quick Quotes. That same year the augmented company moved to a “larger” 1,500-square-foot location on Jackson Highway. They outgrew that space in about a year, Millet said. The company was forced to find other off-site space to augment their needs.
“We were spread over four different locations,” Jennings recalled.
It “sucked a whole bunch of resources,” and was very inefficient, Millet said. Quick Quotes hired a business development specialist in 2006 to help guide a three-phase expansion, according to company business documents supplied to The Chronicle by Millet. The goal was, in a word, efficiency. Production, sales and profits all increased as a result.
Finally, in 2009, they found a space large enough to consolidate their segmented operations into a single location on Northpark Drive. And with the move came “all kinds of efficiencies,” Millet said.
All In The Family
“We’re all local people that have been able to come together,” Millet said of the company’s employees.
Quick Quotes is “one big family” that includes immediate family members, a couple of cousins here and there, and a few close friends thrown into the mix, Millet said. At one time the company employed two people with the same name. Methods of differentiation soon emerged, according to Jennings. “Babysitter Mary” took care of Jennings’ kids at her home while simultaneously assembling instant journaling kits. “Garage Mary” was a family friend who operated a laser-cutting machine that sliced the company’s signature shapes from card stock in one of the early garage manufacturing facilities.
Today the company employs five part-time and 11 full time employees, all related by blood or friendship.
Looking Ahead
The company is operating efficiently in its new location, according to Millet. Between 2002 and 2009 the company grew from over $63,000 in sales revenue to $1.2 million, according to company documents. Revenues in 2011 are expected to exceed $1.6 million.
•••
Lee Hughes: (360) 807-8239
