blitz on the breath mint industry
Susan Nord, SBT Reporter
Steve Schuster, like most entrepreneurs, crams a lot into 24 hours each day. Traveling the world is one of those things.
Schuster, who, along with his sister Heidi Schuster, founded Schuster Marketing Corp. in 1994, could have kept the airline industry profitable over the past few years single-handedly.
“The demands of travel are enormous due to our worldwide scope,” Schuster said in an e-mail interview. “I have been to five countries and four states in the past eight weeks alone. We both may travel anywhere between 50,000 and 200,000-plus miles a year,” he added, referring to himself and Heidi.
That’s a lot of frequent-flyer miles.
And that could be one of the reasons the company, which produces and distributes Blitz Power Mints on a global level, was named to the Metropolitan Milwaukee Association of Commerce’s Council of Small Business Executive’s Future 50 as one of the fastest growing businesses in the area.
The Schuster siblings both worked as international manufacturers’ reps, which gave them the necessary experience to start a company selling their own products around the world.
Blitz Power Mints come in 14 flavors, including espresso and cin-a-clove, and capitalize on Europeans’ tastes for strong breath mints. For various reasons, mints are also easier to sell in worldwide markets.
“Our product, as a food item, has an indefinite shelf life,” Schuster said. “It also is not affected by temperature extremes. The product is sugar-free, too, so there was only a small import duty as sugar is a protected commodity and has high duties.”
Schuster said the company is now vertically integrated due to a recent purchase of its Canadian supplier. As part of the move, one of the supply company’s founders, Tom Holtgen, was brought in as an equal partner in Schuster Marketing. Holtgen provides manufacturing expertise and oversees packaging design, flavor choices and the like, according to Schuster.
Supervising the Canadian factory from Milwaukee presents some challenges, but the company is committed to using technology to solve such problems.
“We had to become more high-tech to compete globally,” Schuster said of the company’s cutting-edge philosophy.
Along with employing Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) with some of the nation’s largest retailers, Schuster Marketing has an ISDN line, monitors the Vancouver, B.C., plant using a Web camera, and in the factory employees check in via a fingerprint on a keypad instead of punching timecards.
And although the company grew from an initial employee count of two in 1994 to 30 in 2000, “it is not our intention to have too many employees but rather to continue to find ways to eliminate the need for labor and automate,” Schuster said.
All the technology can’t overcome old-fashioned industry practices, however, and the firm has had to deal with “slotting” – the accepted practice of paying retailers to gain shelf positions – while trying to expand its market share.
Another obstacle Schuster says the company runs into is the tendency of multinational competitors copying the Blitz product. “It is truly amazing how un-innovative a multi-billion dollar company can be,” he notes.
As for future success, Schuster credits his father, a Marine captain who served in both World War II and the Korean War, for instilling him with a never-say-die attitude: “Personally, I try to treat every day as though it is our first day in business. Persistence, persistence, persistence. Never relent and never quit.”
April 27, 2001 Small Business Times
