Caren Schweitzer earned a business degree from the University of Minnesota but wound up as a stay-at-home mom suffering from an entrepreneurial itch that homemaking didn't quite satisfy.
So in 1995 she started a part-time business in the basement of her Plymouth home, supplying promotional products to corporate clients for their branding, marketing and employee incentive programs.
Good thing, too: Shortly after she started the business, Schweitzer's marriage began to unravel and in 1997 she became a single mom with three kids to support. So she transformed her hobby into a full-time enterprise.
The result is Creative Resources Inc., a Hopkins company thriving in an industry crowded by more than 22,000 competitors. With top-tier clients ranging from Supervalu, TCF and Best Buy to MoneyGram International, Health Partners and Aveda, the company grew to 2008 revenue of $2.7 million.
How does she do it? "This is a saturated industry, so the only way to compete is with creativity and 24/7 attention to customer service," said Schweitzer, 49. Translated, that means she aims for design twists that go well beyond the coffee mugs and T-shirts that have branded the industry as a "trash-and-trinkets" business, as she put it.
To promote a new Supervalu beef brand, for example, Creative Resources produced the requisite T-shirts adorned with the corporate name and slogan ("Beef Spoken Here,"), but then wrapped them in old-fashioned butcher paper tied with twine to produce a nostalgic package that might be most familiar to geezers like me.
Then there was the "Back to the '60s" package created for Cub Foods' 40th anniversary, including a colorful "flower-power" bag containing a tie-dyed T-shirt, temporary tattoos that proclaim "I Love My Cub" and strings of colorful beads adorned with the peace sign. Again, a nostalgia trip for us codgers.
Or consider the delightful creation the company came up with as a promotional giveaway for Partnership for Quality Care, a coalition of health-care providers and professionals promoting health-care reform: nonwoven, recyclable blue hospital scrubs carrying the slogan, "Every Patient Matters."