May in the central Upper Peninsula can still be late winter, and I got a taste of that Saturday when the Great Lakes IT Report's Allegedly Spring Tech Tour 2009 hit Marquette.
While snowflakes flew by outside in the 34-degree temperatures, I talked to online entrepreneurs making a serious go of it in the North Woods.
My first visitor was David Ollila, founder and president of Marquette-based V.I.O. Inc., a manufacturer of point of view cameras and helmet cam accessories.
Ollila, a veteran UP mountain biker, founded the company 10 years ago so he could more easily show his buddies the crazy stuff he did on two wheels. Early versions weren't much more than a camcorder strapped to his helmet and a VCR and power supply in a backpack.
Today's sleek units feature tiny cameras the size of a pinky finger and solid-state recording units not much bigger than a cell phone. They're still used by extreme athletes but also increasingly in the surveillance and law enforcement markets.
As for sales in this economy, Ollila siad, "We're doing OK. We're waiting for the second shoe to drop, but so far so good." The company posted sales of $5.4 million last year and so far this year sales are up 14 percent. About 60 percent of the company's sales are in Europe, which he said "helps quite a bit."
Ollila said the company has several new growth initiatives in the works that he's not quite ready to talk about and is increasingly emphasizing sales in the commercial, industrial and tactical markets, incuding a lot of monitoring and safety applications.
And life isn't getting any easier: "When I started this company 10 years ago we had zero competitors. Now we have probably 30 competitors, or as I call them, enablers, because they help build awareness of a market we spearheaded."
Coolest of all, V.I.O. is now the official camera of Nitro Circus, a sort of slightly-grown-up Jackass show on MTV where young men do exceptionally stupid things, usually avoiding injury.
V.I.O. is also leading a reverse charge in terms of offshoring.
"We're in the process of shifting manufacturing to the United States," he said. "We're building a pretty compelling Midwest story and especially a compelling Michigan story. "We're learning that the cost of doing business in China really is equal to the cost of doing businss in the U.S. when it comes to manufacturing."
Soon, V.I.O.'s units will be designed in partnership with a company in Holland, Twisthink, and built by a company in Indiana.
V.I.O. now is up to 20 employees in Marquette (from three 10 years ago). And Ollila said the company is a good example of what entrepreneurship can do in Michigan.
"We're not a GM, but 100 companies like us are," he said. "I would say we hvae officially graduated from startup to second-stage company that has a significant impact on the local and state economy."
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
I also spoke to Justin Sailor, proprietor of a very cool online store, www.yoopersteez.com, offfering T-shirts and UP gear.
You may remember Sailor from his 2006-07 Hometown Invasion tour, where he traveled all 50 states with the aim of staying with people he'd never met.
Sailor, a native of Baraga, returned home to the U.P. after graduating from Michigan State University and established Youper Steez.
"When I was on my tour I got a lot of shirts from very specific locations," he said. "When I came back to the U.P. I saw a need for a little more stylish branded T-shirt, and one more geared to the younger generation as well."
Sailor designed both the Web site and its signature shirt, a plain shirt with a silhouette map of the UP.
He said the shirts are selling briskly, but "the real pull to the Web site is the blog. We offer fresh and interesting perspectives on the UP, covering the fun stories."
The biggest market for the shirts, he said, is likely to be "UP expats" -- those who grew up there, or who attended Michigan Technological University or Northern Michigan University, then later moved away.
And the site is drawing worldwide attention.
"Just a week ago I shipped a shirt off to Australia, so I now can say they've gone to six of the seven continents -- leaving out Antarctica, which will be difficult but not impossible."
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Yooper Steez is one of the newest U.P. e-retailers but it's also one of many. Others include Ironwood-based Stormy Kromer, manufacturers of the legendary waxed cotton winter cap, at www.stormykromer.com; Marquette's QuickTrophy, a national shipper of trophies and plaques for all types of sporting and other events, at www.quicktrophy.com; and Getz's Department Store of Marquette, which does a fine business in clothing for working folk at www.getzs.com.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
When you walk into Getz's, it's like stepping back in time -- to at least the 1960s, if not the 1880s, when the store was founded. It's that rarity of rarity, the hometown downtown department store. (Hometown downtown department stores haven't survived in many places -- RIP Hudson's in Detroit, Gilmore's in Kalamazoo, Milliken's in Traverse City, among many others).
You can credit the internet in part.
"We'd still exist as a store," insists Getz's manager, Dennis Mingay. "The store business is still good, but there isn't a lot of growth. Right now our business is 70 percent Internet and 30 percent store."
Mingay said he attended a meeting in Marquette over a decade ago on the commercial potential then-new World Wide Web. He said it "made sense to me what we could do online with the Carhartt brand specifically," so he proposed selling goods online to the store's owners and the Detroit-based work clothing retailer Carhartt. Getz's became the world's second Carhartt online retailer in 1997.
"At that time we didn't even have a computer at Getz's," Mingay said. "My daughter, in the seventh grade at the time, would print out the orders from our computer at home and help us ship out the orders."
Today, Getz's online business employs about 25 people, inlcuding 12 in IT and customer service. The downtown store's third floor -- part of which has hardwood floors and a tin ceiling, and was thus pretty obviously once retail space, and the other part of which used to be a dance hall and still has a stage -- serves as the online store's warehouse.
"We stock everything Carhartt makes in every size they make," Mingay said. "That allows us to ship orders the same day they are received."
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
Saturday afternoon is traditionally the Give Matt A Breather portion of the Tech Tour, and so I pointed the Tech Tour La Fontaine GMC Yukon Hybrid out Marquette County Road 550 to Big Bay, one of the most scenic areas in northern Michigan.
I stopped at the Thunder Bay Inn just to check it out -- it's better known as the courthouse from the 1950s classic movie "Anatomy of a Murder."
And who did I bump into but its brand-new general manager and chef, Duke Peacock.
Peacock and his parents, Wayne and Gretchen, took over the inn just last October. They took two months to remodel before reopening in December.
Besides a terrific little restaurant, the inn has 12 rooms available for rent. They range from a small room with a sink and a shared bathroom down the hall ($60) to a huge two-bedroom suite that sleeps four and has its own huge front porch ($120 -- a heck of a bargain). I toured the rooms and they're lovely, full of period furniture and antiques. (A warning, though: no TVs!)
Duke Peacock said all food at the inn is homemade, and he says he's been told his Friday night Lake Superior whitefish fry is the best in the U.P.
He said he was managing a resort banquet kitchen in San Diego when his parents told him they were buying the inn. The family is originally from Michigan, though Wayne and Gretchen had been living most recently in Atlanta, Ga. before retiring to the Petoskey area. Friends in Marquette told them about the Thunder Bay Inn's availability, and they decided retirement was overrated.
Duke Peacock said the family's still working on a Web site for the inn.
After visiting the Inn, I headed northwest as far as you can go on County Road KK, and learned that yes indeed, there really is a Checkpoint Charlie guard shack at the entrance of the Huron Mountain Club, one of the most exclusive resorts on the planet, for mega-millionaires only. (See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huron_Mountain_Club.)
Sunday, I'm headed back below the bridge for Monday's visit to the Tri-Cities, Saginaw, Bay City and Midland.
E-Mail Story
Print Story
