From little acorns do mighty oak trees grow. Just ask Terry Fulwiler, chairman of WS Packaging Group, Inc. The key to that kind of impressive growth, he'll tell you, is giving every customer "small company" personal service along with "national company" capabilities.

Like an acorn, it would have been hard to predict the future for the converter, founded as Wisconsin Label in 1966 by Ray Fulwiler, Terry's father, and partner Frank Knipfer. The original firm, located in the small Wisconsin town of Algoma, operated out of a 400-sq-ft former veterinary hospital, printing one- to three-color, pressure-sensitive labels for local businesses.

Today, parent holding company WS Packaging, still headquartered in Algoma (pop. 3,357), maintains a stable of 21 manufacturing locations across the country. While the business is still about 80 percent p-s labels, the company also converts sheetfed labels, folding cartons, industrial tags and printed tapes. Retail foods are its primary end market, but customers run the gamut from HBA and household-care to security and medical products.

"Back in 1986, it was basically a Wisconsin company," Fulwiler recounts. "At that time, we decided that we had to go out and be bigger. We began to expand both geographically and in the product lines that we would do."

The first venture, a startup operation called Label Graphix in Heath, OH, was launched to serve existing customers in that market. Over the next decade came acquisitions such as commercial printer Victory Graphics, Milwaukee, for its sheetfed offset and carton cap-abilities; startup Wisconsin Screen Graphics to do silkscreen printing; GA-based Voxcom for more label capacity; and American Creative Packaging for contract-packaging services, among other expansions.

"We wanted to diversify the products that we were doing to differentiate ourselves from all the other label companies out there," Fulwiler says. "About the time we were adding all these companies, we began calling ourselves WL Group to differentiate from Wisconsin Label. Wisconsin seemed a bit parochial, and it wasn't as easy to sell Wisconsin Label in Atlanta."

From about $5 million in sales in 1986, the converter had grown to $100 million and 800 employees when it made its most significant expansion—a merger with Mason, OH-based Superior Label in October 2000. Overnight, the united company gained $50 million in sales, three converting operations, and the status of OEM of Superior Machine Systems label applicators. It also added the expertise of Kenneth B. Kidd, CEO of Superior Label.

Back in 1970, Kidd and his three founding partners started on a path similar to Wisconsin Label. Growth in Superior's business led to additional manufacturing plants in Dallas in 1987 and Phoenix in 1995. The labeling machinery division was built from scratch beginning in the early 1980s.

"There were some tough years with that, trying to build equipment," Kidd recalls. "But that was one thing that makes our company a "systems-oriented" supplier—providing labels and giving service in both areas.

"Terry and I had known each other for a good while," he continues. "We talked about where we were headed with our companies and saw that we were on similar paths."

With the WL-Superior merger came the creation of parent holding company WS Packaging Group, with all businesses operating as wholly owned subsidiaries under their brand names. February 2001 saw the next major move; the acquisition of Label Art, Inc., Wilton, NH, which added another $50 million business to the mix. And in January this year, CA-based Blake Printery joined the team, boosting sales another $20 million.

In melding a dozen converting businesses together into a national powerhouse, many customers might say that the first thing lost is personal service. But Fulwiler, Kidd and other WS managers go out of their way to maintain the small-company touch.

"We present ourselves to customers in two ways," Fulwiler says. "We can be the large national company with a local presence for you, or we can be your local nearby company with large national backing."

In either case, WS seeks to offer as diverse a product mix as possible and act as a true "one-stop shop" for end users big and small. Besides p-s labels, the company's various operations can also provide a frozen-pizza maker, for example, with folding cartons, in-pack coupons, static-cling labels for supermarket-freezers, retail-shelf dangler tags, and large promotional floor signage.

For larger customers, security is the watchword, both in terms of having secure facilities and a number of operations available nationwide. Fulwiler says, "We can give them the best of both worlds, the kind of preferential treatment for being a really large customer without the fear of putting a large order in and bogging us down."

The personal touch extends to one of WS Packaging's latest services: online order placement and tracking via password-protected access to its Web site.

Fulwiler and Kidd would immediately say that doubling the size of WS in less than two years is certainly not without its challenges. But doing your homework helps.

"One of the biggest advantages among the companies, which was by design when we were looking for partners, was these are really additive acquisitions," Fulwiler says. "Between Wisconsin and Superior there was less than one or two percent overlap of customers. With Label Art, there was much less than one percent overlap because the products and markets they focus on were completely different."

Corporate culture, though, is something else. "We were also careful that these are companies that have a culture fit with us," he says.

"We want to be able to trade technology back and forth, both hardware and people skills," Fulwiler continues. "We've done training with each other so we can find and trade best practices."

"We may find that one facility needs a new capability or new capacity," he adds, "and we can find a piece of machinery in-house for that, while the machinery that was displaced can actually be an upgrade for another facility."

WS is no stranger to capital-equipment purchasing. Some recent installations include three Mark Andy 2200 presses (one 13-in. 10-color, two 10-in. 8-color); a 16-in. 10-color Mark Andy 4150 press with two Stork screenheads; an 18-in. 10-color Comco Commander press; three label rewinders, one each from Aztech, Deacro and KTI; a 13-in. 10-station IR dryer from Xeric Web; a 9 x 9-in. 2-head hot-stamping system from NewFoil Machines; and a 30 x 40-in. DuPont Cyrel® FAST 100TD flexo platemaker.

Printing processes are all-encompassing: flexo and UV flexo primarily for p-s labels but also offset for sheetfed labels and cartons, silk-screen and rotary-screen on combination presses, and digital ink-jet.

How does the converter work with suppliers? Its size, Fulwiler admits, makes WS a preferred customer to most vendors. "We're well known to all the suppliers in this industry and are targeted by all of them. We never need to seek them out, exactly. It's amazing how easily they can find Algoma."

As for raw materials, WS counts Fasson, Green Bay Packaging, MACtac, 3M and Raflatac among its p-s labelstock providers. Can WS demand the price it wants for stock, and get it? "I think that's going a little too far to say that," Fulwiler counters. "Our purchases are in multiple millions of dollars. We're also trying to get the best value for our money; no different than what our customers do to us."

With almost two years of the Superior merger and Label Art acquisition to look back on, Fulwiler believes the businesses have meshed together well. Rather than being complete, he says, the transition is a continuous improvement process.

"Ten years from now, you could probably still find some things we could do to make the synergies better, but we've made great strides and continue to go forward. We do a lot of homework; the bad surprises are minimized."

"We've worked out some of the wrinkles and had to do some other things due to the slower marketplace," Kidd adds. "We expect better things ahead."

Kidd gives special credit to WS Packaging's employees and their range of expertise across all of the converter's different businesses for the smoothness of the merger.

"It's one thing to consolidate, but it's another thing to integrate," he says. "That's what you'll talk about over time. The real key is good communications and dedication to what you're doing."

Editor's Note: At presstime, WS Packaging had just acquired IdentiGraphics Inc., Portland, OR. The move further expands WS' capabilities into digital printing and its geographic reach into the Pacific Northwest. See related feature on page 78.