By Michael F. Carmichael
June 17, 2010
Anita Crook was working for her husband when, six years ago, she received a new purse from her son for Christmas.
| Anita Crook, founder of Pouchee. |
|
It was a great purse, an expensive, thoughtful gift – just not for Crook. It was a big empty bag with a designer logo. There was nowhere to put anything that she might ever find again. Her lipstick would roll under her wallet and hide there until the shade went out of fashion. Her car keys would hook up with her cell phone to become a tangled disaster waiting to fall in a parking lot puddle. Her license and credit cards were “in there somewhere.” Crook’s solution: the Pouchee.
It’s a smallish fabric container with pockets of varying sizes to hold lipstick, wallet, car keys, cell phone, license, credit cards and other must-haves. It has large handles so that it can be easily retrieved from a cavernous larger purse or even a backpack.
And, it’s helped bring Crook and her family back from bankruptcy.
Several years ago Crook’s husband “had a manufacturing plant and was doing quite well,” she explains. “He hired a CFO who proceeded to steal three-quarters of a million dollars, shred invoices and deleted my husband’s voice mail so we didn’t realize that we also owed half a million in back invoices. We had to sell everything that we had built up to that point.” He then started a staffing business with his wife as a partner, but it wasn’t that long before she “retired” to follow her idea.
Crook needed a prototype of her Pouchee concept, but since she doesn’t sew, she had a friend’s daughter make the first prototype. “She also had a friend who had purses made overseas.” One conversation networked into another and soon “two thousand Pouchees arrived and I thought I would have them for a lifetime because I don’t sell; I don’t like to sell. My husband and two sons do but I didn’t get that gene,” she laughs.
“I started beating on doors of small retail shops, though,” Crook continues, “with fear and trembling. Everybody loved them. Everybody bought them. I had a hundred percent success for about three or four months.” She reordered 5,000 and “sold those right away. And now I’m getting 15-16,000 a month and keeping an inventory of about 40,000.”
“When you’re 63 years old you have to work a little smarter than when you’re 30,” Crook says. “When you’re 30 you’ve got a little time to waste. I worked out of my garage in the beginning and did everything myself. When I finally did hire an assistant we both worked at my desk and we both went to the garage to ship. I’m working in an office now. I have two full-time and two part-time employees.”
| A Pouchee filled with findable "stuff." |
|
By working smarter Crook “grew incrementally. I never had to borrow any money and have done the whole thing debt-free – which I really like. In the economy we’ve got I continue to grow at about 40-45 percent a year. If tomorrow everybody in the world decided they didn’t want a Pouchee, I don’t owe anybody anything. I’d go home, sell off my inventory and say it’s been fun.
“My goal is to put a Pouchee in the purse of every woman on the planet,” Crook laughs. “I do some online sales because I don’t want anyone to be without a Pouchee – but my marketing strategy has been to sell them through gift boutiques that cater to women. I have avoided the big box stores, even though Target did pursue me as did Macy’s. We did the New York gift show and Macy’s sent three different groups to our booth.”
There’s a decided benefit to selling through smaller retailers, says Crook, besides the fact that she “enjoys working with the small individual stores. It may be harder, because I’m in 1,800-plus stores around the country now, and a lot in Canada and several other countries, but I like doing it that way because it’s a real special product.
“If I were to put them into a major chain or a big box store at the moment it would probably be the end of my business,” Crook continues. “They’d hang the Pouchees on a hook and people would walk by them and say to themselves ‘that’s an odd looking little purse.’ They wouldn’t understand that it isn’t a purse, but goes inside one. They wouldn’t buy it and the big box probably wouldn’t restock them. And, my boutique stores would stop buying from me if I sold them in Wal-Mart or Target.”
Instead, Crook uses sales representatives in the U.S. and a distributor in Canada. “I like doing it this way and I always keep everything new and fresh with new patterns, styles and products.” Asked if Crook would ever consider making a Pouchee for men, Crook explains, “We have a ‘Console Caddy’ that came about because my husband asked me for one of my Pouchees. I’m looking at this six-foot-four guy and asking ‘you need a Pouchee — why?’”
It turns out that he, too, had trouble locating things – not in a purse, but in the console of his new SUV. “He can put a flashlight, tools, pens, spare change – whatever he would throw in the console – and he can find it when he needs it. It’s especially handy when he goes through a car wash because he just pulls it out and doesn’t fear having something happen to the contents.”
| Crook being interviewed by Jack Roper and Kimberly Kelly of Your Carolina morning television program. |
|
With Pouchees being made in China by the thousands has Crook given thought to having them made locally? “I can’t even get somebody to quote for me,” she says with disgust. “Even with the shipping and duties and everything, I can get them made in China for a few dollars. Over here it would cost me $20 to make the same product [they retail for considerably under $50]. The town where I live [in South Carolina] used to be the textile capital of the world. Nobody’s making anything anymore. With labor costs between $15 and $20 an hour it’s just hard to compete. People don’t want to work for less because things are much more expensive here than they are in China. I understand that.”
Does Crook have any advice for budding senior entrepreneurs? “If they have an idea and they just don’t know if it’s worth the time and trouble to pursue it – I say ‘go for it!’ What have you got to lose? Yes, you don’t have the energy in your 60s that you had in your 30s, I definitely don’t. But that’s why I hire people who are young. You have a lot more wisdom when you’re older. You make smarter decisions. The decisions I’ve made are because I have 60-some years of life behind me.”