The Miller Group

Source: Retail Digital

Date :27/07/2007 15:07:39

The Miller Group is excelling at creating environments for retailers that bring customers in, and and keep them in the store

Written and produced by David Weldon & Nick Ledue

When retailers reach out to consumers today, increasingly they promote the experience of visiting their stores.

The strategy is critical for retailers, who are faced with growing competition, changing consumer tastes, and shrinking profit margins on sales. So retailers need to not only get customers into their stores, they also to keep them there.

It’s a phenomenon known in the trade as “cross-shopping” — drawing a customer from one department, to another, to another.

The motive of increasing overall sales is obvious. But the methods to do it are usually very subtle. In fact, if the retailer is really at the top of their game, the methods may be quite invisible to the shopper.

But the most effective methods are very clear to Ron Barsalou, chief operating officer at The Miller Group, a retail design, graphics and display fixtures company that works with many of the nation’s top retail chains.

The role of The Miller Group is to help its customers install the signage, promotions, display and total design elements that will appeal to, excite, and effectively navigate shoppers as they visit a retail store.

One for all…

The Miller Group is actually three separate firms recently merged into one expanded product and services company.

The company had its origins as Miller Manufacturing, which began operations in 1897 in Richmond, VA. Miller Manufacturing remained in the Miller family until 1980, when it was sold to its second owner. The third, and present, owner — S. Tucker Grigg Jr. — acquired the company in 1985.

Miller Manufacturing had traditionally done wood based retail display fixtures and furniture items. Approximately 80 percent of the company’s products were being done in wood, according to Barsalou.

Then, in 1988, Miller Manufacturing acquired the Multiplex Company of St. Louis, which had been in operations in that city since 1903. Multiplex brought two key assets to the merger: a history of working primarily with metal in the retail display area, and access to a new West Coast market. While Multiplex makes a variety of store fixtures, it is perhaps best known for the large revolving carpet holding racks in common use in home improvement stores and decorator showrooms.

“It is known as the Multiplex system, and the company has approximately 85 percent of the designer showroom market,” Barsalou says.

The merger of Miller and Multiplex then gave the combined company the ability to produce virtually any fixture design needed, in wood, metal or plastic.

The third leg of the triangle was added in 2002, Barsalou explains, when North Screen Studios (also knows as NS Studios) of Toronto was acquired.

The strategy of adding NS Studios to the family wasn’t to grab a Canadian market, although that certainly did happen. The appeal of North Screen was its “creative studio, devoted to forward thinking, innovative designs,” Barsalou says.

“This closed the loop for us, in terms of being able to provide a total product to retail- from design concepts to the production of product,” Barsalou says.

With NS Studios on board, the new trilogy officially became the Miller Group, and could offer retail customers the ability to take any branding, marketing or display campaign from vision to installation, all in-house, and with rapid turn-around.

“We can do virtually anything needed by the stores,” Barsalou explains.

Miller Group’s designs start with a brainstorming session followed by thumbnail steches. Research is important to review best practices, new substrates and technologies that influence and enhance the project. As Barsalou explains, an important part of designing effective retail space is in knowing how a consumer will react in it.

“When we start to work with a new customer, we get to know who their client is, what the market is, and what the culture of the company is,” Barsalou notes. “We provide solutions.”

Know thyself

One of the biggest cultural challenges the company had to master was its own merger period, Barsalou says.

When Miller Manufacturing and Multiplex joined forces, they were in 1,000 miles apart, largely serving other markets and working with different product materials. That required a great deal of work in integrating the two company processes for virtually everything.

Collectively they began integrating purchasing of raw materials and securing new contracts for each other, by the expanded offering to each other’s clients. Barsalou says the company began importing more materials at the same time, in order to maintain inventory levels where they needed to be, to meet the growing production demands.

Then, with the acquisition of NS Studios, the challenge of integrating a third culture began, and that process is still underway, Barsalou says.

Merging people cultures was fairly painless, Barsalou notes, but integrating technology was a different story. Miller and Multiplex now share an enterprise resource planning (ERP) software platform for sales forecasting, accounting, and order entry functions. The NS Studios group is not on that system — at least yet.

Still, the payoff of welcoming NS Studios was immediate, including new major national accounts such as Sears and Nike.

The NS Studios acquisition also resulted in new investments in technology, such as a $500,000 spider-web printer, as Barsalou calls it. The combined Miller-Multiplex operation had previously been limited to four color process printing in sizes up to five feet by eight feet. It can now do larger, high-definition digital printing with the new press, enabling it to meet virtually any customer demand.

The combined creative and production resources of the three facilities also enable Miller Group to undertake much larger projects, and to provide one-stop-shop services.

A case in point is work being done for a current customer, that Miller Group began working with in January. Miller Group was hired to develop a program around a new private label brand for a department store that would involve five separate departments, and would involve 40,000 SKUs.

After the designing and engineering phase was complete, Barsalou says that Miller Group was given the contract to handle 20,000 of the 40,000 SKU item fulfillments, and has handled the entire process, from conceptual ideas, to design, to prototyping. Manufacturing and order fulfillment will happen in July and August.

“We set up a third warehouse operation on the West Coast to help us with this project,” Barsalou explains.

Fortunately, the growth of the company has also given it flexibility and scalability. Barsalou says Miller Group can now easily add warehousing when needed, import material to supplement project needs or seasonal demands, and will be able to work with more offshore partners in the future.

In the meantime, the challenges of three far-removed locations, with different operational specialties, are forcing the company to reassess itself, and look for efficiencies.

Miller Group is embracing lean manu-facturing processes, and looking at further technology investments to better integrate operations.

From a staffing perspective, Barsalou says the company wanted to get through the merger and acquisition period before adding many employees, since several job roles could change.

Now that the merger impacts are under control, business had grown, and new clients have been acquired, Barsalou says the next immediate concern will be evaluating the geographic challenges of the three facilities.

The internal debate for Miller Group is over the advantages of far removed facilities in terms of serving a broader market, verses the added cost of maintaining those remote and separate operations.

The good news, however, is that no matter which course the company takes, Barsalou says the immediate future looks very bright.

“It has taken time to get the integration under control,” he says, “but it looks like we’re on the cusp of a huge explosion in new business. I expect to see new lists of clients and lots of new types of projects.”