“You have to make 200 mistakes before you're going to be successful,” says Ben Clark, CEO of Ann Clark. “The faster you can make the mistakes, the faster you'll be successful. Mistakes are the tuition you pay for success.”
Clark has been going at rocket speed for over two decades, building Ann Clark up to become the world’s largest maker of cookie cutters out of a well-hidden business park building just off Route 7 in Rutland.
Born and raised in Rutland, Clark arrived in Vermont thanks to his parents, John and Ann, who moved here in the 1960s because they didn’t want to raise their kids in Washington, DC.
“My mom studied art,” Clark says, “she's always been an artist. My dad was a construction consultant, which came to a halt in the recession of the late 1980s. So they were looking for something else to do, and my mom had drawn a pig, and they had a cookie cutter made out of it… They took it to a wholesale gift show and they sold a bunch of gift products in the shape of the pig… Then they added a cow and a sheep, got rid of some products, added more shapes, got rid of products, and they ended up as a cookie cutter company.”
John and Ann would buy the cookie cutters from a Pennsylvania company, tie on cookie recipe cards Ann had researched and designed, and then resell them as gift items to specialty retailers.
“We'd come home for Christmas,” Clark recalls, “and the phone would ring. True story. I answered the phone, and someone says, ‘Hi, can I place an order?’ I'm like, ‘What?’
“Inventory? All over the living room. Garage, full. Basement, full… Then they came up with the idea of doing custom shapes… Your logo was a cookie cutter was our thing. So that began to grow…”
Soon, the company had grown enough that John and Ann moved it out of the house and into a rented warehouse space.
Meanwhile, Ben says he and his wife “were an early thirties couple doing well, loving life... And then, when my wife was pregnant with our oldest daughter, Margaret, who's now 27, I said, ‘Let's move back to Vermont.’ My wife replied, ‘We talked about this, and you said, “No never would you ever, never, never, never [move back].” Right. So we started having that conversation and then I talked to my parents about it, and said, ‘Hey, how about I join the business?’ And they said, ‘Well we couldn't afford you.’ And I said, ‘If you hire me, that will change.’”
Did it ever.
Ben had been working at Black and Decker and had an MBA and a degree in Mechanical Engineering. Which was exactly what the company needed.
"So we moved back,” Clark says, “and the first thing we did, I said, ‘We've got to make the cookie cutters in house.’”
Bringing the production in house was not as much a question of increasing the company’s margin as it was of guaranteeing supply.
“One of the things about being a small manufacturer,” Clark says, “is that often your suppliers can’t meet your needs, because they're all small, too… So we started making cookie cutters rather than relying on a supplier. We kept improving the process and we got better and better, which is natural. The more you make, the better you get. Until we got to the point that we acquired the supplier that we used to buy our cookie cutters from.”
The company that John and Ann had built had mainly targeted the gift trade. But with this acquisition, the company began to also supply cooking stores across the country – places that know how to sell cookie cutters. Sales took off and the company could barely keep up with demand.
At that point, Clark says, “We set the goal of being the world’s largest cookie cutter maker… And so we got fairly aggressive about who the other players were and just started to identify what we could do better, to deliver faster. Our wholesale edge is that we ship in one to two days. Direct to consumer, we ship in one to two days. And then we found the gift of Amazon.”
Marketing through the e-commerce behemoth allows Ann Clark to sell its 700+ products directly to consumers in nine markets and 19 countries. But that also means they need to be experts in all aspects of digital marketing, knowing the algorithms and selling patterns better than anyone.
“When you're on Amazon and you search something, what comes up first is not random,” Clark says. “That's the hard part. And that’s something we spend a lot of time and effort on. We have a pretty big team here.”
The growth in online sales (which Clark says represents about 80 percent of the company’s business) helped Ann Clark reach its goal: “We're the leading cookie cutter maker in the USA now and really our only competition is Chinese companies. That's a whole other conversation.”
To build the company further, Ann Clark started looking at what other things people buy when they buy cookie cutters. That has led them to branch out into food coloring (which did so well that they started making their own), sprinkles, icing mix, cake mix, meringue powder, and baking mixes.
Clark jokes that half of their building makes five million cookie cutters per year, and the other half of the building sells five million cookie cutters a year. “Which is more difficult?” he asks. “It depends on who you're talking to.”
The production side of the business is a wonder to behold. Every inch of the production, warehouse, and pick-pack-and-ship territories is planned and designed for maximum efficiency and flexibility, using lean manufacturing principles geared at eliminating waste. The company may make five million cookie cutters per year, but they do it in lots of 300 at a time, never overstocking inventory, always ready to meet demand. They make all their own dies, and the cookie cutter forming stations (where a new die can be switched over in just 9 minutes), and team members are all interchangeable. When someone comes into work, they go to any workstation they like, because everyone knows every job, and everyone shifts between workstations during the course of a shift. This guarantees an even, steady, predictable flow in what Clark calls the “river” that is their production.
When asked about what he loves most about being a maker, Clark recalls how he was talking to some friends from business school, and they asked, “‘Why don't you just import them? Why are you doing this? You can just go buy them. You don't need to make them.’ And I don't really know why I had the fascination of making them. I think I just like making things. But now we're at a point where because we make them, we're able to be a different company. We are able to be more agile, responding to trends and developing new products, and we are able to meet our customers’ needs much more efficiently.”
What lessons has Clark learned from 30 years in business, of being a maker? Here’s a rocket-speed, bullet-point summary of some of the ideas he shared:
The great thing about being a maker in Vermont, Clark says, is that Vermont's really good at cooperation. “If we're not competing, we'll share resources and ideas.” As a board member of the Vermont Manufacturing Extension Center, Ben has both benefited and given back to the Vermont community of makers, exchanging ideas and inspiration with other manufacturers around the state. “If you look at Vermont manufacturers,” he adds, “everybody here is high-end.”
He then cites companies like Trow and Holden and Champlain Chocolates, but clearly Ann Clark – a cookie cutter business that is anything but – is also in their number.
