A sterling achievement

Nation's Business, March, 1998 by J. Tol Broome, Jr.

A call comes in on one of the dozens of toll-free telephone lines at Replacements, Ltd., a company that specializes in locating and selling discontinued china, crystal, and tableware patterns. An order is placed for three dinner plates and two soup bowls of Cavendish by Wedgwood, a popular china pattern.

The sales associate taking the order? It is the company's founder and president, Robert L. Page.

To stay in touch with the needs of his customers, Page fields several dozen sales calls each week at Replacements' home office in Greensboro, N.C. "We place a tremendous emphasis on customer service," says Page, who tries to stay as directly involved as a president can in a $57 million company that employs more than 500 people.

In addition to taking sales calls, the 52-year-old Page makes it a point to contact several of the company's 1,500 suppliers each week to say thanks. He also has helped design many of the custom software programs used to track an inventory that exceeds 90,000 patterns, and he is the company's most knowledgeable employee when it comes to identifying patterns.

In March 1981, Page left his job as an auditor for the state of North Carolina and decided to make a full-time business of a weekend hobby that included selling refinished furniture. Page had collected coins as a boy, later focusing his collecting efforts on discontinued place settings.

"I hated my job," says Page. "So I decided to quit. My thought was that I might not make as much money, but if I liked what I was doing, I would be better off."

Page set up a card table in his bedroom and used a recipe box to track his customers and suppliers. His attic became his warehouse, and an answering machine was used to take orders. He soon dropped the furniture refinishing to concentrate on buying and selling used china and crystal. "I quickly began to realize that there were people looking for patterns and there was no one out there filling that need.," says Page.

Soon after starting the business as a full-time venture, Page hired a part-time assistant and rented a 600-square-foot house for the operation. "She packed the orders, and I did everything else," says Page. "I was working some very long hours."

Six months later, attempting to purchase a 2,000-square-foot facility, Page was turned down for a loan backed by the U.S. Small Business Administration, but he persuaded the building's owner to finance the purchase. Sales reached $52,000 the first year. In 1982, a bank provided a loan for a 5,000-square-foot expansion. Sales passed the $5 million mark in 1986.

That year, however, Page was injured seriously in an automobile accident. Although he was confined to a wheelchair for six months, he continued to devote long hours to Replacements.

Sales continued to increase at a dizzying pace as the company outgrew two more facilities. By 1989, replacement flatware (sterling, silver plate, and stainless) had been added to the product line, and sales were approaching the $10 million level. Page realized he had to think long-term for his next expansion. He purchased an 80-acre parcel of land that had high-visibility frontage on Interstate 85 on the outskirts of Greensboro. A 100,000-square-foot facility was constructed with plenty of room for additional warehouse space. It took four months to move all the inventory. Page hopes it will be his last move.

Today, Replacements occupies 225,000 square feet. It advertises in more than 100 publications, including Better Homes & Gardens, House Beautiful, and Smithsonian. Its customer list recently topped 2 million. Ninety percent of sales come by way of the toll-free telephone lines, which receive more than 8,000 sales calls per day. The remainder comes from walk-in traffic in the showroom. A network of more than 300 personal computers and terminals manages the sales system and tracks inventory.

Page cites cash flow as his biggest challenge in a business that is inventory-intensive. One of the largest U.S. companies in its field, Replacements purchases 50,000 to 60,000 items per week, utilizing a quarterly catalog, produced in-house, to provide more than 80,000 prices for the firm's suppliers, mainly antique dealers and china companies.

Page says there are two keys to the company's success: honesty and "extraordinary" customer service. Replacements keeps detailed records on customers' ordering habits and keeps them informed when the company receives items in patterns they have bought in the past.

Every employee is trained to take customer calls, and a peak-time system is used to inform administrative employees -- via chimes or a voice broadcast over the company's speaker system -- to stop what they are doing and answer a call. As a result, the average answer time for a customer call is nine seconds.

Page says he is thinking of expanding horizontally into other areas of collectibles, but he will not sacrifice service for growth. "We don't want to grow so quickly," he says, "that we can't continue to provide the level of customer service that we do now."