Chef Craft

With a broad assortment of products for grocery, hardware, drug, and discount stores, Chef Craft makes a compelling choice for retailers who want to sell kitchen items and more. As a manufacturer, buying direct from Chef Craft cuts out the middleman and gives buyers a full range of product at entry level price points. “We have over 650 items for the kitchen, including holiday and seasonal items,” says Brian Ernster, VP sales. “We’ve been in business for over 25 years, and we always carry quality products at good prices.” Ernster... 

Keychain Breathalyzer Makes Great Convenience Store Impulse Buy

All Fun Gifts, a novelty wholesale company, is introducing a new keychain breathalyzer that sales manager Joe Renard says is a great fit as an impulse buy at independent retail stores. “It’s an item that we’re really pushing towards convenience stores, flea markets, and truck stops,” he says. The company is offering two skus, one slightly more feature-rich than the other. Renard emphasizes that these are gadgets with a high entertainment value. “Both of the products are intended to be used as a novelty item,” he says. The product works... 

Sky Gift Wins With Toys & Jewelry

Sky Gift is a company that focuses on both retailing and wholesaling, and has experienced smashing success with two very different product lines: jewelry and toys. When it comes to jewelry, it’s the Murano glass jewelry, handcrafted in Venice, Italy, that has been a major hit. In toys, an interesting and affordable product from China called, smash balls, has become huge for Sky Gift. There are lots of other items offered by the company, including the Wormie the Worm toy, radio controlled toy vehicles, and the brand new Wander Fly toy. But... 

Design Your Skateboard With Rough Decks

Rough Decks is a company that specializes in the sale of sporting goods, particularly skateboards and related accessories. However, the firm began via a partnership that grew out of necessity and became something beneficial to all parties involved. Originally, Nancy Wang, owner of Rough Decks, was the owner of a Chinese factory that produced strictly skateboard decks; that is, the oblong platforms on which the skater stands. Her eventual partner, just a friend at the time, was the owner of a factory that produced various skateboard parts, including... 

Mister Snacks Offers Healthy Choices

In the healthy snack business, it doesn’t pay to be stale, and Mister Snacks Inc. is working hard to constantly bring fresh new products to market. “We’re large enough to take care of our current customers and many many more,” says national sales manager, Steve Letourneau, “but the nice thing about being a smaller company is that we are willing to try new items. We don’t have a large R&D department. We don’t go out and take six months to survey people. Instead, we see something, we think it might work,... 

New Tech Creates Hot Products

Links Marketing, Flanders, NJ, has applied new technologies to solve old problems that could well result in two red hot products, perfect for retailers in 2010. The first product, in which the firm was a pioneer, is the electronic cigarette, according to Mark Anton, president of Links Marketing, LLC, a sales, manufacturing and retail organization. “Last year, we decided to spin off our electronic cigarette into its own entity called, What A Smoke LLC, to focus strictly on the electronic cigarette industry. Ever since, we have been manufacturing... 

New Leaf Trading

Typical of many a successful entrepreneur, when Scott Goodman, CEO of Hollywood, FL based, New Leaf Trading, worked for a kiosk owner, he quickly saw a better way to do the business. So it wasn’t long before he quit his day job and opened a kiosk of his own at another mall. That business grew into 11 kiosks, with a great monthly dollar volume in Maryland, Tennessee, Florida, Pennsylvania and other states. “The kiosk business is a good one, and it is an easy way to make money,” says Goodman. “We sold a eucalyptus pain spray,... 

Kole Imports: Your Profit Source

Twenty five years ago, when Danny Kole, his brother Rob and their parents, Pearl and Art Kole, launched Carson, CA based Kole Imports, it was essentially the two brothers and their dad working the telephones all day, selling general merchandise to discount variety stores around the country. The Kole brothers became very good at painting vivid verbal pictures of their products, because there was neither email nor Internet at the time, and people were just starting to use fax machines. Soon after the business’s launch, the dollar store phenomenon... 

Total Display Resource

A critical question for many small business people with big dreams is: how do you take a bright idea that may start off in a garage or other less than ideal location, and grow it into a multi-million dollar company? For Michael Fried, founder of M. Fried Store Fixtures in Brooklyn, NY, who started a shelving company in his basement in 1991, the critical keys to success were quality products, a passion for customer service, and competitive pricing, says Michael Lebor, director of sales and marketing for the firm. “When you furnish great customer... 

3D Moves Beyond Belts

The 3D Belt Company started producing its, “Authentic Cowboy Tough,” line of Western products in a 10 by 30 foot building in Schulenburg, Texas in 1988. Twenty-two years later, the company is still in Schulenburg, but now its offices, warehouse and distribution center are housed in a 150,000 square-foot facility, and its top quality line of Western products has been enhanced with new lines, including Silver Strike jewelry, Badger leather products, Sentry leather products, and an exciting new line of personal care fragrance products,...