Industry News

Company Spotlight:
Creative Memories
by Katherine B. Ponder

A company on the verge of bankruptcy. An unconventional idea from a Montana stay-at-home-mom. Hundreds of thousands of photos stored in boxes and envelopes around the world. It all came together to make Creative Memories today's scrapbooking giant. Now Creative Memories is spreading its wings internationally to help people preserve and celebrate all their memories in a variety of ways.

Salvation

The Antioch Company, Creative Memories parent company, was built from a fledgling effort started by two college students at Antioch College. In 1926, Ernest Morgan and a fellow student printed bookplates from salvaged printing paper. When graduation came around, Ernest chose to continue the business while his partner moved on. Eventually, Antioch became a commercial printer and producer of bookmarks, calendars and other consumer-oriented printed products. Jump forward to 1985, when Antioch acquired Holes Webway, a struggling album maker. Webway was slowly declining and shedding its product lines. It sent postcards to customers notifying them it was no longer going to provide many of its old, standby products.

Fate stepped in. Loyal Webway customer Rhonda L. Anderson was a stay-at-home mom with four children ranging from newborn to 6. She had been asked to give a presentation to a group of mothers of preschoolers. The only topic she had felt qualified to speak about was album-making, though she was sure everyone had their own albums. "My mother made albums," Rhonda says. "I grew up making albums. When I got married and had kids, the tradition continued. I don't consider it a craft or an optional activity. I just shared some of my albums and how I had made them with photos, memorabilia and stories."

Rhonda L. Anderson, Creative Memories Co-Founder

Rhonda was surprised by the group's reaction. Several of them asked her to give the same presentation to their friends in their homes, and some asked her to make albums with their photos. It turned out that most of her audience's photos were stored in boxes, stuffed in drawers and otherwise shuffled into the corners of their lives. But when she returned home that evening and shuffled through the day's mail, she found a postcard from Webway saying they were discontinuing the album she always used-and she'd just taken 40 orders to make photo albums for others. She was frantic. She dialed Antioch even though it was after hours, letting the phone ring and ring. Finally, Marketing Vice President Cheryl Lightle answered. Rhonda, who at 50 sounds as enthusiastic and energetic as she must have that night in 1987, let her story and ideas about album-making spill out.

Rhonda began to realize that she could make a business and help others by showing them how to make unique, thoughtful albums for their own photos and mementos. Looking for reassurance that this quickly conceived thought wasn't frivolous, she asked for an opinion from a family friend who happened to also be a conciliation lawyer. She showed her albums and shared her business idea with this friend. The lawyer looked through the albums and said something that has stuck with Rhonda every day since. He said that every day he dealt with people who had given up on each other, their marriages, their children, their jobs and their lives in general. He was sure that if they'd preserved positive, cherished memories in the same loving way she had, they wouldn't be in his office. This opinion from a seasoned professional bolstered Rhonda's confidence. She says, "I thought, 'Wow! Save the world with a photo album?' "

Back at Antioch, Cheryl Lightle took Anderson's idea to her boss, Lee Morgan, son of Antioch's founder. He agreed to sit in on a presentation by Rhonda. The meeting went well, and Antioch agreed to give the new company, dubbed Creative Memories, a try.

Today the little company formed from such humble beginnings is a huge enterprise. Creative Memories is in 11 countries, has 90,000 consultants worldwide and approximately $300 million in sales. The concept worked and continues to work because the company has stuck to its original principles of helping people preserve memories. And Creative Memories is celebrating its 20th anniversary.

Creative Memories St. Cloud, Minn., headquarters

Twenty Years of Tradition

There is much to celebrate at Creative Memories with its second decade complete. Rhonda believes that making it to 20 years is quite an achievement. "The growth of Creative Memories validates my belief system," she says about the company's milestones. "We work with integrity. I don't preach to people or say people have to do what I do. But it's my story. It's also the beauty of direct selling. It gives people the flexibility they dream of."

Creative Memories grew from its original six consultants and gave that flexibility to consultants around the United States and, eventually, internationally. Its traditional product line has included high-quality albums, stickers, specialty papers, pens, adhesives, cutting tools, page protectors and everything needed to create page layouts from the simple to the sublime. There is also an imprinting service offering customizable wording and select graphics for album covers and spines. Creative Memories offers many album sizes, page inserts in different colors, organizers and so much more. Even its cutting tools are light-years ahead of simple scissors, providing a perfect edge for everything.

Legions of scrapbookers eagerly seized the chance to express themselves with such hands-on tools. The company expanded into Canada within three years of its founding and went beyond North America to Europe and the Asia-Pacific region. With its phenomenal success, Creative Memories created today's scrapbooking industry, drawing many imitators. Other companies jumped on the bandwagon and are also selling albums, stickers, papers, tools and more. But Creative Memories offers a relationship between consultants and customers that other companies can't replicate. Consultants help customers achieve their goals for sharing and preserving their memories-whatever those may be. They provide advice on the best products to use, help customers become comfortable with Creative Memories tools, organize time dedicated to album-making and show a genuine interest in their customers' stories.

Also setting Creative Memories apart is the company's insistence upon the highest-quality products. There is no legal oversight or neutral party that certifies whether products really are archival quality, acid-free, lignin-free, buffered, photo-safe, etc. So Creative Memories has stuck with the International Organization for Standardization's definitions of all these archive-related terms. No one else has made such a commitment. "It's like the Wild West out there," Rhonda says. "Just because something says 'photo-safe' on it, you don't really know what that means. With our products, you know we're meeting ISO standards." Creative Memories has its own technology center at corporate headquarters where products are tested and retested. Its labs measure paper, adhesives, plastics, pens and all album materials to ensure they are truly archival quality.

Creative Memories has high standards, indisputable success, loyal customers and dedicated consultants. What more could a company want? Lots, according to corporate leaders. They delved into their collective success, vision, experience and insights to create an ingenious plan for the future.

The Next 20 Years

Asha Morgan-Moran, Creative Memories Global President

The company's motto is, "Your life. Your story. Your way." This is Creative Memories' promise to provide products and services that make it easy for everyone to celebrate and share their stories. "While preserving memories for future generations will always be important to us, we realize we can have a great impact on the way people connect with one another today-by sharing stories, celebrating favorite moments and surrounding yourself with the people and things you love," says Asha Morgan-Moran, Creative Memories Global President and granddaughter of Antioch founder Ernest Morgan. "This is really about being true to our mission of 'preserving the past, enriching the present and providing hope for the future.' "

Asha says all of this didn't come about by chance. When she began her professional career at a strategic consulting firm in Chicago, where she spent eight years, Asha sifted through companies' methods and activities to help them pinpoint new success opportunities. She always had her eye on Creative Memories, though, which began while she was in college. "I grew up thinking Antioch would stay a printing company," she says. "When Creative Memories started, I was heavily into it. I love direct selling, the customer contacts.it's fun and dynamic."

After her experience in strategic consulting, Asha followed her dream to be part of Creative Memories. She quit her job and became a Creative Memories consultant for several months. Then she moved to Creative Memories' corporate side. She guided the company's international expansion and learned that the desire to preserve memories crosses cultures and languages.

Eventually, competition heated up, digital photography became more common and the company's 20th anniversary approached. And Creative Memories has crafted a new approach for the next 20 years. "Today, we're really reinventing ourselves," Asha says. "We're redefining our market position and what we want to be. We've gone from photo preservation for 15 years, to memory preservation for five years, to memory celebration and helping people showcase the best in life."

These ideas led to a key point of action. "We did a strategic study last year to define what we were and what we wanted to be," Asha says. "We looked at the market. Competition from retail has grown immensely. We had 12 weeks of mid- and upper-level managers committing two days a week to look at the market, customers, employees/owners, everything. Now we have a phenomenal five-year strategic plan." The plan also includes input from everyone involved with Creative Memories, from first-time customers to experienced consultants and employees.

Creative Memories' strategic plan is based on its mission, but now has something for everyone. It continues its commitment to traditional products and scrapbooking. It takes huge steps forward into digital photography and framing. It offers a shift from celebrating past events exclusively to celebrating life inclusively. In short, the changes give a wide variety of choices in how people commemorate their special times.

Scrapbooking isn't for everyone. While some people want to put as many photos as possible on a page, others dedicate a lot of space to photo mats, borders, creative text and more. Sometimes all those choices can be intimidating to new scrapbookers. "People feel pressure to be creative and make decorative pages," Rhonda says. In the past, no matter how many times consultants reassured customers that they didn't have to be over-the-top creative, there was a dread of expectation. Creative Memories is responding to those who need a different way to tell their stories.

PicFolio Albums

If you're familiar with slide-in photo albums, you've got the general idea of PicFolio albums. They have pockets for each photo, but they add that special Creative Memories extra: guaranteed photo-safe materials, and optional preprinted and prelayered mats and journaling cards to accompany the photos. Everything is designed to fit in sleeves with no cutting required. This lets customers complete a beautiful album within a few hours rather than days or weeks.

Power Palettes

Creative Memories' Power Palette systems are sets of designer-inspired paper, stickers, borders, photo mats and journaling boxes ready-made for easy combinations and page layouts. They're made to fit each of the company's album sizes, and some include idea books to jump-start creativity. These are the ultimate tools for customers who want the beautiful, finished look of typical Creative Memories albums but who don't have the time or desire to pull together a look on their own. It's foolproof and fast.

Power Sort Box and Power Sort Mini

Sometimes the biggest hurdle for customers is figuring out the photos they have and how they can use them. Enter the Power Sort boxes. The larger Power Sort Box can hold up to 2,400 4-by-6-inch photos within sturdy dividers and has a large pocket in the lid for oversized items. People sort their photos into the box chronologically, by subject, by album, etc. There's also a Power Sort Mini, the smaller cousin to the larger box. It holds 600 4-by-6-inch photos and has multiple dividers and three main compartments. It can be used for specific album planning, to hold extra photos or negatives or to house photo CDs. Creative Memories consultants know that organizing photos can be even more daunting than creating an album, so they often hold organizing workshops. The workshops let customers sort and organize their items without the left-behind feeling of watching others complete album pages.

Memory Manager

Creative Memories hasn't forgotten digital photographers. Its new Memory Manager software allows customers to use their digital photos any way they want. It can help import photos directly from cameras, scanners or existing files. It stores and catalogs the photos, as well as audio and video clips, using the Memory Vault system. Customers can easily improve their photos with the software's tools, whether they need to remove red-eye, crop or balance color. The software is designed to work easily with the PicFolio albums and the company's StoryBook Creator Software, which is used to create digital photo books.

For anyone intimidated by technology, Rhonda can testify that this software is easy to use. "It's so easy, I about fainted!" she says. "I was preparing myself for a headache trying to figure out how all this would work. It was so easy. I thought, 'I was afraid for no reason!' "

StoryBook Photo Books
and StoryBook Creator Software

With StoryBook Creator Software, a free downloadable program, Creative Memories has embraced the digital world. It lets customers create digital photo books at their computer, with hundreds of exclusively designed page templates, sizes and customizable cover options to choose from. Users can save their creations then come back and work on them whenever convenient. Once done, customers order their albums from Creative Memories and receive them in beautiful, hardbound book format. And duplication is a breeze, as customers can order as many copies as they want of the photo book to share with family and friends.

Custom Framing

Some photos are so special that people want to see them all the time. Creative Memories knew this need existed and recently began its rollout of custom framing. Unit leaders are among the first to sell this product, and it will be available to all consultants by summer.

Ultimately, Creative Memories is taking the best of its 20-year history and positioning itself for a phenomenal 40-year celebration. It is adding many innovative products and services so it's a new range of opportunity for incoming consultants, who also enjoy upgraded support tools. Around the world, people know Creative Memories is the company they can trust with their precious memories and celebrations.

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