Click here to order the March 2015 issue in which this article appeared.
I’m thrilled to announce that a significant change is coming to Direct Selling News later this year: We’re moving into a fantastic new headquarters building!
The new facility, approximately 20 miles from our current home in Lake Dallas, Texas, will make us neighbors with some of the biggest corporations in North Texas, including Dr Pepper/Snapple, Frito Lay, JC Penney and Toyota. We’ll also be once again back under the same roof as our parent company, SUCCESS Partners, the leading producer of marketing tools, videos and personal development materials in the direct sales industry as well as the publisher of SUCCESS magazine and Success from Home. The company’s warehouse, manufacturing and fulfillment operations will remain at SUCCESS Partners’ Lake Dallas facility. In all, about 150 employees will make the move.
“We are thrilled to be moving into this new world-class home that will better serve us and our partners in the direct sales industry as we continue to expand and build a platform for the future,” said SUCCESS Partners Founder and CEO Stuart Johnson. Johnson hired architectural firm Corgan Associates Inc. to design the renovation of the building and expects the work to be completed in time for a late-summer move. Plans call for an open, inviting atmosphere designed to support creativity and teamwork.
The new building represents a significant moment in the life of the organizations involved. For our parent company, SUCCESS Partners, the move marks a milestone in the company’s growth. When it acquired its current headquarters in 1990, the company had just 13 employees providing communication tools and services for the direct selling space. Nearly 25 years later, that nondescript building on Swisher Road is packed to the gills, housing more than 200 people in warehouse, manufacturing, fulfillment, sales, service and creative operations. In fact, Direct Selling News moved out of that building in June 2011 and into its own office space to make room for more growth at both organizations.
“The new headquarters will be a great reflection of who we are and who we will be in the future,” said SUCCESS Partners Senior Vice President of Strategic Marketing Paul Adams. “It will give us the space and the ability to interact better and collaborate more, and we will be a better organization because of it.”
For DSN, the move signals our commitment to continuing to grow our brand, bringing direct selling executives more news and information that will support your business, and telling the story of direct selling to the world. The new building will give us the space we need to expand and improve our print and digital offerings, and it also will give our staff members more opportunities for collaboration and professional development. Some of our new officemates will be our colleagues at SUCCESS magazine, and I am looking forward to seeing that fantastic team every day. With 80,000 square feet of space spread over two stories, there will be plenty of room for growth all around.
Our parent company, with its visionary leadership and commitment to the direct selling industry, always has enabled Direct Selling News the opportunity to serve the community in a unique manner. Our commitment to journalistic relevance will be even more effective in the new space, as we will be able to add to the tremendous talent we have already attracted. To our advertisers, we will always be grateful for the honor to spread your message, and to the leaders of the direct selling industry, I can only envision a bigger, bolder, more research-focused journalistic resource to serve the future of this most incredible channel of distribution we love to write about.
I’ll share more details as we get closer to moving day. Until then, it’s back to business. In this edition of Direct Selling News, you’ll learn what’s new in the competitive world of sports sponsorships, what happened when one direct selling CEO stood up to Amazon and much more. We’re also making one final call for submissions to the 2015 Global 100 list. If your company has not yet updated its information, or submitted the Revenue Certification Form (RCF) for this important ranking, please visit directsellingnews.com today.
In closing, I’ll leave you with this quote from Rodan + Fields Co-Founder and Chairman Amnon Rodan about the evolution of direct selling and how his company is growing right along with it:
“We looked around and concluded that retail selling is about selling today and yesterday—the numbers we sold yesterday compared to the product that moved off the shelves today. But the way forward is about the combination of offline and online selling, which is social commerce. Taking that thought further, the best way to attain product exposure is through social networking. Combine that with e-commerce and the result is what we call social commerce. It is the way of the future.”
May your future be filled with success,
Lauren Lawley Head
General Manager
