Northwest Paper Box (CONT’D FROM PAGE 22)
“I was not thrilled with the high-pressure sales arena of the commodities trade, and I was looking for a slow- er-paced living environment.” In the late 1980s, the three brothers decided to expand their footprint beyond setup boxes. “At the time, the rig- id box business was not a growth business,” John says. “We brothers wanted to continue to work together, and we chose corrugated as a logical expansion.” It was not an auspicious beginning, according to Brad. “So, we opened up a plant to do corrugated and promptly lost our shirts. We had no idea what we were doing.” The Van Allens began their bumpy ride into corrugat- ed in a separate 20,000-square-foot building with a few pieces of rudimentary equipment: a 50″ two-color printer slotter, a laminator, and a die cutter. Once the kinks were worked out, says Brad, things began looking up. “We thought we knew what we were doing at the start, but you know, there’s a learning process,” he concedes. “After we got our stuff together about how to price things, how to run things, we started making a little bit of money.” That early profitability prompted the Van Allens to look for additional converting capacity in better equipment and, if the opportunity arose, to look for companies that may be interested in selling. Brad found both. “We found another company called Taylor-Made Pack- aging that did corrugated boxes,” he says. “They had a
jumbo. We didn’t. They’d been in business a long time and were profitable, but the majority owner wanted to get out of the business.” After the acquisition of Taylor-Made in 1993, the Van Allens consolidated their corrugated and their setup box businesses in one location in the Swan Island Basin indus- trial area northeast of downtown Portland—a location they occupied until April 2023. It was during the 30 years at what Brad calls simply “the Basin” plant that the company Northwest Paper Box Euro Dong Fang crew, from left, Jeffery Dunn, Supervisor Daniel Raya, and Jacob Farrell.
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July 29, 2024
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