U.S. Display Group (CONT’D FROM PAGE 48)
rary workers. Moore says the company uses 10-50 tempo- rary workers a day. “We have done an exceptional job of meeting these critical ‘make or break’ deadlines, which is what keeps our customers keep coming back. And that is a very good thing.” California Dreaming So good, in fact, that it created a problem. “We had become so full and busy that we were quickly reaching our capacity. We were simply out of space,” says Moore, who spoke to Mehiel about building a second facility, say, a 300,000-square-foot behemoth between Tullahoma and the Interstate, before Mehiel thought having two smaller facilities in different geographical locations instead of one large one was the solution. Around this time, he learned that General Corrugated Container (GCC) in Buena Park, California, was for sale. In short order, Mehiel and Moore visited the plant, negotiated an offer, and made the de- cision to buy it. The expansion was completed, and it seemed like space and capacity issues were resolved. Or were they? Then Covid-19 hit, and the world shut down, and much of GCC’s display business—now U.S. Display’s business— went with it. “Three of their top four or five customers had been buying displays for the movie industry and just like that, those accounts were gone,” remembers Moore. “There wasn’t a movie theater anywhere that was open, much less a marketing company seeking displays pro- CONTINUED ON PAGE 54
implement the things the company needed to do from an ISO and quality standpoint and coincidentally, or perhaps not, business grew. And grew again. Over the years, it has doubled and then re-doubled. Unlike a brown box plant that needs to keep its custom- ers within a certain geographic area, a display manufac- turer can have customers anywhere and everywhere but being close to mass merchandisers and the distribution centers is a bonus. “Being here in Tennessee is a big ad- vantage for us,” says Moore. “The reason FedEx is in Mem- phis is because it’s centrally located in the United States. Today our top customers are in California, Florida, Minne- sota and scattered throughout the country.” Flexibility And Reliability Being able to make a quality display is one thing but providing it on a strict deadline, every time, is quite anoth- er and the difference between life and death as a display manufacturer. “If you’re doing a display for Super Bowl Sunday, it can’t show up on the Monday after the big game,” says Moore. “And if you can’t be flexible enough and do a good enough job scheduling and getting displays in the store when they’re supposed to be there, you simply can’t stay in this business.” Thus, U.S. Display Group leans heavily on its very flex- ible employees, a good percentage of whom are tempo-
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