Board Converting News, May 23, 2022

Weber Display & Packaging (CONT’D FROM PAGE 1)

1991 and began operations on August 1 of that same year. Today, Weber Display & Packaging is a $95 million com- pany employing 190 people on three shifts and last year producing 720-million-square-feet of board out of its four facilities in the Philadelphia area: its main 110,000-square- foot plant on Richmond Street, an 80,000-square-foot co-packing facility, a 67,000-square-foot just-in-time ware- house, and a recently-opened 30,000-square-foot print- ing, die cutting and finishing site on nearby Ontario Street. Weber also owns a small semi-permanent display division to serve its point-of-purchase customers who frequently require permanent fixtures in their product merchandising. It’s All In The Name Jim Doherty III, the son of Jim Doherty Jr. and now the President and CEO of the company, remembered that his father, when buying the company, wanted to keep the name “Chesapeake Display and Packaging,” but the sell- ers refused. “So my father went back and said, ‘Well, if I can’t have that I want the David Weber name back,’ and they agreed.” The Weber name, said Bob Doherty, had a longstanding reputation in the Philadelphia market and the new owners of the company recognized the value it had with the customer base. “People called it ‘Weber’ when it was Chesapeake,” Doherty said. “They could not get that name out of their heads.” “We took advantage of that,” said Bob Doherty. “We went out to tell the customers, ‘We’re going to be here;

manufacturer of corrugated boxes. Weber served a 100- mile radius in and around Philadelphia, including the pro- duce and seafood industries of southern New Jersey. It was in some way, shape or form, run by members of the Weber family until the 1950s, when the family sold por- tions of it to Chesapeake Corporation and Interstate Con- tainer Company. Chesapeake later bought out Interstate’s shares and became the sole owner of the plant, and it re- mained in Chesapeake’s control and operated under the Chesapeake name until 1991. It was during these Chesa- peake years that the Doherty brothers, Bob and the late Jim Doherty Jr., were involved – Bob as Sales Manager and his brother Jim as an Independent Broker. As Bob Doherty tells the story, Chesapeake had made the decision in the late 1980s to close the plant. The company had faced a prolonged labor strike and the ba- sic infrastructure of the plant was beginning to wear. Jim Doherty Jr. was brokering a lot of business for the plant, and out of concern for the company’s employees and cus- tomers, he attempted to delay Chesapeake’s decision. “At the time Jim thought that we could help employees get other jobs, get customers resituated,” Bob recalled. “But in the end, the conversation started flowing toward, ‘Are you interested in selling?’” After what Bob calls three-to-four weeks of “Wharton [Business] School-style” negotiations, Jim Doherty Jr. assumed ownership of the plant in January BCN(US)202109(o)(出血5mm).pdf 1 2021/9/7 下午 03:50:46

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May 23, 2022

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