Church Hill Classics: From Moonlighting To Merchandising

By Kaaren Valenta

A company launched by a working mother in the basement of her Newtown home has been ranked by Inc. magazine as one of America’s fastest-growing companies. Church Hill Classics, a diploma frame manufacturing company, ranked 290 on the Inc. 500 list for 2003.

The Inc. 500 ranks the nation’s top 500 privately held companies based on sales growth for the previous five years. One of only 12 percent of the companies founded by a woman, Church Hill Classics posted five-year sales growth of 612 percent with sales of $1.9 million in 2002.

Lucie Voves, 39, started the company as a moonlighting venture in 1991 while she was working as a brand manager for Proctor & Gamble.

“We actually started out in art publishing,” she said. “My husband and I both graduated from Dartmouth, and we wanted a photo of the campus.”

The couple arranged for an artist to create a likeness of the college’s main building, which they reproduced. The artist’s wife taught Lucie Voves how to frame the prints. The couple sold the prints, first on a street corner in Hanover, N.H., during alumni week, then through the alumni association, and eventually through the campus bookstore. Many of the purchasers began asking if they could also get their diplomas framed.

 “Once I saw how well the diploma frames sold, I approached other schools and soon added Syracuse, the University of Connecticut, Yale, and Princeton,” Ms Voves said. “Now we have about 600 clients, including schools, professional associations, and the military.”

The University of Connecticut was a hard sell, she recalled.

“I literally begged them. They told me they stocked $29–$34 frames and couldn’t sell them, so how could they ever sell a more expensive one, one that would cost $89?”

Finally Ms Voves talked the bookstore manager into hanging a sample on the wall. Last year the school sold more than 1,000 of the Church Hill Classics frames. Cornell University, the largest customer, sold more than 2,100 frames last year, with a retail value of $250,000.

“People don’t want a frame that looks inexpensive,” Ms Voves explained. “Not after all they have spent getting their degree.”

The frames are designed and handcrafted for each school, and include such features as color-coordinated matting, gold embossing of the name and seal, jewelry-quality medallions, enameled sports insignia medallions, tassel boxes, and panoramic photographs of campus scenes.

When Proctor & Gamble made the decision in 1992 that her division was relocating to Cincinnati, Ohio, Ms Voves opted not to go. She stayed partly because of her husband, Joe, whose metric industrial supplies business is located in lower Westchester County, but also because of her own goals.

“I am fiercely independent,” she said. “I wanted my own business. And I also wanted to have time with my family and women just couldn’t get that in the corporate world, at least not then.”

In 1994 the couple had their first child, Joseph, now 9. He was quickly followed by Jordan, 7, Lindsay, 5, and Jonathan, now almost 2.

“I have a lot of flexibility by owning my own business,” Ms Voves said. “My husband and I both work normal hours. We are home for dinner. We get the kids on the bus in the morning. I’m home by 5:30 pm and I don’t have to travel a lot because I have a marketing manager.”

Ms Voves quietly ran the company out of her basement on North Branch Road in Newtown for several years. “Early in 1995 I ran an ad in The Bee and hired Robin Schultz, who lives in Newtown. I interviewed her sitting on my living room sofa. She had experience in the garment industry with manufacturing, inventory, production, planning. She oversees the company’s production, purchasing, and daily operations. She has done an amazing job. I’ve really got a great team of people that I can rely on, and Robin is at the center of it.”

The women found a company in Waterbury to do their gold embossing, but finally bought the equipment to do it themselves and set it up in Ms Vove’s garage, which was warmed by a space heater.

Finally, in 1996, Ms Voves moved the company, first to Ridgefield, then into an industrial park on Shelter Rock Lane in Danbury.

“Basically, I needed a bigger basement and my husband needed a shorter commute,” she said.

The company now has 31 permanent employees and eight temps. Seventy percent of the employees are female. Three years ago it tripled the size of its quarters in the Shelter Rock Lane building, now using almost 15,000 square feet of office, production, and warehouse space.

The firm added equipment that can do specialized tasks such as cutting a double mat to incorporate medallions, but much of the work assembling the frames is still painstakingly done by hand. For example, before the four sides of a frame are glued together, by hand, the edge of the raw wood on each end is stained.

“Our frames never develop the white line on the seams that you see on so many frames, “ Ms Voves explained.

Many other companies have entered the diploma framing business after seeing the success of Church Hill Classics, but none do such an active marketing program for their customers, she said.

“We create school-specific color brochures, send them home to Mom and Dad, provide merchandising tools, and give each school their own page on our website, www.diplomaframe.com,” she said. “The brochures that we design and produce are very high quality, very expensive. Producing them is another large part of our business.”

The company also provides merchandising materials to the bookstores and a line of high-quality graduation gifts through an association with Jardine Associates, a Rhode Island company.

The biggest challenge the Church Hill Classics has faced is growing from being a picture framing business to becoming a manufacturer. The company became so large that last year it hired consultants to streamline the production and warehousing operations.

“We use bar coding to know where the orders are in our production process,” Ms Shultz said. “All the boxes are labeled. It has cut down on errors tremendously.”

Robin Schultz, 49, said she joined the company almost 12 years ago because she realized it had a lot of potential. “I had a young son at the time — he’s now a sophomore at Hofstra — so the job fit my needs.”

“The company has grown tremendously,” she said. “It has been a very exciting thing to watch the growth from Lucie’s basement, when she had three accounts, to the company today. It has been quite an adventure.”