With A Little Help From His Friends

These days a long-shot start-up doesn't have to go it alone

It was the unlikeliest of new ventures: an actor with little business experience sets up a company to manufacture toilet partitions. But Greg Braendel is confounding the skeptics, thanks in part to an array of heavy hitters lined up behind him. Why would Fortune 500 suppliers, fancy lawyers -- even a Big Eight accounting firm -- all be willing to help out a start-up so far off the beaten track?

-- J.C.

Greg Braendel's accountants and consultants come from giant Peat Marwick Main & Co., which is providing its services on a reduced-fee basis. His lawyers are with the Los Angeles branch of White & Case, a venerable New York City firm; they aren't charging him much either.

In fact, nearly everyone seems to want to help out his young company. Braendel's vendors extended him credit before he had so much as a D&B rating. A nationwide network of reps and distributors are selling his wares. Du Pont and Formica Corp., which manufacture some of his raw materials, are helping him with his marketing. UA Theatres, Brunswick Recreation Centers, and the United States Air Force signed up as customers when his company was scarcely a year old.

By now you've doubtless decided that Gregory Braendel -- it's pronounced Bren-DELL -- is some high-tech hotshot with a decade's experience at Hewlett-Packard Co. Not so. He is a 44-year-old itinerant Hollywood actor, who for 20 years has supported himself with a variety of jobs while garnering a few small parts in television movies and commercials. He has no M.B.A.; indeed, he has only the barest experience in business of any sort.

Nor is his company likely to be the next Lotus Development or L.A. Gear, riding technology or trendiness to the top. Thrislington Cubicles, as it's called, manufactures bathroom partitions.

Bathroom partitions? Bear with me. We'll start at the beginning, because the saga is an object lesson in how even a start-up with an unlikely founder and an offbeat product can have a noticeable impact on the marketplace. Braendel took on a seemingly impossible task. What has made it merely difficult, rather than impossible, is a dramatic shift in the way the business world treats entrepreneurs.

My wife and Braendel had known each other as children. I first met him in 1984, on a family trip to Los Angeles. He took us on an insider's tour of Hollywood; he played a tape for us of the time he kissed Cheryl Ladd in The Grace Kelly Story. Three years later I saw him again, when he was passing through Boston. This time he didn't want to talk about acting, he wanted to talk about the toilet-partition company he was starting. From the sublime to the ridiculous in three short years, I thought -- until he began to explain himself.

Think about it, he said. Every hotel, restaurant, airport, school, office -- every public building, everywhere in the world -- has bathrooms, and in those bathrooms are stalls. Somebody has to manufacture those stalls. This is one big market.

Right, said I. And doubtless there are some good-sized companies supplying that market. Maybe so, he replied, but their stuff doesn't look like this. That was when he spread out his four-color brochures.

Yow. Like everyone else, I had conjured up an image of bathroom stalls in plain metal, gray or white, most likely with the latches missing. The enclosures Braendel was showing me hardly looked like rest-room equipment at all. On the contrary: they looked as if they had emanated from some high-fashion design studio, perhaps for use in a jet-set client's poolside cabana. These, it turned out, were the bathroom partitions manufactured by a company with the elegantly British name of Thrislington Sales Ltd.

The story poured out. Thrislington had been making and selling the cubicles in the United Kingdom for the previous several years, and had already captured an appreciable fraction of the market. Braendel's English cousin, Adrian Emck, worked with the man who had designed them, and had come to America looking for ways to market them here. Braendel -- not unmindful of the pecuniary possibilities -- agreed to help his cousin out. At Thrislington's expense he flew to San Francisco to consult with an architect friend, then back to Hollywood, where he located a company called Bobrick Washroom Equipment Inc. "My idea was to find a manufacturer, then sit back and collect royalties for 10 years or so," Braendel says. "Then I could pursue my acting career."

Bobrick wasn't interested, but told Braendel to call a nearby distributor, Stumbaugh & Associates Inc. Stumbaugh liked the looks of the product; so did the manufacturer's-rep firm that Braendel visited next. Intrigued, Braendel went to England and kicked around possibilities with Brian Moore, managing director of Thrislington. Moore took a liking to the American and came back to the States with him; together they visited other manufacturers. But none seemed just right.

Finally -- it was now late 1986 -- Braendel and Moore were sitting on the patio outside Braendel's Hollywood home. Brian, said Braendel, why don't I just manufacture the damn things myself? Bloody 'ell, he remembers Moore saying, why not? Braendel formed a company, and in January 1987 flew to England to negotiate an agreement. The British Thrislington -- which had more work than it could handle, and no time to explore alternative arrangements -- leapt at the opportunity. Braendel came back with North American manufacturing and marketing rights, with a modest royalty to be paid the parent company on every unit sold.

Greg Braendel, you have to understand, is a positive kind of guy, upbeat and likable, with a salesman's gregariousness. While waiting for his acting career to take off he had earned his living in various ways: fixing up houses, hawking floor mops at fairs and home shows, once starting a short-lived company to market lithographs. Most recently he had been working as a salesman for a company that installed cogeneration-energy systems.

Braendel is so upbeat, in fact, that the magnitude of his new undertaking may simply never have occurred to him. Add it up. He was setting out to build a company -- something he had never done successfully -- in an industry he knew next to nothing about. He would be making a low-tech product that, while distinctive, could easily be copied. To succeed he'd have to line up reps and distributors all over the country, set up and operate at least one factory and ultimately several more, persuade architects and interior designers to gamble on a new and still-untested manufacturer -- and do all this before competitors moved in on his turf. Braendel figured that he could count on his parents back in Pennsylvania for some seed capital. But he had little money of his own and little notion how to raise more.