In 1996, frustrated by flat sales and worn out by the demands of the business (according to company veterans, Shin never took a day off in all his years at Camera World), Shin decided to sell. He hired a retail-management veteran, Walt Mulvey, to help ready the company for sale. A former banker who'd had experience in helping stagnant companies improve their operations, Mulvey saw a profitable company with a good reputation -- but one with cramped quarters and lackluster employees. Mulvey reorganized, setting up an incentive program and a "no-blame" management system that allowed workers to air problems openly. Within a year, sales had climbed 31%, and Mulvey helped Shin put out the word that the company was for sale.
Word of the sale reached Alessandro Mina. A gentle native of Sweden who'd lived in Italy, Switzerland, and France, the multilingual entrepreneur came to the United States in 1989, at the age of 27. While working on his M.B.A. at Stanford, he embarked on an investment project with two fellow European students. In 1993 the trio founded Sverica International, an investment fund designed to help transform old-fashioned companies into aggressive-growth companies and often into Web-based businesses, and rounded up contributors. Camera World "fit all our criteria," Mina recalls. "It was profitable. Sales were stagnant, but there was growth opportunity. The owner was retiring, and there was a successful mail-order business in place. It had a huge database of happy customers who came to Camera World in the same way people go to Amazon.com for books or Dell Computer for computers -- they go there pretty much knowing what they want. I held the view that Internet and mail-order sales are basically the same that way, so I thought it had all the ingredients for a great Web business."
Another plus: Camera World had a sound infrastructure; there was no need to develop one from scratch. The company had already figured out how to take in orders, process them, and ship them out. Moreover, Shin had long-established relationships with top-tier suppliers and innovative systems in place to provide customer service. The company even had a Web site, though visitors couldn't use it to buy products. And unlike any pure-play dot-com, Camera World had the unheard-of pedigree of profitability. "We saw this terrific sleeper and thought we could turn it into a full-fledged Net business," Mina recalls.
Mina and his colleagues bought Camera World Co. and named the online arm Cameraworld.com. Temporarily taking over the reins as CEO, Mina -- along with Mulvey, who stayed on as chief operating officer -- set about morphing the company from a primarily mail-order business into a primarily online business, knowing that companies like Dell (which had gone from no revenues to $26 billion in 15 short years) had followed the same path.
As Mina had predicted, the path was clear of the thorny issues that trip up novices. The niche was already nailed: unlike pure dot-commers, he didn't have to spend time and money on brand development, market research, and focus groups. Mina and company preserved and expanded the long-standing relationships with suppliers and customers that Shin had built. "We made it a point to visit every supplier personally, take them out to dinner, and assure them that the business would continue," Mina says.
"Walt and Alessandro had a vision," says Canon's Peck. "At first we had some doubts about their ability to take over the business and move it to the Net, but they were able to build on the infrastructure to handle it."
The nitty-gritty back end has come to matter enormously to investors.
In forging a new business plan for the company, Mina spelled out his goals. For starters, the company's Web pages would have to be transformed from simple brochureware into a true transaction site. And its back-end systems would have to be married to whatever happened on the Web. The company itself would have to move into a larger, better-organized space, with a warehouse that would allow orders to be shipped within 24 hours, as opposed to the five days required by the mail-order business. "We wanted to one-up everyone else," Mina says. "To speed everything up, we had to cut out obstacles. We needed to staff up, to fix the bugs in the computer systems, to upgrade the telephone systems for more lines. In the past Mr. Shin had to check everything. Things were duplicated. We decided to streamline processes and empower people."
The toughest challenge was time. Mina wanted Cameraworld.com to become the leading online vendor of cameras -- before a competitor could. "We had to completely change the mentality of the organization, from collect-a-paycheck mode to survival mode," says Mulvey. "We ran the company on two urgent premises: We assumed that there was a competitor out there who would beat us to market with the biggest Web site in the world. And we told ourselves that if we didn't make our goals, we couldn't make payroll."
Camera World moved to a less expensive location in Portland four times the size of its former quarters. Though the order-fulfillment process remained the same, Mina and Mulvey reorganized the warehouse to speed up shipping. Frequently ordered products, like film, were kept closest to the packing and shipping stations, while rarely ordered equipment was kept in the back. The company added inventory and packing stations; instead of one packing station, for example, it now had four. And it upped the number of PCs in the warehouse from one to five.
The move, Mina estimates, saved the company $7,000 a month in rent and about $4,000 in reduced manpower requirements in the shipping, receiving, and returns departments. (The displaced employees were reassigned elsewhere in the company.) "Because the warehouse was larger and better organized, we made more shipments on time with fewer errors," he says.
To turn the existing, 300-visitor-a-day Web site into an E-commerce factory, Camera World hired the company that had designed its original Web site, Web Northwest. With just six months in which to transform the site, Web Northwest owner Pete Chiboucas teamed up with a Camera World veteran, Internet administrator Gil Rocha, and together the pair hand-coded the pages as Active Server Pages to create a visually appealing, highly interactive site. Visitors could click on an image of a camera, a lens, or another product and order it using a shopping cart. The Webmeisters also cranked up the fire under the site, spending $20,000 to install a network of six high-powered Windows NT-based servers that could handle thousands of concurrent users at a time.
