Lisa Christensen is 24 years younger than her husband, and though she is both attractive and charming, she is anything but a trophy wife. The two first met in 1986, when Lisa sold display ads for a California newspaper and one of her clients was a pet store Chris had opened for his son. A year or so later, the two ran into each other at a dinner party, and upon hearing that Lisa was newly divorced and, as he did, enjoyed country and western dancing, Chris asked her out. Lisa said she'd think about it, and she wasn't kidding. Three months later, she called to accept.
The two fell in love and merged their lives, and a few years later relocated from California to Texas to lower their overhead and give their fledgling dog-product business a better chance to survive. For three years, they worked out of the guest bedroom of a small house in Dallas, using the garage as a warehouse, where Chris filled orders with an orphaned blue jay named Zippity resting on his head. ("Truly," Lisa said. "I have pictures.") Over time, the two sold enough shampoo to buy 15 acres about two hours south of the city.
From the onset, the two were the perfect balance for each other: Whereas Chris is risk, Lisa is caution. "Our accountant says he gets a kick out of us," Lisa said, "because Chris always has his foot on the gas, and I have my foot on the brake."
In addition to holding the purse strings, Lisa wears many hats and has, during the past half-year, overseen two major new initiatives. The first was a total overhaul of the company's website, which hadn't been updated since it was built in the late '90s. The new, sleeker site was set up so that any of the company's distributors can choose to have a CCS "child" site that will look exactly like the mother site, only with that company's branding. Anytime CCS adds a product or tweaks a label, all sites will update simultaneously. The distributors, then, need only manage sales and distribution.
The other project aims to solve a critical problem of the Christensen business. "The dog-show vendors—we call them distributors, but they're really retailers," Lisa explained. "They're selling to the end consumer." That means if a person wants White on White or a T-Brush, he or she is going to have to buy it from Cherrybrook or, if the person is in Seattle, The 3 C's (which controls the Pacific Northwest). This system works great for dog shows, but it foils any effort to expand into grooming shops and pet retail before it has begun. Even the shops—some of them major national pet stores—that call and ask for product (on the order of 10 or more a week, Lisa noted) wouldn't be able to sell the products with any success, given the prices the distributors would want to charge. Lisa saw only one solution. "We need a retail line that doesn't hurt our show and pro line," she said.
That line—Lisa Lynn—has been in quiet development for a year and should begin to appear by early 2012. It will not, as you might assume, come in at a lower price point. "It will actually be more, probably," Lisa said, explaining that the idea is to go in the complete opposite direction of the low-cost, high-volume brands you find at pet stores and in catalogs like PetEdge. Rather, Lisa Lynn products will be in smaller sizes at higher prices. Think Aveda—less technical than the dog-show stuff but prettier, with more "froufrou perfumes," said Lisa. "The stuff pet owners will buy."
To pull back slightly, the business space into which CCS is growing is made up of three industries: dog shows, grooming, and retail. The company dominates the first, but that market is finite. That leaves two, much larger areas to probe, and while Chris is more interested in grooming—in the past year he has attended more grooming shows than dog shows—Lisa is into the retail world.
I spent enough time with the Christensens to realize that Lisa isn't just a smart and strong personality who balances her husband; she's a shrewd executive. She said one reason she's so focused on containing cost and avoiding debt—or paying it back as quickly as possible—is that the reality of her circumstances warrants keeping a very close eye on the future. Being 24 years younger than her 73-year-old husband, she will, in all likelihood, be running the company herself someday.
And yet, her foot is only barely on the brake. Her own goal, she told me, is to triple the business in four years. "No grass grows under our feet," she said with a smile. "It never has."
Despite the fact that America's economy was at that very moment in great turmoil, there were no signs of stress at CCS. Chris led me through a door into the warehouse/factory portion of the headquarters, where the 110-degree summer heat smacked me in the face like a blast of jet wash. It would have been far more comfortable to stand in front of one of the company's cool-air dryers, one of which was being assembled in a corner by a cheerful woman in shorts and eyeglasses.
Much of the heat was drafting in from a massive loading-dock door, open to the outdoors while pallets were stacked for pickup. CCS is the local UPS office's largest customer, to the extent that the driver who used to have the route called her truck the Chrismobile. That kind of personal relationship is precisely why both Christensens consider their small-town location to be a linchpin of their success. So long as they promised to double their work force by 2016, the local government gave them the land, with room for 80,000 square feet of expansion, for free.
One reason CCS should easily fulfill that requirement is that the company is preparing to take over the mixing of chemicals for its liquids. And although the move introduces risk, both financial and chemical, to the operation, it provides yet another excellent opportunity for growth. Within a few months, CCS will have the ability to contract-fill for other companies and, because it already does labeling on-site, provide a full-service operation for private-label jobs.
With sales at $4 million and climbing, expansion already under way into grooming shops, and a retail line in the works, it should be noted that Chris Christensen is also not at all finished with his domination of dog shows. At last count, he told me, his company was in only 13 of the 100 categories that apply to show dogs. "Think about leashes and collars and crates and dollies," he said. "The list goes on and on and on."
