In Maine, self reliance comes in many forms
Mainers pride themselves on self reliance and this issue provides some worthy examples.
One of the more intriguing stories in this issue is written by Senior Writer Lori Valigra. The Bull Moose name is well known across Maine. The Portland-based retailer has nine stores in Maine and two in New Hampshire. The stores sell vinyl records, CDs, DVDs, video games and the like — items that are easily accessible in their old-school form on Amazon or their digital form on iTunes or other outlets. And yet, Bull Moose continues to record what to me were surprising sales figures, while in turn expanding the number of stores.
As Lori discovered, the Bull Moose team is very skilled at figuring out what customers want, when they want it and how much they're willing to pay for a given item. Bull Moose founder and President Brett Wickard got so good at what's called lean retail that he formed a company called FieldStack, which created a retail-tracking software I'm guessing a lot of companies would like to have working for them.
Another company with the drive and willingness to innovate is South Portland-based WEX. As reported by Senior Writer Jim McCarthy, WEX has been around since 1983, when it was known as Wright Express Corp. It is a provider of payment processing and information-management services. One example of its services is fleet cards that trucking companies use both at the pump and to track data. It's already in 200 countries and has annual sales of $817 million in 2014, up from $717.5 million the previous year. WEX got a real boost a decade ago when it went public. A leader in the IPO, Melissa Smith, is now CEO. Jim sat down with Melissa and the company's chief information officer, Stephen Crowley, to talk about what's next for WEX. With a market capitalization over $4 billion and a strong cash reserve, the company is poised for more expansion. But it also continues to retool its technology to stay ahead of changes in the marketplace and to thwart cyber thieves.
Of course, Maine's scrappy self reliance goes beyond technology.
Elsewhere in the issue, Laurie Schreiber, a correspondent based in the salty town of Bass Harbor, takes a look at the lobster industry's effort to raise its profile. Prices paid to lobstermen are slowly rebounding, though the fishery's stocks remain strong. Under the retooled Maine Lobster Marketing Collaborative, there is now a significant budget for marketing. To that end, the organization hired a Boston PR firm, Weber Shandwick, to retool the trusty crustacean's brand. “We have a superhero in lobstermen, and a lot of brands don't,” Patty Stone of the Boston firm told Laurie. “We have this halo effect from Maine. You don't often walk into clients who have such built-in benefits.” We all know lobstermen are out in the worst weather and restaurants in much of the country feature “Maine lobster” on the menu. But the new branding effort hopes to get lobster in front of more chefs and a greater range of markets around the world. As David Cousens, a well-regarded lobsterman, says, “We've got a great story to tell.”
In a recent issue, I wrote about a conversation I had with Peter Vigue, who heads Maine's largest construction firm, Pittsfield-based Cianbro. He had an interesting anecdote regarding lobster. He frequently travels to Houston on business. There, he notes, everyone wants to take you to a steak house and, because it's Texas, everything has to be bigger. He recalls one such visit and the steak house had a big lobster tank featuring, well, big lobsters — ones weighing four and five pounds — prominently labeled “Maine lobster.” Naturally, the Maine native knew a lobster of that size could not be legally harvested in Maine, exceeding the size limits. But the story illustrates the power of the Maine brand as it stands today.
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