Wendy Newmeyer admits having no fear of failure. Thirty years ago, Newmeyer and her husband, Jack, moved from New Jersey to 100 acres in rural West Paris with a small savings, determined to live off the land. The couple lived in a trailer without electricity or running water, cutting down trees to sell to lumber companies.
Today, Newmeyer runs Maine Balsam Fir Products, turning balsam branches into aromatic pillows, draft stoppers and neck rolls for 5,200 clients. In the company’s 26-year history, it has made over 2 million products, says Newmeyer. The business paid for the couple to build their first house, the barn where the pillows are manufactured and the log cabin factory store. The business has had its ups and downs, but each challenge has pushed the company into a new phase it might not have reached otherwise. “The business advice I would give is that failure can be your friend,” Newmeyer, 54, says. “Don’t take it so seriously.”
Newmeyer lived that advice earlier this year, when the souring economy forced one of her major accounts, a catalog company she’s worked with for 15 years, to cancel its annual order of draft stoppers, which usually kept her staff busy for two months. While the immediate effects were negative — Newmeyer had to scale back the hours of the company’s seven employees and take a pay cut herself — it enabled Maine Balsam Fir Products to ramp up a new product line of customizable pillows that can feature any photograph or logo, applied with a heat transfer machine.
Newmeyer tiptoed around the idea last year, but this year has attacked it full force with encouraging results. Sales for the customizable pillows so far have totaled $10,000, on par with what the draft stopper order would have brought in, and Newmeyer estimates the line could propel the company to new heights. “It kind of recharged me,” she says about having to stake out a new trajectory for the company.
Newmeyer started Maine Balsam Fir Products in 1983 to help support herself and her husband. She began selling balsam branch material wholesale, at first to an incense manufacturer in Lewiston, and then to 125 customers interested in making their own balsam products. Newmeyer then transitioned into making pillows with “more pizzazz” than the monochromatic ones that were already on the market. She sold the pillows in 150 gift shops in Maine that first summer, and in four years the business hit $100,000 in sales.
Business climbed steadily until 2000, making $500,000 annually at its peak. But since then, business has fallen down to about $250,000 a year, in part due to the economy, but also Newmeyer’s decision to keep the business manageably sized. “Our low overhead affords us the ability to get through tough times,” she says. “Even if we got bigger, I know we wouldn’t get better, and that’s unacceptable to us.”
It has also allowed Newmeyer to spend some of her time paying her successes forward. She teaches a marketing class for new entrepreneurs through Maine Centers for Women, Work and Community, gives presentations to high schoolers and the local community, and was asked to speak at a women’s business conference at Syracuse University in 2005, right after Myra Hart, the founder of Staples.
Newmeyer’s employed over 100 women in Maine Balsam Fir’s history, and about a dozen have become entrepreneurs themselves. Newmeyer thinks of her company now as an “incubator” for other women business owners, despite its relatively small scale and bootstrap approach. “Sometimes things don’t have to be complicated in order to be successful,” she says.
Mindy Favreau
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