The interior of this display was printed on the six-color Apstar rotary diecutter. Then labels were applied using an Automatän laminator. NWP successfully matched the yellows.

Art Durand was your prototypical "people" salesperson. His relationships meant the world to him. He worked in the box making industry for decades, including Twin Town Box Corp., which is now Green Bay Packaging in Coon Rapids, Minn. Twenty-one years ago he decided he wanted to provide customers with more personalized service. So he started a 50,000-sq-ft sheet plant, Northwest Packaging (NWP), with two partners, some family members, and a dozen employees.

Today, the St. Paul, Minn.-based operation takes in $18 million annually, runs about 12 million sq ft per month and has expanded to 150,000 sq ft (including a 75,000-sq-ft warehouse).

Durand died in August 2007. Today his son, Steve, who started in the box making industry in 1979, is president. Another son, Mark, who has been in the industry for 32 years, is the coordinator of sales and production. His daughter, Karen, is in charge of finance.

Gilo Menjivar, the Apstar's operator, can run the rotary diecutter from the machine's main console (in the background) or from the computer screen on the stacker from A.G. Stacker.

Steve was a teenager when he started in the industry; his father gave him a job directly out of high school so he could help finance his college education. He began in design and also was a corrugator scheduler and manager at Green Bay Packaging. Art would be proud to see that his sons and daughter not only continue to grow NWP but still value people, whether employees or customers. Steve remembers him saying, "We're friends to people that have no friends."

"We take an interest in you and your company, not just your purchase orders," Steve says. "Our biggest asset is our people. In our 21 years of existence, we've only lost six office employees. Many of our press people have been with us from day one. They're empowered to run their machines as if they were their own. Here you're not a number, you're a person."

Sheet Plant within a Sheet Plant

Last February, the company helped a flower account that found itself in a bind the Saturday before Valentine's Day. That afternoon the client ran out of boxes to ship its flowers. Steve was called at home. As soon as he found out, he ran out the door, went to his warehouse, loaded the (already made) boxes on a truck, and sent them on their way.

NWP does a lot of warehousing for its customers, which allows it to service them the same (or next) day. For the past 12 years, it has run a vendor-managed inventory program where customers don't place orders, they just release them.