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From workstations to collaboration areas, fit out your ideal workspace. Take control of your marketing campaigns and brand with our experienced Max Vision team. Feuer and Hurwitz, refusing to ignore the threat, began trying to initiate talks with Kmart. The talks initially centered around an outright purchase of OfficeMax by Kmart. But Feuer and Hurwitz were hesitant to give up control of their company. Fortunately for the founders, Kmart turned out to be OfficeMax's greatest ally, rather than its worst enemy.
Feuer and Hurwitz were allowed to maintain total control of the company, and Kmart smartly became a silent financial partner. With its new bankroll, OfficeMax intensified its expansion efforts and quickly met the goals that it had set with Kmart executives.
Both companies were so pleased with the arrangement that Kmart decided to up the ante in It purchased 92 percent of the outstanding shares from the original investors and became the owner of OfficeMax. The net result was the OfficeMax was sitting on a mountain of cash and had virtually no long-term debt. Furthermore, Feuer and Hurwitz were still firmly in control of the company.
The deal couldn't have been sweeter for OfficeMax, which was suddenly positioned to launch a bid to dominate the national business supplies superstore segment. That's exactly what the company did. During the next 18 months the company began opening new OfficeMax outlets at a feverish pitch.
More importantly, the company purchased the store Office Warehouse chain and the outlet Bizmart chain, and eventually integrated those stores into the OfficeMax organization.
As a result of store additions and acquisitions, OfficeMax was operating stores, coast-to-coast, in 38 states by the end of Although cash was a major ingredient in the company's recipe for growth, its shrewd operating strategy was just as important for success. Indeed, throughout its expansion OfficeMax maintained its customer focus. It also adapted the format of its stores to capitalize on the huge growth in the small and home-based business markets, which became the dominant industry trend during the early s.
In addition, OfficeMax managed to implement cutting-edge information and distribution systems that allowed the top mega-discounters like Kmart and Walmart to thrive. By the mids, OfficeMax was efficiently operating nearly stores and several distribution centers, and stocking more than 6, brand name office products, business machines, computers and related electronic devices, software, and other goods.
With Kmart's financial backing and the OfficeMax team's successful operating strategy, the company sustained its blistering growth rate in By the end of the year the company was operating stores in 40 states and Puerto Rico. Importantly, the end of marked a huge change for the company. Late in that year, its well-heeled parent, Kmart, sold out. Kmart's investors had been pressuring Kmart to sell off its side interests and refocus its resources on the hyper-competitive general merchandise discount industry.
Kmart's directors stooped to the pressure and decided to bail out of the OfficeMax venture. It aims at cutting costs, consolidating stores, boosting clout with suppliers and improving their chances of fighting market leader Staples Inc SPLS. O , as well as online and discount rivals. Uncertainty around the timing of the Federal Trade Commission approval made it challenging to find a new CEO by the time the deal closed, the committee in charge of the search said.
In addition to office products, OfficeMax stores also feature CopyMax modules offering print-for-pay services and FurnitureMax facilities, which offer office furniture. The company also maintains an e-commerce business officemax. Through joint ventures, OfficeMax operates stores in Mexico and Brazil.
OfficeMax started in as a simple idea. The company achieved that stunning success despite intense competition and an economic recession that began in the late s and lingered throughout the early s. The company's savvy marketing, distribution, management, and financial systems and strategies became models for other superstore retailers in the s. Feuer, who became the driving force behind the chain's growth, had been nurturing the idea during more than 17 years of service with Fabri-Centers of America, a store retailer in Cleveland.
By his early 40s, Feuer had risen to the executive ranks. Still, he was frustrated by his inability to run the company as he believed it should be operated. Feuer finally jumped ship and, despite other excellent corporate job offers, decided to start his own enterprise.
He and Hurwitz decided that they didn't want to fund the start-up with bank debt or venture capital because they didn't want to forfeit control of the operation.
So they scrambled to raise capital from friends and family. The sum was paltry compared to other retail start-up businesses at the time, but the pair thought that they could parlay the cash into a winning enterprise. Feuer and Hurwitz launched their enterprise on April Fool's Day in On that day, they laid out on a sheet of paper their concept for a new type of office products store.
Their goal was to create a large business supplies discount store that was an exciting place to shop, and offered professional and friendly service, as well as prices between 10 and 30 percent less than those found in more traditional office supply retailer shops.
The main goal was to bypass all of the middlemen, such as wholesalers and distributors. Achieving that goal, they reasoned, would allow them to effectively replace mom-and-pop office supply stores, much as supermarkets had replaced small grocers years earlier.
OfficeMax was fighting an uphill battle from the start. In May, an office supplies industry trade paper published a list of 15 start-up companies that were trying to crack into the business; OfficeMax was 14th on the list by asset size.
The start-up team knew that it had to keep expenditures at an absolute minimum to compete. So Feuer and Hurwitz rented office space in a square-foot brick warehouse that had barely any heat or air-conditioning. The space was equipped with a few pieces of cheap office furniture, a coffee machine, and a copier the copier and coffee machine couldn't be operated at the same time, however, because the fuse would blow. They decided not to invest in a fax machine until it became absolutely necessary.
OfficeMax started out with a skeletal staff of seven people, not including the founders. Their requirements for potential employees were simple: they had to be hard workers with open minds, big hearts, and plenty of enthusiasm. They also had to be willing to work for very little money.
Feuer and Hurwitz attracted the workers by promising them part ownership in the company if they stuck with it, and by offering them the chance to go farther, faster, and to have more fun than they had ever had in any other job. From the beginning, Feuer made it clear that OfficeMax would be operated differently from the bureaucracies from which most of the team members had come. There would be no secrets, criticism and praise would be swift and frank, and everyone would cooperate as a team.
Thus, OfficeMax was up-and-running without a single store or any other operation that could bring in any money. The founders hoped that they would be able to get manufacturers to fund their inventory, but they soon found that few big companies were eager to do business with a meager upstart.
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