After 118 years in business, Fetter Printing Company announced in December that it had completely overhauled its management structure as well as its vision for the future, walking away from some of its traditional lines of business in order to focus on others in which it can be a market leader. This bold and unusual move prompted WhatTheyThink to contact President and Chief Operating Officer Terry Gill to get the story behind the story.

WTT:  Terry, thanks for talking with us today. Fetter has made a pretty bold move.  Maybe you could start by telling us how you came to the conclusion that you needed to make a change like this?

TG:  We came to the realization that with finite resources, we couldn’t create a powerful enough value proposition that we could really dominate a category.  We were serving several different areas and doing a good job, but increasingly, we were getting requests from customers to develop more complex solutions. We came to the conclusion that we had to simplify our business and focus all of our resources on a limited set of vertical markets.  Our labels business made sense because it was a defined market. We had an advantage there because we were the number two supplier to the paint and coatings segment. Our production platform was not too dissimilar from the competition. But while our competition was providing decorative labels to the paint industry, they also served other industries, and we felt our focus on paint and coatings could deliver a significant competitive advantage. This industry traditionally has a heavy reliance on inventory and acceptance of high costs of obsolescence. We believed that if we could devote 100% of our resources to the label business, we could help them reduce their dependence on inventory as well as reduce cycle times.  We didn’t see that opportunity in direct marketing and commercial print, and that was what drove us down that path—the huge savings we believed we could help this segment achieve.