|  ORIGINS
- Originally known as The Public Broadcast Fulfillment Center,
Peak Fulfillment originated as a department of VisABILITY, Inc.
The parent company is public broadcasting's largest supplier of
fund-raising premiums. (Premiums are items
like coffee mugs, T-shirts and tote bags that
have been branded with public broadcasting station or program
logos. They are used as contributor incentives.) VisABILITY is
also the licensed supplier for Prairie
Home Companion,; Morning Edition, Car Talk, NPR, Red Dwarf, All
Things Considered, Marketplace, This American Life,
etc. (To see a complete list, try VisABILITYClients)
It is a privately held company that originated in Greeley
and is owned and managed by a husband-wife team.
Premium
fulfillment began in 1986. Retail sales by phone, fax and mail
was started in 1995. The first ecommerce store was launched
in 1996. These activities were shifted from VisABILITY when Peak
was chartered in 2001. Upgrades were completed in Spring of 2002
and the company was publicly announced in October, 2002.
 LOCATION
- Peak is located in Lyons, a
small mountain town with 2,000 residents in the foothills
of the Rocky Mountains 12 miles north of Boulder.
Interesting contrast
- Peak's clientele is concentrated in urban centers
throughout the country.
SERVICE
- From simple inventory management and parcel fulfillment
to complex ecommerce, we cover all bases. We even build and host
ecommerce stores seamlessly integrated into our clients' websites.
PLUS - By working with VisABILITY, Peak can develop and source
products for its clients! This range of integrated service
is extremely rare.
CURRENT
CLIENTS -
- for
National Public Radio
- warehousing/shipping of merchandise in wholesale lots
to national retail outlets like Borders, Amazon, etc.
- for
new PBS series Great
Museums - ecommerce store selling program
videos. (In time we hope to expand the product line to include
items from gift shops of the museums covered by the program,
related books, etc.)
- for Car Talk
- operation of ecommerce store - named The Shameless
Commerce Division on cartalk.com.
(The program is carried by nearly every public radio station
in the country and is broadcast internationally by Armed Forces
Network.)
- for
public radio & TV Travel Guru Rudy
Maxa - ecommerce store to launch in 2003
- (Maxa, former Washington Post investigative reporter, is the
host of the PBS series Smart Travels. He is also the
travel expert on Marketplace, public radio’s daily business
news service broadcast on 500+ stations.)
- for
The Jewish Heritage Video Collection
- inventory management
and distribution to university and municipal libraries nationwide.
- for
Denver Regional Council of Governments
(DRCOG)
-
inventory management and distribution to participants
in the annual Bike to Work day.
- for Brink
Inc. - inventory
management and distribution to Feedlots and Dairies.
PROSPECTIVE
CLIENTS - We are
currently in discussion with museums in San Jose and Chicago,
a college in NY, a national internet content provider in Boston,
a regional health association in Philadelphia, a national young
adult magazine, a national health association in Washington, DC
and a regional outdoor organization in Colorado. Our particular
hope is to acquire several new clients from the Front Range.
MARKET
NICHE - There is a small and under-served national
market niche consisting of membership and
affinity organizations that depend on the support of established
constituencies. To protect their relationships, they need a quality
of service nor readily available from most product distribution
companies. Peak is the only
product distribution company in the nation specifically designed
to serve these affinity organizations, which are found primarily
in the non-profit sector.
We will also serve brand intensive Boulder/Denver
for-profit companies that have earned an intensely loyal
following.
HOW
WE COMPARE -
Peak is partially a calculated
response to the practices of large commercial fulfillment
houses. Most follow an industrial assembly line model. That hi-tech/low-touch
approach moves a lot of merchandise. It can also make unavoidable
an error rate that is higher than ours. And a customer
service quality that is lower. We have no doubt that commercial
product distribution companies are well suited for the markets
they serve. Fortunately for Peak, the assembly line approach makes
them less appropriate to our market niche.
UNIQUE
ASPECTS - We believe three atypical characteristics
will help Peak become the preferred supplier to its market niche:
-
We
learned to focus on relationships rather than on transactions.
The company's real distinction is its ability to
carefully manage services to end-users. We consciously
enhance the loyalty each client receives from the customers
we serve in its name. To see unsolicited praise from our
clients and their constituents (our customers), click:
Client Customer Comments
-
We
have the benefit of big technology. The benefit of
small size. And the disadvantages of neither.
As a small boutique operation Peak can provide quick, flexible,
personalized service to end-users. Big companies, focused
on transaction volume, either can’t or won’t do that. But
unlike the typical small provider, Peak utilizes cutting-edge
technology. Thus, Peak is in a unique position. It can
smoothly process large quantities of daily orders with impeccable
control - while providing responsive and flexible customer
service. Anecdotes that illustrate our service quality can
be found here: Examples
-
Peak
has all bases covered. Many companies provide
outsourced fulfillment service. Few can also build,
host and maintain ecommerce shopping carts and seamlessly
attach them to clients’ websites. In association with VisABILITY
(also our company, and located in Lyons) Peak can develop,
source and produce logoware products - domestic and imported.
PEOPLE
- Six people are responsible for
Peak Fulfillment in the roles of founders, owners and directors.
We all came from non-profit and constituency-service
organizations. Click here to check out our bios.
INFO
NUGGETS - The following
nuggets interest us - and may interest you.
-
Before
we split into two companies, we were so growth-averse, and
so totally focused on public broadcasting, that for years
we turned away
prestigious non-broadcasting clients. The John F. Kennedy
Center (DC). Carnegie Hall (NYC) The National
Symphony Orchestra (DC) The Metropolitan Opera
(NYC) And others of equal stature.
-
More
people get their news from Morning Edition or All
things Considered each day than from the Wall Street
Journal, the New York Times and USA Today
combined. Those
two news programs have a larger
daily audience than the weekly readership
of Time Magazine or Newsweek. The number of
people who receive business and economic information on
any given day from Marketplace is greater
than the total readership of the nation’s leading monthly
business magazines - all of them
combined. These programs are broadcast
by about 450 non-profit, non-commercial public radio stations
qualified by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.
-
Robyn
Goldman, Peak's CFO,
was co-founder, CFO and COO of NYT Video News
International, now called New York Times Television. It is
the producer of, among other programs, "Trauma: Life
in the ER". She came to us from WHYY in Philadelphia.
In 2001 she adopted two daughters (6 & 8 years old) from
Russia. Then she decided it would be better for them to grow
up in a place like Lyons. Shortly after arriving in Colorado,
Robyn went back to the orphanage in Russia for a third
daughter. Emily, a 12 year old, had been like a surrogate
sister to the first two so Robyn decided to keep them together
in America. Mother and children are doing well.
- Robyn is not
the only client who joined our staff. Robert
Auman, Peak's president,
was the assistant general manager and chief business officer
at WBUR in Boston. As an undergraduate, he put himself through
school by serving as the Technical Director for BYU-sponsored
traveling theatrical groups. He traveled to many places throughout
the world, including some countries that don't exist anymore.
If you get to know us, and him, he'll be happy to tell about
the exotic places he's visited - and about meals of dog meat
and water buffalo milk.
-
Our
little town of Lyons is about fifteen minutes northwest of
Boulder. About twenty five minutes up the canyon is Rocky
Mountain National Park. Lyons, elevation 5374 feet above sea
level, is also home of Planet Bluegrass - sponsor of the Telluride
Bluegrass Festival over on the Western Slope. Right in town
it hosts the annual Rocky Mountain Bluegrass Festival and
Rocky Mountain Folks Festival. Both local festivals are held
a couple hundred yards from our offices, and attract thousands
of visitors from all over the country.
- Unlike just about
any other product distribution company, we have plenty of
critters nearby. In September a mother bear and her cub crossed
the road about a mile from our office and a mountain lion
roamed through a residential neighborhood a few blocks away.
Deer are common, elk use a migration route in the hills above
town and Bighorn Sheep are seen on
canyon walls to the West. We hear coyotes at night and see
them during the day. Peak's owners have several times watched
a bobcat hunt on their property.
- The six owners,
officers and directors of Peak have accrued 93 years of senior
level management and marketing experience in higher education,
international education, public broadcasting and regional
service agencies. In addition, the owners have spent another
40 years in the for-profit world as preferred suppliers to
public broadcasting.
- We have
two employees who, until recently, lived at about 8,000 feet.
Our fulfillment crew includes a woman in her mid-sixties who
periodically spends a few months teaching English As A Second
Language in China. And we have a retired financial analyst
from the University of Colorado - who explores caves when
he's not in the Peak warehouse. Also on the staff is the only
local state-certified female firefighter and EMT. She's a
veteran of the famous Big Elk Fire in 2002, where the slurry
bomber and helicopter crashed and generated national headlines
- plus other forest fires, plane crashes and smaller disasters
in Colorado and Montana.
Contact:
John Burke @ (303) -823-0327 or john@peakfulfillment.com |
