Q&A: Craig Moreland, TLMI chairman

Labels & Labeling (L&L):  Why did you decide to join TLMI? What advantages has it brought you both personally and professionally?

Craig Moreland (CM): I had a great conversation with past TLMI chairman John Bankson at Labelexpo in 2004 and he suggested I attend the TLMI annual meeting that year as a prospective member. I took John’s advice and very much enjoyed the meeting. I met a number of friendly and welcoming members and felt that there was tremendous value in joining. I have been active ever since.

TLMI membership has given us a much broader understanding of the industry its players. Additionally, TLMI has a number of regular studies that we find valuable to help us benchmark our company performance with our peers and the industry as a whole.

TLMI sponsors the management ratio study where converter member companies can submit their year-end financial results to a third-party company who then prepares a confidential report for each participant that shows where you are strong and where there’s room for improvement. TLMI also produces a quarterly trend report and a bi-annual wage and labor study. All of these are tremendous management tools that you can’t get any other way. Also, I am proud that Coast Label has won the TLMI Eugene Singer award for one of the best managed companies four times.

TLMI also created and sponsors the LIFE environmental certification program for the label industry. The criteria are rigorous, so it’s an achievement that a company and its employees can be proud of. Coast Label earned its LIFE Certification in 2011.

Personally, one of the most rewarding aspects of TLMI membership is the great friendships that we have made.

L&L: What are the main challenges and opportunities facing TLMI and other label associations?

CM: Trade associations must always work to remain relevant for their membership and that is no different for TLMI. We must continue to evolve and offer benefits, programs, studies, research and advocacy that bring value to our membership which is diverse in size, focus and location. Because the industry is ever-evolving and our members’ needs are ever-changing, TLMI must keep working to deliver compelling value to the players in our industry.

L&L: What will be your main focus in the year ahead leading the association?

CM: TLMI has an amazingly talented board of directors, a strong and dedicated staff and huge group of members that selflessly volunteer their time on our many committees. Due to this pool of talent in our association I genuinely feel quite honored and humbled to have been elected to lead TLMI.

Our biggest task ahead of us during my term is to make strong progress on our recently developed strategic plan. This plan is focused on delivering valuable information and services to our membership – generally focusing on things that are too difficult and too expensive for our members to cost-effectively do themselves. Our key goals are centered on making key strides in industry sustainability, strengthening our external affairs so that we are telling our good story, and assisting our members with workforce recruitment and development.

L&L: When did you decide to join the label industry and why?

CM: In 1991 I went looking for a company to buy. I wanted a manufacturing business that had recurring customer purchases and that sold B2B as I understood the value of a customer base that purchased year-after-year as long as you offered them good service and value.

I found Coast Label Company for sale and soon after I was in the label business. I was young and had a lot of confidence, my wife Janice was a full-time mom and we had two small children. Failure was not an option because we pretty much went ‘all in’. In retrospect, I was very fortunate to have stumbled into a great industry with good fundamentals and strong growth potential. Over the years, we have grown the company organically as well as through a couple of small ‘tuck-in’ acquisitions, including the purchase of Western Label – founded in 1913 – the oldest label converter on the west coast. In our lobby, we have a Keiss & Gerlach seal press that Western Label purchased brand new in 1929 – six years before Stan Avery invented the pressure-sensitive label construction that created the industry as we know it today.

L&L: Describe your company’s focus and structure.

CM: Our largest vertical market is medical and our second largest is what I call high-performance and industrial. Coast Label Company is a specialty label supplier that targets companies that have unusual label requirements. Many of our relationships with customers start off with a mutual nondisclosure agreement and then proceed down the path to us solving a problem or creating a product that involves specialty adhesives, face stocks, coatings and multi-layer constructions.

L&L: I understand your son, Drew, is being groomed to take over the business. What are the advantages – and challenges – in having a successor come from your family?

CM: While our kids were growing up, they worked at the business many summers doing a range of duties. I probably erred on the side of making the family business not look terribly fun or a likely career choice for either of them. I really stressed that they should get a great education and follow their own interests for a career inspiration. My kids took that to mean that there really wasn’t an opportunity – ever. Five years after Drew had graduated from college and was enjoying a successful career at an online media company, he was quite surprised when I approached him about joining the company. I needed someone with his skill set and it turns out that it was the right time for both of us. That was five years ago, and it has been a wonderful experience working together. Drew has earned his current place of leadership in the company and due to his skills and contributions our team sees him as the company’s next leader. We are now planning how to transition the leadership and eventually the ownership of the company to Drew. I’m not ready to ‘go fishing’ just yet, and we see several stages of this transition yet ahead of us.

In selling a company to an outsider you spend a lot of time getting the company ready to be marketed for sale. In transitioning the company to the next generation, you focus that energy on getting the successors ready to lead the company so that they and the company will be successful going forward. The latter takes longer and requires more work but it is much more fun and rewarding.

L&L: What printing equipment do you use? Have you invested in digital?

CM: We have a pretty conventional small fleet of flexographic printing and converting equipment ranging from three colors up to eight colors. For us the converting section of a press is just as important as the printing section due to our functional label focus, so most of our presses are highly optioned in that area.

We just installed a 13in UV inkjet press (Durst Tau 330E) and semi-rotary finishing machine (Grafisk Maskinfabrik DC330 Mini) with a festoon unit that can run either in-line or near-line that we purchased shortly after Labelexpo Americas. That equipment is running now and we are thus far very pleased with our investment.

L&L: Apart from machinery, what other technology is important to your business?

CM: Information technology is crucial to us. You have to be extremely responsive to customers and their needs in today’s market and you need the tools to tell your story to prospective customers and then communicate with those prospects so that you can turn them into customers. And, for our customers, specification control is extremely important and we use the enterprise software tools to manage our processes to ensure that we provide and extremely consistent customer experience.

L&L: What are most exciting future opportunities for your business?

CM: I continue to be excited about the growth prospects for our industry because there seems to be no end to the opportunities to create value for customers by thinking of new and better solutions. We are in a creative industry with constant new challenges and that makes coming to work every day a joy for me.

L&L: What interests you outside the label industry?

CM: We have a second home in Mammoth Lakes, which is in the Sierra Nevada Mountains of California near Yosemite National Park. We enjoy snow skiing, hiking, fishing and relaxing up there throughout the year. We are also very fortunate that our children and their spouses live close by, making family get-togethers and activities frequent. We welcomed our first grandchild in October and expect another in May, and that’s opened a fun new chapter in our lives. I’m also an automobile enthusiast and you’ll find me most early Saturday mornings at the original Cars and Coffee event in south Orange County hanging out with fellow car nuts.