King Group Rules Retail Supply Line

Whether playing baseball or building a retail display for baseball caps, both are games of inches.
An inch can be the difference between a home run and a routine fly ball. When it comes to designing, manufacturing and shipping displays of anything from can openers to crock pots, an inch or less can be just as decisive.
A pallet display an inch too tall can make it impossible to double-stack a truck, increasing fuel and labor costs. An extra inch of exposed midriff on a display photo could make it too risqué for the conservative constituency in the boardrooms and on the sales floors at Wal-Mart.
When a vendor like Clorox or a retailer such as Wal-Mart or Lowe’s needs a new way to move an existing product or an old way to move a new product, they turn to Kendal King Group.
By the numbers alone, the Kansas City-based company doesn’t stand out. The company has a total of 30 full-time employees, eight of whom work in its Bentonville office, which KKG opened 10 years ago.
Kendal King Group’s size, however, belies its critical role in the retail supply chain and the company has experienced 20 percent revenue growth in each of the last two years.
Cost-effective marketing solutions keep cash registers humming, jobs growing and supplier teams — not to mention their corporate masters — smiling.
With feet on the factory floors of China and strategic manufacturing and distribution partners across the United States, KKG is a vertically integrated company capable of meeting nearly every need in retail.
The company does more than displays. It can handle signage from “Shrek the Third” to the Wal-Mart shareholders meeting as well as offer trade show booth services.
A deep background in logistics and design plus two decades of service to the world’s largest retailer is what sets KKG apart, said company president Drew Loboda.
“We come at each job from two directions,” Loboda said. “There’s the front end. What is it going to look like? What other elements can we use to educate folks? There’s also the back end. How are we going to make it and ship it? How fast can we get it to market?
“That’s how you get a good return on investment.”

Basket Building
Most of Kendal King Group’s business comes from clients who are already selling or have sold to a major retailer like Wal-Mart, but vice president Jakob Nilsson said around 20 percent to 25 percent of KKG’s clients are manufacturers trying to get a product into stores for the first time.
They either need someone to craft the pitch they will make to a Wal-Mart buyer or to execute a strategy they have already sold.
About half of their clients seek out KKG for the entire process from the drawing board to the sales floor while the rest need its service to execute a predetermined strategy.
Tight deadlines and redesigns can happen when a client doesn’t come to KKG for help up front on the back end, and can make for an opportunity to form a long-term relationship when it bails a company out of a jam.
Kendal King asks companies for challenges, and it got one from Provo Craft last fall when the hobby and crafting company came to it a month before Thanksgiving needing to execute a product rollout for the biggest shopping weekend of the year.
Most programs take anywhere from 6 weeks to 8 weeks from the sketch to the first sale. Kendal King was able to deliver Provo Craft’s “Cricut” — a personal electronic cutter targeting scrapbook enthusiasts — in four weeks with everything from an interactive floor display to end caps to the associate information kit.
Kendal King has been dealing with Wal-Mart for long enough to empathize with store managers facing the most hectic season of the year, so making a product introduction go smoothly on the floor is as key as getting the item on a truck.
“There is a lot of intensity and we try to balance all that,” Laboda said. “Communication is the key. To pull people together is a challenge and we try to be sensitive to that.”
The associate information kit is becoming just as important as the display itself, especially in Wal-Mart where the morning meeting makes for the perfect venue not only to educate associates, but to sell them as well.
The associate is the first opportunity to make a sale, Loboda said, and that can make for excitement about a product and strong recommendations to customers on the floor to drive sales.
Starter rolled out a new line of shoes last year and Kendal King’s associate kit for the product was packaged like a shoe box with flash cards of the various footwear and their features included.
Perhaps most importantly, the kit also included the fact that the Starter brand is owned by the more well-known and pricier Nike Inc., a piece of information that could make the difference in a purchase for a customer concerned about quality.
A display for gift cards isn’t nearly as complex as one for electronic navigation systems like KKG client Garmin, which has to host a functional product in addition to looking good.
While bright colors, a well-known logo or even the motion-activated voice of NASCAR superstar Ryan Newman can help draw a buyer’s attention, the most important factor is appearance.
“The display should reflect the quality of the goods,” Nilsson said. “A sagging display is not a good reflection on the goods. The customer should walk away thinking, ‘I got a great value,’ not ‘I just got something cheap.’
“It makes the customer feel good about their purchase.”

Family Values
Kendal King Group is family-owned and it has meshed well with the family-value oriented Wal-Mart Stores Inc.
Company founder Kendal King, whose background was commercial printing, made a good match with Wal-Mart and he landed the retailer as a client on a cold call with the pitch to help with its printing needs.
“Our approach from the beginning was to make the customer No. 1,” Loboda said. “If you have a problem, run to the problem. If we have an issue, we run to it and after it. We’re about strong ethics, respect and sensitivity. It’s better to pass on a job than tell a client we can do something that we can’t.
“That’s how you maintain quality.”
Kendal King Group, a preferred vendor to Wal-Mart, has several former Wal-Mart employees, including account executive Parker Hunt, who works in the Bentonville office, has 20 years experience with Wal-Mart and helps manage the international operations of KKG.
“We know their history, we know their culture, we know their core values,” Nilsson said. “It’s what we’re all about. You want to help people.”
Sustainability touches the packaging and distribution industries as much or more than any other, and KKG has taken steps such as using pallets made from recycled, heat-pressed plywood.
But beyond simply using recycled paper or wood, the main way to be sustainable — and, most importantly to most companies, cost-effective — is to save fuel and materials, an area in which KKG excels.
Being sustainable and taking an active role in the community is important to KKG. Nilsson, though he won’t take credit for it, nearly single-handedly got club soccer off the ground in Benton County.
He was a force behind the new soccer complex at Sugar Creek in Bella Vista, the tournaments it hosted there last fall brought an estimated $500,000 to the area economy and his youth players have boosted the local high schools.
Bentonville High School’s girls soccer team recently won the state championship with 10 players on its roster who have played either for Nilsson or in his club league.
“We do it because we love it and it’s good for the community,” Hunt said. “It’s very important to try to add to it.”