|
|
|
One-of-a-Kind Love Affair
After having crafted improbable business success from a spare bedroom, Fen and Phyllis Seton set out to carve an even more meaningful second career of service to others
|
Business New Haven
1/21/2002
By:
Michael C. Bingham
|
To do all the good they can, by all the ways they can, in all the places they can, for all the people they can.
- Lawrence J. DeNardis, president, University of New Haven, describing 45 years of community service by Phyllis and Fenmore Seton to greater New Haven.
Some people keep scrapbooks. Fen and Phyllis Seton are close to needing a new addition to their North Haven home just to house all the awards, honorary degrees, citations, newspaper and magazine articles and letters of thanks that have documented their remarkable lives of public service. And, like most of what they have accomplished during their nearly six decades as a team, Fen and Phyllis Seton did it all together.
Got married amid the global cataclysm of World War II. Built a business in their spare time from a kitchen table in Westville. Raised a family. “Retired” in the prime of their long and rich lives together to devote their remaining decades to helping others less fortunate than themselves.
Throughout Fen Seton's 30-year career building Seton Name Plate from scratch and ever since, the Setons have been storybook heroes to those in need in their hometown and beyond, especially young people, and particularly young people with disabilities.
The roster of their good works over the decades would require a small encyclopaedia. Even the most cursory survey would need to include:
• Fenmore Seton is past president of Rehabilitation International (representing 145 organizations in 83 countries), a lecturer on rehabilitation issues at the United Nations and recipient of a Presidential Distinguished Service award citation from President George (H.W.) Bush.
• The sole female member of the New Haven Board of Education (1960-67), Phyllis Seton has spent more than half-century advocating for children's causes. In 1991 she received the Community Service Award from Women's Health Services “in recognition of the spirit of caring you have demonstrated in the New Haven community.”
And that's just the beginning. As a couple, the Setons whole far exceeds the sum of its parts.
• The pair conceived of and endowed the “Elm & Ivy Awards” program, jointly presented each year by the president of Yale and mayor of New Haven, which honors Yale employees and New Haven citizens who have made significant efforts to improve town-gown relations.
• The couple's efforts have earned them honorary doctorates from the University of New Haven and Albertus Magnus College.
• Yale conferred jointly on the Setons the university's highest honor, the Yale Medal.
• The National Society of Fund Raising Executives named the Setons Connecticut's Philanthropists of the Year in 1998.
ª In 1999, the Setons earned the Seal of the City Award from the New Haven Colony Historical Society.
And while that list merely scratches the surface, it seems clear that the still-vigorous Fen and Phyllis have yet -unwritten chapters to pen in a life lived so well, and so generously. For all they have done, and may yet accomplish in their rich lives, Fenmore R. and Phyllis Z. Seton are Business New Haven's 2002 Citizens of the Year.
If the Setons' second career has been helping people, their first career reaped rich rewards of a different sort.
Fen Seton traces his entrepreneurial roots to age 14, when his family spent summers at a house on Ft. Trumbull Beach in Milford.
“I would go down to a popcorn stand, and they would sell me 20 or 30 [bags] of popcorn. The guy was selling it for 15 cents from a stand, and he sold them to me for nine cents, and then I put them in basket and walked up the sand on Sunday afternoons until all the bags were sold."
Thirty bags times six cents was $1.80 that young Seton cleared. Peanuts, you say? Actually, peanuts represented Seton's first attempt at diversification beyond the popcorn business. After all, he reasoned, not every beach-goer necessarily cares for popcorn - and the customer is always right. More importantly, Seton figures the addition of peanuts represented an additional dollar of profit for each trip down the beach. Remember that this was during the very teeth of the Depression, before anyone had heard of FDR's New Deal. A penny earned was a penny saved.
Next, to make money during cooler months, Seton sold Liberty magazine. Little remembered now, Liberty during the '20s and '30s was a national general-interest magazine just a rung in popularity below Look, Collier's and the Saturday Evening Post. The glossy, which cost a nickel a copy, was hand-delivered to subscribers. Young Seton cleared three-quarters of a penny on each copy he delivered (on foot, by the way), and figured he was doing pretty well for himself.
“That was earning money,” he says. “I just had a knack for doing these things.” So does entrepreneurism run in the Seton family? “Actually, no,” he says. “My family is all lawyers.” Just a knack, then.
Fast-forward several years. In 1938 Fen Seton is graduated from Yale (and remains to this day Blue to the bone: A pillow adorning a parlor chair in the Seton home proclaims, “It's Hard To Be Humble When You're from YALE”) as war clouds gathered in Europe and the Pacific.
Following Pearl Harbor Seton joined the then-U.S. Army Air Corps as a young radar officer. In that capacity he witnessed first-hand the carnage of Normandy on D-Day plus three, and six months later found himself enveloped in the most brutal land struggle on the Western Front, the Battle of the Bulge. He survived both those ordeals, in part because he had bigger plans.
The idea for what would become Seton Name Plate germinated when Seton in 1951 was a young married Air Force officer stationed in Fort Bragg, N.C. with time on his hands and an irresistible itch to begin making his way in the world. He read a book by a long-forgotten author named Irving Graham on how to start a mail-order business. “I read the book and I was fascinated,” he recalls. For the couple, who by then had been married for eight years, “Opportunity knocked and we were listening,” Fen Seton recalls.
The concept that coalesced for the pair was so out-in-left-field it could only be lunacy - or genius. The plan they devised was to start a small mail-order company to create and market exclusively for people named Smith. Why Smith? Poring over Social Security records in the Pope Air Force Base library, Seton discovered there were more Smiths than Browns and Joneses combined. For their first product Phyllis Seton designed a Christmas card showing Santa with a white beard fringed in black and die-cut to spell out the name “Smith” in cursive letters.
The couple ordered 25,000 of the cards from a local printer for four cents apiece. They then created a direct-mail package including a sample card, price list, SASE and letter (“SANTA IS A SMITH! JUST LOOK AT HIS BEARD”). The package was then mailed to 1,000 selected Smith households throughout the country.
But how to “select” them in the days before sophisticated demographic databases - or even ZIP codes? Having procured from the local phone company directories for the 35th largest U.S. metro areas, Fen and Phyllis combed over thousands of Smith entries trying to deduce which ones were middle- or upper-class based on…how “nice-sounding” the name of their street might be. (E.g., “Heather Lane” and “Park Avenue,” good; “Railroad Avenue” and “Commerce Street, “ not so good).
Having mailed 1,000 hand-addressed direct-mail pieces to the anointed households, the Setons within four weeks were delighted to discover orders for all the remaining 24,000 cards with full payment up front.
Thus, to make a long story short, was Seton Name Plate born. Returning to New Haven in 1952 to teach ROTC at Yale as the Korean War raged, Fen Seton diversified into doorbell name plates. Moonlighting after work each evening, Seton discovered he could make about 40 per night, netting 60 cents per piece. “So $24 or so per night wasn't bad at all,” he recalls.
Two years later the Setons landed their first major client when the service manager for a local Carrier air-conditioning contractor ordered specialized plates for AC installations - and was so pleased that he gave the fledgling firm a list of Carrier dealerships nationwide, along with his personal endorsement.
In building their company, the Setons instinctively grasped an elemental concept many business owners embrace only with reluctance: That business success isn't about what you want - it's about what your customers want, and need.
Their objective “from Day One,” say the Setons, “was to create a company that was market-driven. Our approach was that we would not try to shape our customers to our product line, but rather that we would create a product line to exactly meet the desires, needs and engineering standards of those we served.”
Note that word: served.
It worked, and the Setons built their company from a part-time spare-bedroom effort into a financially sound company with more than 100,000 business customers, including more than 100 or the Fortune 500. Slowly but steadily, annual sales grew to about $5 million by the 1970s. And because it was so carefully managed financially, the Setons were clearing margins of 20 to 25 percent each year.
Which made it an especially attractive acquisition for a larger company. Much earlier in their marriage Fen had promised Phyllis that if and when Seton Name Plate became successful, he would retire by age 65 - which meant by the end of 1982. As early as 1978 Fen Seton began to search for the right buyer, one that would be willing to make significant new investments in a new factory (the old New Haven plant was by now bursting at the seams) and vastly increased catalogue mailings. After being low-balled by one suitor too many, Fen Seton concluded that his company “could not possibly be of greater interest and value to any company in the world than it would be to our very large, highly regarded competitor”: the W.H. Brady Co. of Milwaukee, Wisc.
So Seton cold-called the company's president, Bill Brady Jr., whom he had never met or spoken to. “Mr. Brady, I promised my wife that I would retire by the age of 65,” Seton admitted upfront. “And when I consider the various companies that might be interested in buying Seton Name Plate, it occurs to me that no company in the United States would have more reason to be interested in buying [it] than W.H. Brady.”
Brady's response? “You are goddamned right!” and within 90 days of their initial September 1981 meeting in Milwaukee, the Setons had sold their baby to Brady “under extraordinarily generous terms.” Seller's remorse? Nah. “I knew my employees would be well taken care of,” Seton says.
And they were. Today the Brady-owned Seton Name Plate sells some $160 million of products annually, most manufactured in an 85,000-square-foot factory and office building in North Branford, to which the company relocated in 1983.
In April Fen and Phyllis Seton will celebrate their 60th wedding anniversary. Not bad for a one-time peanut-peddler and his wartime bride.
“Undoubtedly my number one best decision in my life was to marry Phyllis,” Fen wrote a few years back. “”Phyllis has been the wind under my wings.” A memoir penned by Fen some years later was dedicated to Phyllis, “The pride of my life and delight of my existence.”
Long may they run.
|
Go FirstGo PreviousGo
NextGo LastGo
to Index
|
|
