Loading ...David Fry didn’t decide to grow his 300-person, $55-million-a-year electronic commerce business in Michigan because of the mitten state’s Internet savvy or entrepreneurial culture.
No, the Pennsylvania native landed in Ann Arbor because his wife, a surgeon, did her residency at University of Michigan Hospital.
They found Ann Arbor a nice place to live and, despite Michiganders being slower to embrace the Internet than folks in other states, David Fry found the place to be an excellent recruiting ground for Fry Multimedia, the e-commerce and Web site development firm he founded in 1994 and still runs today under the shortened name Fry Inc.
“It’s easier to hire talent here,” Fry, 42, told me last week at his Ann Arbor headquarters, where about half his 300 employees work. He also has offices in New York, Chicago and San Francisco.
“Part of it’s being kind of a big fish in a small pond,” he said, “but we’re more likely to find good, long-term employees who are likely to stay, people who are a little older, more mature.”
He has seen Michigan’s brain-drain problem up close: It’s very hard to attract kids right out of school from U-M or Michigan State University, he said. They tend to run off to big cities out of state.
“But on the West Coast and in other big cities,” Fry said, “there’s more of a mercenary culture.” A lot of job-hopping, a lot of moving around. As people mature and settle down, the Midwest and Michigan look better to them.
As a result, several very successful companies in the Internet shopping, marketing and promotional fields have settled happily in southeast Michigan. Others include ePrize of Pleasant Ridge, a leader in online contests and promotions; Fore See Results, an Ann Arbor firm that measures customer satisfaction with Web sites, and Enlighten, an interactive marketing agency, also based in Ann Arbor.
Of a total of $100 billion or so in annual e-commerce purchasing activity in the United States today, about 2.5% of it occurs via systems run by Fry Inc.
That’s a far cry from what David Fry, a graduate of Johns Hopkins University who went on to earn a doctorate in computer science from Harvard, envisioned when he first hatched a new media offshoot of his family’s printing and publishing business, Fry Communications, in Mechanicsburg, Pa.
Technology was moving rapidly in the early 1990s. CD-ROMs were all the rage and there was a buzz building about the promise of the Internet. But David Fry’s flyer on trying to make money from new media was “an abject failure” for the first year or so, he said.
Then a friend of his who worked for Godiva Chocolatier called about doing a CD to help market Godiva’s goodies. Fry put up a Web site instead.
Soon afterward, he landed Ragu, the spaghetti sauce outfit, as a client, creating Mama’s Cucina under the umbrella of Ragu’s Web site.
The idea wasn’t as much to sell sauce online as to advertise its many uses: Mama’s Cucina was designed to be the Internet’s family kitchen, with lots of offbeat and fun information about food and the Old Country. It won a prestigious Clio award for advertising in 1997.
By 1999, Fry Multimedia was really cooking, adding clients such as 1-800-Flowers, Eddie Bauer, and Crate and Barrel along the way, as it spun off from the Fry family printing business.
“We tripled in size in the last six months of 1999,” David Fry recalled. “It was a disaster.” Too much growth, too fast, and the dot-com bubble was about to burst in 2000. When it did, Fry got hammered — annual sales dropped from $33 million to $20 million — but many competitors in the online shopping business flamed out altogether.
Fortunately, Fry’s client base wasn’t loaded with Internet-only retailers, but rather with existing companies that had long-term strategies, brick-and-mortar stores and catalogs.
Since then, he said, “we’ve broadened our services and taken on clients who don’t even sell much directly online for delivery to the home.” Recent clients include Grand Rapids-based Meijer Inc. and appliance maker Whirlpool Corp. of Benton Harbor.
Not many people buy washing machines online, but you can order service for your Whirlpool appliance directly from the Web site. And Whirlpool’s Gladiator Garage Works unit does peddle workbenches, shelving and cabinets via the Web.
At some point, said David Fry, e-commerce will settle into a growth rate more typical of a mature industry, but he’s still looking for 15% to 20% a year for Fry Inc. And that’s just in the United States. The company is looking for opportunities in Europe, which he said is about 18 months behind the United States in adoption of e-shopping, and eventually Asia.
With 300 employees today, up from 220 in 2006, Fry is still recruiting to keep up with growth at home, trying to fill 10 or 12 current openings, especially for Java software engineers in Ann Arbor.
Detailed job postings are on the www.fry.com Web site.
(Source: The Detroit Free Press, by Tom Walsh)
