Office Products Stores and Dealers Band Together : Marketing: TOPP expands throughout West Coast to meet the challenge of competition from discount warehouse chains.

A group of office products stores and dealers based primarily in California said Wednesday that it has expanded throughout the West Coast to fight increasing competition from discount warehouse chains.

The group, called The Office Products People, or TOPP, expects to have a combined purchasing power in excess of $200 million and more than 100 members. TOPP, which will base its marketing offices in Newport Beach and administrative offices in Madera in Northern California, hopes to offer lower prices and better service to compete with large warehouse chains such as Office Club and Staples, which have moved into Southern California in the last four years.

“It’s analogous to when Wal-Mart moved to small towns and wiped out Main Street,” said Pete Sloan, the owner of South Coast Stationers in Costa Mesa and the marketing director of TOPP. “The difference is we saw this coming.”

South Coast Stationers, which found its 25,000-square-foot store pinched by a much larger Staples, an Office Club and a Price Club nearby, has been able to increase sales since the TOPP name was adopted earlier this year, Sloan said.

In Orange County, TOPP also includes Office Emporium in Brea, Costa Mesa Stationers and Doran Stationers in Anaheim. Each member has annual sales between $1 million and $6 million, Sloan said. The new TOPP members come from cities in Oregon, Washington, Idaho, Arizona and Montana, making what is believed to be the largest office-supply buying group in the West.

“It’s safety in numbers,” Sloan said. “You can do an awful lot when you got 100 people thinking in the same direction.”

Members are expected to bear the TOPP label, similar to independent hardware stores which use the True Value label, Sloan said.

The group plans to share in marketing expenses, such as newspaper display advertisements and catalogues. Before TOPP was formed about a year ago, the independent stores often had little money to spare for promotions, Sloan said.