Specialty Label Firm Is Tagged a Success : Entrepreneur: Barbara Thomas began her Huntington Beach company after coming up with the idea for adhesive tags for doctors’ charts.
In the late 1960s, when she worked as a medical records administrator at a community hospital in Stanton, Barbara Thomas tagged the idea of using removable strips of paper to indicate exactly where a doctor needed to sign a patient’s chart.
“The big problem was getting the doctors to sign their charts off,” Thomas said. “You had to stand over them to point to the orders . . . you practically had to lead them by the hand. I thought there had to be a better way to get the job done.”
By accident, Thomas discovered that the better way was using colored tape with removable adhesive to mark charts. She developed homemade indicator tags by slicing the tape into strips with a razor blade and using a different color for each doctor.
“I got a good reception from doctors because it cut down on their work,” she said.
Thomas knew her idea would sell at other hospitals and in 1972 she decided to start her own business to sell what she called “Medi-Tags.”
“It was something I thought about for a long time and realized it was a risk, but then I didn’t want to end up being a little old lady in a rocking chair wondering if it would have worked,” said Thomas, who started Barbara Thomas Enterprises Inc. in Huntington Beach.
She started the company with $5,000 of her own money. “It’s all I had,” she said. Her parents also pitched in financially during the first five years.
Thomas, a single parent and mother of three teen-agers, sold Medi-Tags out of the kitchen of her Long Beach home. Her shipping department was her garage and her parents and children helped count and pack the tags.
Thomas said she placed ads in medical records magazines to get business. She also used direct mail advertising and gave out samples of her product. The company contracted with a manufacturer to make the tags, which was 45 days late on the original order, forcing Thomas to make tags by hand to supply customers.
“They liked them so much, hospitals were willing to take a three-month back order,” Thomas said. “Doctors were really the best salesmen. They were my biggest boosters.”
Within three months, Thomas had to quit her full-time job at a hospital because she became deluged with orders for the tags.
Today, Thomas is semi-retired at 63 and chairman of the company, which she incorporated in 1975. She said the success of her product is no surprise.
“I felt there was a real application (for the tags) because they were timesavers. I just thought success would come a lot slower.”
Nancy Thomas-Cote, Thomas’ daughter, handles the daily operations of the privately held company, which she said has annual sales of more than $3 million.
“We’ve had growth every year,” Thomas-Cote said, adding that despite the recession, the company hired six full-time employees in the past 12 months for a total of 47 full- and part-time employees.
Thomas-Cote, 34, said office supply manufacturers nationally are showing a 3% to 5% annual growth in sales.
When Thomas-Cote took over the company’s operations in 1983, she started a new division called Redi-Tag to promote the use of the removable tags--which have adhesive on half of the back portion so they can extend beyond the edge of a page--in offices outside the hospital industry.
“I felt there was promise there,” she said. “I learned the office-products industry from scratch.”
The tags can be used to flag a page, point to a signature needed or to draw attention to a specific page, invoice or file.
In 1992, U.S. manufacturers of office supplies shipped $22 billion in products, according to the National Office Products Assn. of Alexandria, Va., which represents about 7,000 companies nationwide.
Last year, in the category of tapes, labels and adhesives--in which Redi-Tags would likely fall--the trade organization said manufacturers shipped $3.1 billion in products, with a projected $3.3 billion in sales this year.
At Eastman Corp., a Signal Hill-based office products distributor that sells Redi-Tags, merchandise manager Lance Gifford said Thomas’ company is making headway in the industry.
Thomas Enterprises “is one of those little companies that shines because they have a niche product and they approach it intelligently and know what they’re doing,” Gifford said.
The company’s top two markets today are hospitals and law offices, Thomas-Cote said. Tags are used by hospitals, accountants, attorneys, insurance and real estate agents, and secretaries.
By 1987, Thomas Enterprises began to sell tags with printed phrases that work in any office situation. The printed tags include such phrases as: Fax, Rush!, File, Past Due, Please Complete by ..., and, Please Sign & Return.
The company introduced Medi-Labels two years later, which are adhesive labels used on hospital or physician office charts to alert medical personnel of allergies or other medical conditions of a patient.
Today, the company sells up to 40 different Redi-Tags in 16 different colors for $3.98 a package, which may contain 120 tags for a dispenser or 300 regular unprinted tags. The company makes 75 different Medi-Labels, in various sizes, colors and printed phrases. The labels range in price from $8.98 to $12.98 for rolls of 400 to 800 labels.
Redi-Tags are also available in arrow shapes with phrases such as “Sign Here,” where the arrow points to the line for the signature. The company also makes custom labels and tags for customers.
Karen Whistler, vice president of sales and marketing at Thomas Enterprises, said the company’s national sales were expanded internationally in 1987 by securing a customer in Japan. Today, Thomas Enterprises products are also sold in New Zealand, Germany, England, Australia and Canada.
