SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA ENTERPRISE : A Strangely Unique Badge of Honor : Small business: Trophy firm prospers with unusual mix of buttons, plaques and credit cards.
Wesley Ru admits that his is a strange and uniquely American business.
Ru is chief executive and co-owner of Western Badge & Trophy Co., and his firm is a virtual monument to our culture’s need to pat itself on the back, make a public statement or belong to a clearly defined group.
Western Badge’s products are an incredible grab bag of all things promotional: from the plaques that corporate America uses to salve employee egos; to the $20,000 sterling silver trophy for the Winston 500 car race; to buttons, badges, magnets and pins for political candidates, corporations, movie promotions and refrigerator doors; to specially printed T-shirts and other apparel; to the sash worn by Mrs. America.
“I wonder where all this stuff goes,” Ru said as he surveyed legions of workers churning out plaques, buttons, badges and magnets.
“It’s all promotions,” the 40-year-old entrepreneur said. “It’s an unusual business . . . only in America does this work.”
But the Los Angeles company’s greatest growth has come completely by accident from Ru’s ambition to create the ultimate in multipurpose plastic corporate identification badges. That idea never took off. Instead, Western Badge & Trophy turned into one of the nation’s largest producers of that very American accessory, the credit card.
Western Badge produces 1 million plastic cards a day under tight security at a four-building complex on the southwestern edge of Downtown.
“The plastic card industry is where it’s growing,” Ru said. “Everyone seems to have a card. The application of that product has gone absolutely bonkers.”
Ru, who moved with his family from Taiwan to Monterey Park when he was 11, got his business start during his college days at Cal State Los Angeles in the 1970s. Ru said he scraped together $236 and used it to import metal badge clips from Taiwan. One of his customers was Western Badge & Trophy, a company founded in 1912. After graduation, Ru kept the import business going on the side while he worked for others.
In 1985, Ru heard that Western Badge’s owner was interested in retiring and the company was struggling, he said. Ru and his brother-in-law, Antonio Accornero, turned to relatives to raise the $50,000 they needed as a down payment. Western Badge’s owner let the two pay the rest of the $1-million purchase price out of the operating revenue of the business.
Soon, they were out of debt and looking to expand. Ru and Accornero alternated buying property and troubled companies that seemed to dovetail with what they were doing. They included a maker of silk-screened sportswear and accessories, a manufacturer of enamel and cloisonne pins, and a producer of plastic credit and ATM cards.
“All the companies that we bought were on the verge of sadness, in sad, sad shape. That’s all we could afford,” Ru said. “We’re the king of scrap companies.” In each case, Ru said, they would turn the companies around by cutting costs and looking for new ways to market the product.
Western Badge began acquiring major clients such as Walt Disney Co., Price Club and Coldwell Banker. Ru said they are attracted by the array of promotional items, almost all of it custom work, that can be produced quickly by a single company.
From about 15 employees in 1985, Western Badge now has nearly 200. Among them is his sister, Linda Ru Accornero, who runs the T-shirt operation. Revenue in 1995 will be 35 or 40 times the nearly $1 million posted that first year, Ru said.
The plastic card business came from Ru’s belief that a multi-function identification badge would become the rage among employers. He figured employees could wear it, use it to punch in at a time clock, maybe even swipe it through a card reader to make purchases in the company cafeteria or store. But the recession killed corporate interest in that idea, Ru said.
“Good thing the credit card took off or it would have been a real downer,” he said.
“We never thought about credit cards. We stumbled on a plastic cards company, not knowing that this business is going to be our future,” Ru said, predicting that the next few years will bring the proliferation of high-tech plastic cards containing an integrated chip that holds far more information than the magnetic strip now in use.
Ru has achieved a measure of prominence, which he uses to act as an advocate for small and mid-size businesses.
Ru recently was elected a director of the Los Angeles Area Chamber of Commerce (“I’m the diversity guy,” he quipped) as well as a commissioner of the California World Trade Commission. He was appointed by Gov. Pete Wilson to California’s Economic Strategy Panel and has served on the Los Angeles County Commission on Insurance, among other boards.
“I think a lot of people can start businesses,” Ru said, adding that he had trouble finding any Asian role models when he was growing up, let alone Asian entrepreneurs: “For a while, I thought Sara Lee was Chinese.”
But doing business in Los Angeles can be very difficult, he said.
“It’s absolutely not user-friendly to be in business here. There is no concept of what you need,” Ru said. “It’s hard. From the simple things like painting my walls every day from the graffiti.
“We call the city, the police department, and say, ‘Can you do anything for us?’ They say, ‘Of course not.’ We say, ‘Fine, we’ll do it ourselves.’ But the city has the manpower to go around in city vehicles and cite people for having graffiti. They don’t have the people to help us do anything about it but they have the people to cite us. That’s a small thing.”
Bigger is the problem of vagrants who steal coils from the air conditioner units on his buildings’ roofs, which they sell for about $50 each. Ru must pay $400 to replace them. The city cannot stop the vandalism, he says, but it can tell him that he is not allowed to put barbed wire on his building because then the fire department cannot get to the roof.
“Nobody wants to help me,” Ru said. Such problems are compounded for entrepreneurs who do not know the language or the bureaucracy, he said.
Still, Ru insists, Western Badge has no plans to leave Los Angeles even after the “very scary” experience of surviving in the midst of the 1992 riots.
“I really like L.A. I grew up here. What’s sad is you see everyone moving out,” he said. “All cities have their benefits and their problems. If everyone moves out, you’re not going to have any employment base.”
