ROGERS - Mel Redman might not have a long white beard, but he’s Santa enough for the folks of Northwest Arkansas.
This fall, he announced that his company, Redman and Associates, would be moving its toy manufacturing business from China to Rogers, bringing approximately 1 million battery-operated toys and more than 100 jobs to the area in the next three years.
A native Arkansan, Redman has been looking forward to this move for years.
He grew up in Monette in Craighead County, where his mother, a local schoolteacher, and his grandparents raised him. A hard working boy, he picked cotton, played sports and graduated from high school at the age of 16, a few years before marrying his high school sweetheart, Vicki.
The two had grown up together, and the things she saw in him then are the same things she loves about him now.
“Even as a kid, he was a very kind, big-hearted person,” says Vicki Redman. “He’s gotten even more so as he’s gotten older. He’s gentle, tough and tender at the same time.”
The first thing his friends say is that he has a heart of gold. He enjoys giving to and caring for people without drawing attention to it.
“When I think of Mel, I think of his generosity,” says Miles Fish, a friend and fellow church member. “I am always discovering little secrets of things he does for people that no one even knows about. He does it so quietly.”
Redman’s family couldn’t afford to send him to college, so he earned an athletic scholarship to attend Williams Baptist College in Walnut Ridge, and stocked shelves and swept floors at Magic Mart, a discount store similar to Wal-Mart.
In his first job interview, he listed basketball and baseball as his only experience, and they told him that would be a fine start for leadership. Two years later, his tenacity was rewarded with a chance to enter Magic Mart’s training program. He wore a tie to work and learned the inner workings of the various departments of the store.
It took him only a year to rise to the level of assistant manager, a promotion that came with a move to West Plains, Mo., then another two years to become a store manager in Blytheville.
It was no secret that Magic Mart was a major contender to the increasingly successful Wal-Mart. One by one, its most insightful managers changed allegiances, including Tom Jefferson, who later became executive vice president of operations at Wal-Mart. Redman made the switch in 1977.
His first position for the retail giant was as an assistant manager in Sikeston, Mo. He was soon ready for more of a challenge, which he found as store manager in Searcy.
He grew to love the town and the people, and to thrive in his role. It was the first town other than Bentonville to have a Wal-Mart distribution center, and by the time he left two and a half years later, it was among the first stores to net $1 million.
MOVING UP
When Jack Shewmaker became president and chief operating officer of Wal-Mart, he named Redman a district manager, a title that came with the responsibility of managing 12 stores and managers and nearly 1,400 employees. Redman accepted it readily, though it would mean moving again. Given a choice of Oklahoma, Tennessee or Texas, he pleaded against Texas and was promptly sent there.
Once in Bryan, Texas, the Redmans warmed to the area, but their feelings weren’t returned quite so quickly. At the time there were no Wal-Mart stores south of Dallas, meaning the brand’s name didn’t have the weight it does today.
“No one knew who Wal-Mart was,” Redman says. “It was difficult to get a house loan, even though we had good credit. Nobody really understood. They thought we were maybe a startup company and didn’t realize how strong we were in Arkansas, Missouri, Oklahoma and Kansas.”
Redman settled in and, in three short years, added three districts, managed 34 stores and began to train his own managers, since other original Wal-Mart team members resisted moving to the area.
Redman continued to rise in the ranks of Wal-Mart executives into 1984, when Shewmaker made him his assistant. Being the right hand man of the president of the company was exactly as daunting as it sounds. His first charge was to update the incredibly thick, two-volume edition of the Wal-Mart Store Manual, which is the bible of store policy and company procedures.
He then helped with a move so singular that it pushed Wal-Mart into the realm of modern supermarkets, giving the company an undeniable edge over the competition: barcodes.
Many stores required cashiers to input a series of numbers to sell items while also keeping track of stock available in the store. It got the job done, but not quickly. So Redman instituted scanning, with a barcode for each item and a European Article Number to keep track of inventory and make checkout lines move faster.
In 1985, Redman landed a promotion he had always wanted when he became regional vice president. Now he says he didn’t know what he was getting himself into.
He was managing 93 stores, 93 store managers, eight district managers, and nearly 14,000 employees. Each Monday, he’d board a plane at 6:30 in the morning to spend the week in his district, supervising and managing. He’d return on Thursdays before two more days in the office, bright and early at 6 a.m. for sales meetings. While constant travel can be harrowing, Redman fared well, which was perhaps one reason he accepted additional responsibility just two years later, when he started running store planning.
It also required constant traveling, what with 125 new stores, 100 store remodelings, 75 store expansions, and dozens of relocations annually. The work earned him the title of senior vice president of store planning, which included a seat on the Wal-Mart Executive Committee, an elite group that met weekly for crucial decisions concerning the future of the company.
Then as 1993 came to a close, Redman got the opportunity of a lifetime.
TO THE GREAT WHITE NORTH
Wal-Mart needed a top executive to recruit a team of roughly 30 associates to travel to Toronto during the process of buying Wilco, a top supermarket chain in Canada. Whoever led the charge would have to inspire confidence in 19,000 people, many of whom had worked for Wilco for decades. He’d have to help ease the transition into a different business culture and philosophy, and change the basic tenets of customer service.
“It took a little while, three or four months, [for them] to realize we weren’t going anywhere,” Redman says. “It worked very well … and before long we had a country full of enthused folks that just rocked and rolled.”
Once they gained the former Wilco workers’ trust, they remodeled the stores. They tripled the stock, installed new fixtures and improved lighting, as well as added new carpet, fresh coats of paint and changed the antiquated Red Cafes into cafeteria-size McDonald’s.
“Mel is an unbelievable leader,” says Charles Balentine, who was among the associates on the Wilco project.
Balentine looked up to Redman for his talent of dissolving business conflict by settling matters in person.
“If he knew there was an issue, he’d say, ‘Time for a visit.’ For him to show up, that’s what you need. That’s what a leader is supposed to do,” Balentine says.
To be a co-worker or employee of Redman’s is to be treated as family. He expects the same level of hard work from himself as he does everyone else, but he also makes sure that everyone has a good time and feels truly valued.
“He takes care of his family and [employees] are an extension of his family. That’s why he’s been so successful,” Balentine says.
A number of Redman’s associates are actually family members, including his wife, his son Rodney, daughter-inlaw Katie, and her brother-in-law. They say that means they get the same treatment as everyone else.
“He expected me to do my job, yet he was just a very kind boss,” says his sister-inlaw Sharron Littlejohn, who worked for him at one time. “He’s a very smart man, up to date on all the issues. He knows something about everything.”
After returning from Canada, Redman was named senior vice president of operations for the western part of the United States, a pinnacle moment. And in the wake of his most recent success, Redman, at 44, looked around and realized that he hadn’t branched out as much as he had hoped. He was in the same business as he had been since the day he left college with his physical education degree, and he wanted to try something new.
He brought this up to David Glass, chief executive officer of Wal-Mart in 1995, and Glass asked what any good-natured mentor would: “What would you rather do?” Redman didn’t know, so he gave himself some time to think about it. He turned in his badge and played a little golf, which he quickly came to hate. By the end of the summer, he’d thought of just the thing.
A NEW START
Like that, Redman and Associates was born in August 1995 out of an office within Redman’s Bentonville home. He hired a handful of trusted colleagues and they set to work in on-site consulting. As many as 11 months of the year, he was living in New York, where he could be available for most of his clients and travel to California for others, or even to Saudi Arabia, where he consulted for Safeway, Inc. He racked up a million miles of travel in three years.
In the late 1990s, Redman’s savvy business sense told him that on-site consulting was on the way out, so he became a broker. Bentonville was not yet the hot spot for Wal-Mart vendors that it is today, and companies needed assistance representing their product and securing that much-desired vendor number. So that’s exactly what he did.For a percentage, Redman and Associates were a trusted face that could comfortably introduce a new product to the retail giant - a win-win for many.
Fast forward a decade, and you’ll find a still successful company with only one issue. Redman had built a team of experts that had intimate knowledge of Wal-Mart and vendor processes so complete that all they lacked was control of the actual merchandise. So in 2008, they moved forward to secure that ultimate dream.
Now a Wal-Mart vendor, Redman and Associates racked up the appropriate licenses, including those to sell Disney products, six-volt toys and eventually 12-volt toys. They began with two stock-keeping units, and had 600,000 pieces and goods made in China and shipped through ocean freight each year.
It was the cost-efficient option that got the job done, but in a perfect world, they would have a business that poured resources into their local economy. So they focused on increasing the product lines while they worked on a solution. They now have nine products, mostly ride-on toy vehicles with cover art featuring Cars characters Lightning McQueen and Dusty; Marvel characters Spider-man and Captain America; the signature of NASCAR’s Dale Earnhardt; Disney princesses; Tinkerbell; Mossy Oak; and, most recently, members of Duck Dynasty.
The move to go local was slow and steady. Their current manufacturing distributor is out of Long Beach, Calif., and it fulfills orders for 46 Wal-Mart distribution centers in the United States. But having distribution on the edge of the country means letting a lot of inland freight miles stack up on the way to their locations, making Rogers an excellent central location for production and distribution.
In 2014, Redman and Associates plans to hire 19 employees at three times the minimum wage in Arkansas and produce 100,000 pieces, or roughly one sixth of their goods locally. The following year, they’ll hire 45 additional employees and produce half of their stock here, with the ultimate goal of hiring another 70-100 employees and being fully equipped to produce all 600,000 pieces in Rogers by 2016.
Redman is excited about these changes and estimates that it will mean $3 million a year for the Northwest Arkansas economy, something he simply can’t say without smiling.
His friends predict that, as with everything else, this new venture for Redman and Associates will be extremely successful.
“If he believes in something he backs it 110 percent,” says Tim Summers, a longtime friend and fellow church member. “You don’t have to worry about knowing where he stands on issues. He’s a very strong man ethically, obviously a hard worker with a very successful career.”
So far, 540 people have applied for those first 19 jobs, perhaps sensing what Redman has already promised: they will work hard, but they will be rewarded handsomely for it, and treated like family along the way.
In the meantime, Redman rolls up his sleeves, pats a co-worker on the back and gets to work making his pristine, sparkling showroom the magical stuff of children’s dreams.
SELF PORTRAIT
Mel Redman
DATE AND PLACE OF BIRTH: March 28, 1951, Monette
FAMILY: Wife Vicki, sons Scott and Rodney
THE THING ABOUT MY OFFICE IS it feels like I am at home.
MY FAVORITE FRIENDS CHARACTER IS Joey.
PEOPLE IN HIGH SCHOOL THOUGHT I WAS a sports fanatic.
FANTASY DINNER GUESTS: Robert Wagner, Pierce Brosnan and Gen. George Patton
SOMETHING YOU MAY BE SURPRISED TO LEARN ABOUT ME: I can sing
IF I HAD AN EXTRA HOUR IN THE DAY, I’D work.
MY HERO IS Sam Walton.
AS A CHILD, MY FAVORITE TOY WAS a whiffle ball and bat.
IF I WERE STRANDED ON A DESERT ISLAND, I’D HAVE TO HAVE a bag of Cheetos.
WHEN I’M ON A PLANE, I AM afraid!
MY FITNESS ROUTINE IS early morning workouts with Steve Conley!
A WORD OR TWO TO SUM ME UP: passionate and a workaholic
High Profile, Pages 37 on 12/22/2013