We were lucky to catch up with Michael Rainville recently and have shared our conversation below.

Michael, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. Let’s go back in time a bit – can you share a story of a time when you learned an important lesson during your education?

I started making wooden toys, games, and household items before I started junior high school and was selling wholesale before I turned 16. I knew I wanted to expand the business after school and picked my college program to learn the things I knew I would need to know – engineering, marketing, accounting, business law, etc. I was pretty focused and often open with professors about my plans. That is when I learned that what I was doing was considered to be lightweight. “I was pursuing a hobby, not a business,” and the better career track was to aspire to manage a team of aerospace engineers for a Fortune 500 company. I’ve always been fine using self-satisfaction as my marker, so I got a great education and set off to make sawdust. Every so often that same perception about making wooden toys pops up in dealing with suppliers, potential employees, and others. While it doesn’t bother me directly, it has helped to feed my natural desire to be at forefront in using technology and state of the art processes. Also, it doesn’t hurt to be underestimated sometimes. Now, after over 40 years, our old peer group of manufacturers is virtually gone, beat down by cheap imports and other business challenges. We have even bought a few of them out, as we keep on making sawdust, Ironically, that aspect is changing because cutting wood with lasers doesn’t make sawdust like saws always have.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

Maple Landmark is a wood products company focusing on small items – toys, games, gifts, and also custom work for other companies. We are a 44 year old family-based company of 40 people, located in Middlebury, VT. I started the business while I was still in high school. My grandfathers were both involved with carpentry and the idea of making things was a natural. The ability to sell them, and buy more tools was attractive to me – and it still is. We sell nationwide through independent toy stores and gift shops and through an increasing presence on the internet. We are best known for our toys, specifically our NameTrains(R) but our varied technologies allow us to produce all sorts of things. Our calling card is our quality and thoughtful, child-safe designs that are made right here from local lumber.

Okay – so how did you figure out the manufacturing part? Did you have prior experience?

We are a little unique because the woodworking capability came first. The products developed over time. Woodworking is one of those processes that scales really well, you can start small. I started with hand tools, going to power tools, then bench machines and on to computer driven equipment, You can do this as growth requires, plus adding equipment is an opportunity to add capabilities to make new and different things. Early on, I tried larger products like one-off furniture but it wasn’t for me. A better fit was smaller items that were made in batches more repetitively. I could hone the design and process as I went and we found that toys were a good item for volume and repeat sales. Volume can mean six pieces that grows to hundreds or thousands. We still make a wide variety of products, in many categories, because we have learned diversity can mean stability. We’ve seen many situations, but most recently, diversity in products and markets was key to navigating Covid’s impacts.
The down side to diversity is that we don’t have a highly specialized production line, it is little more “jack-of-all trades”, with boundaries. As a domestic producer, we will never compete on price with imports, so being more versatile on-the-fly makes sense to us. We believe our core competency is in managing the variety.
We never entertained having someone else produce our product for us, foreign or domestic. Making things is core to who we are, so we slant the other way. We’ll make component parts that someone else maybe could do more efficiently but we like the control over quality and timelines. That said we do have a couple really good partners for certain parts that we don’t have the capability to produce, yet.
The key bottom line that we repeat every day is that manufacturing is all about problem solving. You have to like it. If you think the machines should just turn on every day and do their job without problem, and you don’t want to think endlessly about process improvements, then manufacturing may not be for you.

Can you talk to us about your experience with buying businesses?

We have purchased a half dozen companies and/or product lines over the years. Mostly as we were maturing and only one was in the last 20 years. The very first one, when we were about 8 eight years in and 3 years full-time, was the most impactful. At the time we were still pretty small and I was questioning whether I had it all figured right. Making things was fun, selling them was proving harder. One day I received a letter in the mail from a fellow across the state who’s products I sometimes saw being sold next to ours. He was small as well and didn’t want to deal with growth, adding employees, etc. The offer was to sell to me. I visited him and could quickly see that his products were easier to make and appeared to be more profitable. He had a good core process and a customer list without substantial overlap with mine. The framework came together fairly quickly, the legal and finances always take the time.
We consolidated here and it immediately gave me critical mass to build a regular employee base. The processes cross pollinated and the customer lists cross sold. The big benefit came from learning, from his customers, there was a potential product extension within his line that he was not pursuing. It took us a few rounds of development but ultimately the idea became (and remains) our largest product line.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.maplelandmark.com
• Instagram: maplelandmark
• Facebook: MapleLandmarkWoodcraft
• Youtube: maplelandmark