Klitzner Industries started as a small jewelry plating operation in the back room of Harry Klitzner’s mom’s candy store on Westminster Street in 1907. It has survived for 100 years by transforming and reinventing itself again and again.
In the beginning, Klitzner Industries focused on manufacturing and plating emblematic products – lapel pins and the like – for fraternal organizations such as the Masons and the Elks.
Today, fraternal organizations account for about 25 percent of Klitzner Industries’ business, and that share will eventually disappear as membership continues to decline, said Dean Klitzner, Harry’s great-grandson and fourth-generation operator of the company.
The company might have perished by now, Klitzner said, if his grandfather and grandfather’s brother had not entered the promotional products market in the 1950s.
“At that point it was an untapped marketplace,” Klitzner said. “We were the only game in town. … The lack of competition was incredible back then.”
Promotional products – key chains, picture frames, bookmarks, business card holders, paper weights, coasters – continue to be the most profitable market for the business and yield 75 percent of its revenue. The company sells the items to distributors who sell them to the end user, mostly corporations.
In the early 1960s, the company moved from Westminster Street to a new, 150,000-square-foot facility on Warren Street, off Elmwood Avenue in South Providence.
But by the 1970s, competitors were infiltrating the industry, and Klitzner Industries had to continue to diversify its product offerings.
In response, the company added a line of acrylic awards and plaques, using a manufacturing process that allowed objects and text to be inserted into clear plastic molds.
The 1970s is also when Klitzner Industries began some innovative marketing strategies that kept its profits growing for about two decades.
The company targeted promotional product distributors with a group of seven non-competing Rhode Island manufacturers of promotional products, Klitzner said. Each year they would visit 30 cities in 30 days. Each company had 30 minutes to sell their product with an extravagant audio visual presentation.
“It had never been done before in the industry,” he said.
Klitzner Industries continued to be ahead in its marketing in the late 1990s with the introduction of e-mail blasts. The company has accumulated more than 100,000 e-mail addresses that are “worth gold,”
Klitzner said, partially by attending trade shows and by asking each person who calls the company for an e-mail address.
“What we saw was this vehicle to get to massive amounts of customers almost on a daily to weekly basis when no one else was doing it,” he said. “And the beauty of it is, it costs me nothing.”
New product development became even more important in the 1990s as well.
“That’s when competitors popped out of the woodwork, because all you needed was a fax machine and a contact overseas and you could be a manufacturer,” Klitzner said.
That is also when Klitzner Industries decided to move some of its manufacturing offshore. Today, the company manufactures about 40 percent of its products at the Providence facility. The remaining 60 percent is manufactured overseas.
“We had no choice,” he said. “It became all about price.”
Prior to the late 1980s, the company had 350 employees making every product it sold. It downsized to about 250 employees when importing drove product prices down.
The company downsized even further after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, which were followed by a “brutal” year during which “nobody was buying,” Klitzner said. The company responded by consolidating jobs and cross-training the remaining 125 employees. It also cut overhead in half.
Most recently, the company has added new product lines such as a fast-growing group of amenity kits for the travel, convention and golf industries.
As a result, Klitzner Industries has experienced “the best four years we’ve ever had,” he said.
