DURABILITY MAKES THE BAG Courierware's organically minded owners say big growth is biggest problem

Publication: 
Topic: 
Type: 

RANDOLPH, Vt. — Eric Truran and Diana Salyer's unconventional method of doing business is working so well, success has become their biggest problem.

You're not likely to find the Courierware course for success in any business textbook, but if you did, it would prescribe something like this:

Don't go to business school, and don't take advice from anyone who has. Grow your business "organically." Forget about rapid expansion, forget about trade shows, forget about the Small Business Administration. Make something durable that people will use; otherwise, you're wasting resources and creating trash.

And, lastly -- hold your principles dear, and remember the business exists to provide for you, not the other way around.

It's a long way from Cambridge, where Courierware shoulder bags have been selling for 10 years, to this Vermont hamlet, where they've been manufactured for a couple of years, since Truran and Salyer escaped the city for these green hills.

But the success of Courierware is paying for Truran and Salyer's 165-year-old restored Cape on 30 acres, and for half-interest in another 80 acres about 5 miles outside town. It also paid for their workshop, a former casket emporium now painted in lively purple and green.

Sales of Courierware goods are rising briskly by the year, to 2,500 this year from 120 in 1987. "Our reputation is 50 times bigger than we are," says Truran, who rarely advertises.

When Truran and Salyer began in 1986 with a $3,000 bank loan, they weren't out to put a bag on the back of every urban hipster between 18 and 85. Truran and Salyer were bicycle couriers in need of a better bag. The market offerings weren't durable enough, weren't comfortable enough, weren't waterproof. So they designed a better courier bag.

Ten years later, they have four models that come in four sizes each. The largest bag was made according to the maximum size airlines allow as carry-on luggage. Courierware also makes walking bags and brief bags, diaper and camera bags, and it's working on a mountain-biking bag.

Altogether some 20,000 bags have been sold, 80 percent of them to couriers, students and others under age 30. But they also have a following among housewives, professionals and a "few old ladies on the Upper East Side" of New York, Truran said.

"Now we're sort of seeing people buy it because it's sort of the fashionable thing, and that's disappointing," Salyer said, explaining, "We think about the design aspect, which we put so much time and thought into, and want people to be utilizing it for that reason.

"But then we started doing all the flap colors, {nine of them, and a bunch of prints and patterns} and I think that's where the bag became sort of, uh, an accessory," she said, using the word with not a little disdain.

Salyer and Truran are clearly a different breed of business owner.

Substance over style, commitment to principle, doing the right thing. Salyer clings to the wholesome and natural. When she left high school in Oregon in the late 1970s, she wanted to work helping the planet -- "old growth forests and stuff like that." So she enrolled at Oregon State, becoming the first woman to win a full scholarship for athletics.

"I studied forestry, and I realized [they] would just show you how to cut trees down faster." So she walked away after 3 1/2 years. "I just decided I didn't want a degree in that."

Salyer, 36, took to the road on bicycle, stopping to work -- usually outdoors -- when money got low. The last time it happened was 1984 in Boston. That's when she met Truran, 37, a boisterous, gregarious, healthy sort who punctuates his thoughts with robust bursts of laughter. He had attended Trinity College in Hartford "on the six-year plan," graduating in 1983 with a degree in English.

He'd been making money during those years by singing on the side -- he once opened for Pete Seeger at the Village Gate in New York -- and came back to Greater Boston to make a name for himself in music. But it didn't happen, and soon he was cycling for his supper. That led to a partnership in a courier business, and that led to the bags.

Mercantilism runs in Truran's family. He grew up in Wareham, spending a lot of time at the Gray Oaks Gift Shop, the family business his grandparents started 55 years ago. So he's Courierware's organization man; Salyer tends more to the design end. Officially, he's the president and she's vice president and secretary, but "those are just artificial titles forced on us externally, and we don't use them," Salyer said.

In such a small operation -- there are also two full timers and two part timers -- they're often helping each other.

"Part of the reason that our lives went this way was that it was something that we could do together," Salyer said. "I've always wondered how people can go to their separate jobs and come home and they have really separate lives."

The married couple have common goals about what they want from their business and how it ought to operate.

One of their biggest selling points is the durability of their bags. They start with doubly waterproofed Cordura nylon custom ordered from Wilmington, Del.-based E.I. du Pont de Nemours & Co. All seams are double stitched, the bottom is doubly reinforced, and the liner is a separate piece of fabric, so that "it's like making a bag that goes inside another bag," Salyer said.

"No one else is crazy enough to make the bag the way we make it," Truran said.

But they're driven by a purpose higher than mere marketing.

"We wouldn't want to make a piece of trash that would be a resource drain on the planet, you know?" Salyer said. "That's my ecology way of thinking. It's like, if it's not an improvement on what's out there, then it's irresponsible to be producing stuff."

Courierware bags carry lifetime warranties and the company takes trade-ins. "We reuse that material, to make sure it doesn't go in the trash can," Truran said.

It's one way they deal with guilt over buying from DuPont. "It's in the top six polluters in the world and we're buying their materials. We have a problem with that. The only way we offset that problem in our minds is that we're making a durable product that people will use. And, it enables people to use bikes. Still, we don't feel great about it," Salyer said.

Just about their only other struggles rise straight from their success. Sure, the move to Vermont was a lifestyle choice, but they had to go somewhere because demand made it impossible to continue manufacturing in their shop at 1105 Massachusetts Ave., which remains open for retail sales. And that meant losing contact with their customers: They can't do on-the-spot repairs, and they don't get direct feedback.

They also have a distaste for exploiting the work of others, even if they are treating them well. "I never wanted to have a sweatshop," Truran said. "And regardless of whether you're paying $15 an hour or $3 an hour, they're still sweating." He said the emphasis on quality makes worker training vital, and so they depend heavily on retaining employees.

"Any one of our persons, if they quit tomorrow, we would be in really bad shape," Salyer said.

It illustrates their problem of scale, which could be solved by expanding significantly, Truran said. But "the more volume there is, the more headaches there are. And that's taking away from our lifestyle," he said. And lifestyle -- their principles, their woods, their working six-hour days -- is what's paramount.

Besides the Cambridge retail store, Courierware does have a few wholesale customers and a catalog.

"We could just shrink and sell by mail order. It is a step we would take," Truran said.

Said Salyer, "All we really want out of it is a lifestyle. I don't want to work 40 hours a week particularly. I have other things I do."