City Guide 2009-10 - GRM

Page 23

It’s all in the cards

Photography by Johnny Quirin (top); Michael Buck (bottom)

P

icture this: You marry an up-and-coming stockbroker and one month later he quits his job to make greeting cards. He has no experience in the stationery industry, but he loved those handmade cards you sent him in college. Do you leave him? No way. Twenty-two years later, you’re still married and living well in East Grand Rapids. That entrepreneurial young man is now president of Design Design Inc., a manufacturer and distributor of stationery, paper tableware and gift packaging. True story, said Don Kallil, who is thankful that his wife, Jennifer, was so understanding and supportive. He admits there were times when he questioned the sanity of starting the company. The first trade show he attended in 1987 was a disaster. “We’d packed our bags and headed to California,” Kallil said. “We wrote three orders during that whole show. “That first year we starved to death. The second year we lived on brown rice and vegetables. My wife had to get a fulltime job just to pay rent.” By the fourth year, however, things were improving as Kallil met new artists, hired a creative director and figured out which products worked. Murray’s Law, a line of humorous cards, was a hit. “Year after year we grew,” he said. Today, Design Design offers 15,000 products, operating from a 60,000-squarefoot building in downtown Grand Rapids with a distribution center in Wyoming. The company employs about 100 people and works with 75 sales reps around the country. The cards, paper tableware, gift packaging and other paper products are sold in independent shops as well as major chains such as Macy’s, Barnes & Noble and Bed, Bath & Beyond. “It’s exciting,” said Kallil. “The stationery business is always changing.” And if that’s not enough to keep him busy, he recently bought Mary Ann’s Chocolates and moved the candy shop to East Grand Rapids — just a few blocks from his home. — Marty Primeau

Don Kallil of Design Design Inc. quit his finance career 22 years ago to make greeting cards.

It was simply Pure inspiration Anna Bosgraaf was 6 when she discovered that chicken nuggets used to be a living, breathing animal. The Holland girl told her mom she wanted to be a vegetarian (a term she discovered while watching “Animal Planet”).

grocery chains, from Whole Foods and Trader Joe’s to Meijer and Spartan

Most parents might have panicked, but Veronica Bosgraaf accepted the challenge. Respecting her daughter’s choice, she did some research and learned as much as she could about meatless nutrition and natural foods.

“The exciting news is that we are partnering with a manufacturer in Michigan,” Bosgraaf said. Originally, she contracted with a California company to make the bars.

Preparing vegetarian meals wasn’t a problem for the mother of three — even her husband grudgingly accepted the new fare. But packing lunches and snacks was a headache. “I was dismayed at what I found,” Bosgraaf said. “Most bars were full of sugar and had very little protein or nutritional value.”

stores. Last year the Holland-based company sold more than 500,000 bars nationwide, and Bosgraaf expects to double that in 2009.

“Michigan and Meijer is where it all started, and we want to do more business right here,” she said. “All of our Web site design and packaging is done locally, and we are doing some warehousing here now also.”

— Marty primeau

So she experimented. While making a pie crust with organic almonds and dates, she realized the texture was similar to a bar. She threw in some brown rice protein, agave nectar and cocoa powder. The Pure Bar was born. With help from friends and family as she tackled the complex process of shelf-life testing, nutritional guidelines, designing wrappers and more, Bosgraaf launched her product in January 2006. Six varieties of Pure Bars are distributed in heath food stores and

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