Hans and Tricia Masing were well established in their respective careers when in 2002 they decided to embark on their “crazy idea.”
“Our son was a huge fan of Thomas the Tank Engine,” says Hans Masing. “At the time, there were not a lot of choices for specialty toys on the Internet. We contacted the company that made the wooden Thomas, found requirements to be a reseller…and set up a basic website with open-source software.”
The Masings’ combined technical experience allowed them to pursue a side project that would have those less tech savvy scratching their heads. For 10 years, Tricia worked as an engineer at Ford. Hans had worked in information technology for nearly 20. Neither expected that little wooden trains would put them on the entrepreneurial track to a new life.
Brain Station was an immediate hit. When the orders kept coming, Tricia researched and found other “outstanding” specialty brand toys to add to the mix. And still the customers came.
“Before we knew it,” says Hans Masing, “we lost our basement to this business. We were carrying 80- to 100-pound boxes through the front door every morning for delivery around the country.”
Flash forward four years, and the Masings expanded to a storefront, giving birth to a new online and local merchant—Tree Town Toys. Hans Masing says they opened Tree Town in a regular “brick and mortar” setting mostly out of respect for the specialty toy industry where traditional mom and pop stores are the norm. Soon after the couple added a third enterprise, Dragonfly Depot, a company that creates websites and fulfills online orders.
And the Masing’s online savvy has made their business grow in leaps and bounds (note: original article said ‘leaps in bonds’). Hans IT experience saves them from hiring a computer support staff and all their websites are written on open-source software, which not only keeps operating and maintenance costs down, but allows them to easily integrate free Google applications such as calendars and blogs. Events publicly posted on these applications are more likely to come up on Google searches. In addition, inserting these applications saves time and money better spent on creating custom software and design.
While Tree Town Toys supplied a concrete presence in the local community, the Masing’s online sales continued to soar. Approached by Amazon to sell specialty toys through their systems, the Masings were increasingly selling more products both locally and nationally. That’s when they learned an organizational lesson the hard way.
“It quickly became clear that we had to keep our inventory synchronized,” says Hans Masing. “We would sell something online and go to the sales floor to retrieve and find that it was being gift-wrapped for a local customer. It was a bad situation, since we ended up with unhappy customers.”
To solve this problem, the Masings launched Dragonfly Depot in July 2007. This keeps online orders through Tree Town Toys and Brain Station in sync with local purchases made through Tree Town Toys stores. Their order cancellations dropped substantially, and their customer base grew with this increased reliability.
“Our overall cancellation rate in 2008 was about 2 percent,” says Hans Masing. “It was probably 15 to 18 percent before the Dragonfly Depot system was put into place.”
With a warehouse and Dragonfly Depot’s synchronized system in place, the Masings saw the opportunity to make their inventory available so other stores could profit, too. Through Dragonfly Depot, the Masings work as an online ambassador to a dozen specialty toy stores across the country. The couple helps these clients by developing a website with an online store. Once that is up and running, Dragonfly Depot works with the store through managing and shipping online orders out from their fulfillment center in Ann Arbor.