Every Company Has A Founding Story. This Is Ours...

Often a Company is founded out of a necessity or happenstance, while others are formed to solve a real world problem. Each has a story to tell.

One of the great inspiring tales was how Levi Strauss & Co?positioned themselves to achieve their tremendous success. They discovered an early opportunity to supply gold miners with dry goods, which eventually led them to become a global denim outfitter and one of the world’s most highly recognized brands.

So how did Betty Mills come about and where did the name originate?

Our Company?was founded in 2002, based on an idea that the janitorial and sanitary supply industry was in need of an online reseller that specialized in their trade of goods.

Referred to as 'Jan/San' for short, the industry at that time was largely a fragmented collection of small family owned businesses spread across the country. Virtually none of them had any online website presence.

It was an open opportunity in need of a first mover, but clearly there was no online category leader.

Google was by now a couple of years into offering its self-service keyword ads on their search platform. The cost-per-click for the term ‘janitorial supplies’ was a mere $0.11, a tiny fraction of what it would cost today. At that rate you could reach new customers at scale and disrupt the status quo.

So we went for it.

While our idea may not have been solving one of the world’s most pressing problems, it certainly presented a sizeable vacuum just waiting to be filled—no pun intended.

Yet it was 2002, and the public was still hurting from the implosion of the dotcom industry, which had substantially deflated the wealth and ambitions of people everywhere, particularly in Silicon Valley where we were based. As a result, a disassociation from technology companies was the order of the day.

As a work around, we were determined to invent an old fashioned moniker that was reminiscent of a 100 year old company — yet at the same time connect the brand with those same categories which we were planning to go to market with, in particular, paper products such as hand towels and toilet paper.

After bouncing many initial branding ideas around over several weeks, the direction we were looking for came into focus.

Paper products, naturally are made in paper ‘Mills’, so we started down the path of figuring a way to embed that word into our brand.

Soon the idea came to us to personalize the budding Mills concept by prefixing it with an old fashioned forename.

We chose ‘Betty’, a name which had long appealed to a bygone era, but yet a very uncommon name for newborns at the time. Of course since so much of our world is cyclical I’m certain such a nostalgic name will popularize one day again.

So following many long hours of brand brainstorming sessions, 'The Betty Mills Company' or 'Betty Mills' for short was born.

A search of the federal trademark database indicated it was clear of any existing claims and as well the BettyMills.com domain was available.

We set up shop on 3rd Avenue in downtown San Mateo, California. Today the town is largely filled with technology companies, but in 2002 it was absent of most. Instead it was a throwback with a very 1950's vibe, including the local neighborhood drugstore on the corner and the historic Benjamin Franklin Hotel towering above the town. It was like our own Mayberry R.F.D.

The picture below is from well before our time, but our new company started where you see the red arrow, in what was formerly known as the San Mateo Theatre. The Benjamin Franklin Hotel structure still stands today, although now in the form of Draper University, a school which teaches entrepreneurship to aspiring young founders.

We had hoped that settling the business into such an old fashioned locale would rub off on our company culture and influence our brand. At the same time we wanted to bring the long forgotten, but always admired old fashioned service values to our customers. And so we got busy at work to make that happen.

For most of the first year in operation my co-founder and I answered the customer phone calls that were rolling in. Speaking directly with customers was our way of learning about our new business, which we knew absolutely nothing about. Neither of us had a janitorial supplies or services background and that was probably a good thing —we didn’t know what we didn’t know.

Of course that went hand-in-hand with plenty of industry people telling us that our idea would never work.

From the outset, the retro-branding was resonating with customers as we had hoped.

We made it a point to casually ask our new callers how they had first heard of Betty Mills. A pattern was emerging, as quite often they would respond by stating something similarly such as, “Oh, my mother used to buy from your company 20 years ago…”

Of course we didn’t dissuade that perception nor did we correct the callers by informing them that we were really just a startup company.

Taking things a step further, we made the decision from the beginning to answer every phone call starting with the warm greeting, “It’s a wonderful day at the Betty Mills Company, how may I help you?”

Now 21 years and 1.5 million orders later, our customer service team still greets each caller just that same way.

As time went on we expanded into medical supplies and today we bill ourselves as America’s Medical & Sanitary Supply Superstore.

The irony, which has not gone unnoticed to me — is that today if someone were to claim that their mother was a customer 20 years ago, it could certainly stand true!

Like the many long serving brands which share their rich history on their websites with the grainy black and white yellowed photos of their first generation team, I often wonder if we at Betty Mills will have the same good fortune to find ourselves as one of those photos 100 years from now.

If so, perhaps we might call our little business endeavor a success.

-Victor

A historical photo just a few steps from our current location on B Street in San Mateo.