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(03/05/15 2:37am)
Mike Rainville’s woodcraft has received various different awards and amount of press throughout his career. The most recent plaque he’s received is the prized 2014 Vermont Woodworker of the Year given to him by the Vermont Wood Manufacturer’s Association. He also won the Vermont Design Competition for a wooden rocking horse (the largest toy the company currently sells) several years ago. In fact, the plaque for both awards was cut, sanded and decorated right in the very woodshop they currently stand in.
Mike Rainville is the owner and founder of Maple Landmark Woodcraft, a company he started in 1979 as a 15 year-old boy that became the largest wooden toy company in the country. “I like making lots of small things”, Mike responds when asked about the products he makes. The company sells everything from wooden raddles to cribbage boards cut in the shape of Vermont.
The shop itself is very authentic. As soon as you walk in you are only several feet away from the actual workroom where you can watch as the operators conduct incredible looking machinery. The store is decorated with gimmicks and small toys made for children, the most popular being the well-known “Name Train.” A “Name Train” is a series of wooden letters, each sitting on a pair of wheels and attached together by magnets. Each letter can be connected to move together like a train. The College Store currently displays their name train behind the checkout counter. Fittingly, it is painted in Middlebury blue.
What is most impressive about the wooden toy empire that Rainville has created is not so much the mass amount of woodwork itself but the savvy business risks he took and capitalized on to make the company what it is now. Mike started Maple Landmark Woodcraft by selling his products in the Gift section of his parents’ General Store in Lincoln. His childhood hobby transformed into a semi-serious business when it started to make money as he sold his knickknacks to a sundry goods salesman and at a Craft Tent at the Field Days County Fair. He didn’t finalize the name Maple Landmark Woodcraft until after college. The name for his company was inspired by his family’s farm in Lincoln, Maple Landmark Homestead, which still exists today.
Mike was wary when it came time to look at colleges, knowing that he wanted to be close to home where his business was taking off. Intrigued by a booklet for Clarkson in his school’s Guidance office (a name he only recognized as being an opponent of the UVM hockey team in previous winters), he decided to thumb through the pages to see what the school was about.
“There was an interdisciplinary industrial distribution page on the back and as I looked through it, for every single course on that listing I thought ‘Yeah I could use that!’… It was a great program. I ate it up. I completed it all in three years … I was just there to get an education and I’d come home on the weekends some. It was a bit of a haul! It was fun. It worked out - I wasn’t sure it was going to work out.” Mike laughs at himself now. Really though, he’s not exaggerating about not wasting any time. Mike and his family started laying the foundation for his new shop in between his last college exam and graduation. “It was a heavy load but I really liked the stuff I was taking and I had a direct application for it. I could take accounting and know what that would mean to me.”
After graduating college in ’84, Mike began diversifying his business. He would acquire mostly small, one-man companies in Vermont that specialized in a certain wood product - such as wooden blocks or wooden games. In 1987 Mike bought Trolls Toy Woodshop, a company that sold wooden letters on wheels. It was from this original concept that Maple Landmark Woodcraft improved the idea and created the soon-to-be iconic “Name Trains.” Business took off in 1994 after Maple Landmark Woodcraft became the first company to successfully commercialize the “Name Trains.”
The next big acquisition for the company didn’t come until 2001 with the purchase of another longstanding Vermont wooden toy company, Montgomery Schoolhouse. The Montgomery, VT based company company sold mostly wooden toys for infants - an area Mike’s company didn’t have specialty in yet.
Mike has kept this mindset of improving on other products and adapting products for the current market. Almost two years ago Maple Landmark Woodcraft introduced their newest item - silly sticks. Silly sticks are long wooden sticks with glasses, mustaches and other accessories attached to the end of them. Mike claims that in the “selfie” era the idea has been vastly successful with the company selling tens of thousands of them. The company, however, hasn’t made any new acquisitions in the last 12 years, mostly because they now control most of the market.
While the demands for certain products have altered since Mike began his career, so has the development of technology. “Take the cribbage board example” Mike begins, “when I first made cribbage boards … I would physically drill each hole. They weren’t all straight and they weren’t all in straight lines. I would take some flack for that.” He laughs at himself again. “Now we have a C&C router where it’s all off a computer program. You just lay wood down and it just punches holes. All of them perfectly straight, spaced and in line.”
However, the new technology has only helped increase job opportunities for the company. Mike has a team that includes graphic designers, sales managers, computer programmers and area supervisors.
Maple Landmark Woodcraft still remains heavily rooted with Rainville family members. Mike’s wife, Jill, is the office manager and handles customer service; his sister, Barbara does marketing and he just hired his oldest son full-time after he recently graduated from the same program Mike completed at Clarkson. Even Mike’s mother and grandmother do work for him around the shop. Mike still lives in Lincoln where he raised two sons with his wife Jill.
Being in the business as long as he has, Mike is clearly very deserving of the 2014 Woodworker of the year. He has dedicated 16 years on the board of the association that named him to the honor and half of that time as President. Rambling through the multitude of commitments he has had in his lifetime, he says that at one point he was on seven different boards. Over the years his board memberships spread variously from the board at St. Mary’s School to the board for Working Lands Enterprise with the State.
Mike is very humble and modest. You can tell he takes pride in his work and in doing it well. Mike, who was born and raised as a Vermonter, loves his home. The wood used to make his products all come from Vermont timber. The Vermont Woodworker of the year award was nicknamed the 2015 “Plaid Shirt” as an ode to his signature Plaid shirt style, which Mike claims could also have been the “plaid shirt and khakis award.” So don’t be shy — throw on your plaid shirt, check out Mike Rainville at Maple Landmark Woodcraft and buy that silly stick!
(01/15/15 1:56am)
On Thursday morning, the Vermont Legislature voted on a secret ballot to decide which candidate in the 2014 Vermont Gubernatorial election would be named the governor of Vermont for the next two years. Democrat Peter Shumlin beat Republican Scott Milne with a final vote of 110-69 among the legislature. The decision was brought to Vermont lawmakers after incumbent Peter Shumlin won a plurality of the popular vote in the state, but did not receive a majority. When this happens in Vermont, the vote is brought to the legislature, unless the opponent withdraws from the race. Republican candidate Scott Milne, however challenged the vote to be brought to the state legislature after the final tally pronounced a too-close-to-call win for the incumbent. Shumlin had 46.4 percent of the vote, barely edging out Milne’s 45.1 percent.
Shumlin has received much discontent from Vermonters in the last year. Many constituents are disappointed with his repeated trips out of state to attend to other priorities as chairman of the Democratic Governor’s Association, as well as his failure to execute Vermont’s Obamacare exchange. Other criticize his inability to make any dent in altering middle-class wages and high property taxes. Shumlin’s most recent action was ending his long-term plan to enact a single-payer health care system for the state. This came as a disappointment to some and relief to others. The timing of this announcement in December created some question as to whether he would be able to hold onto his governorship after the legislative vote.
His adversary Scott Milne, a travel-agency president from Pomfret has little political experience, but was determined to revive the Republican Party in Vermont.
Milne’s greatest hope to win the governorship was that Shumlin’s largest inflation of votes comes from Burlington, Vermont’s most populous area. Milne, although not a favorite in Burlington, had won the most districts in Vermont. Milne hoped that at Thursday’s vote legislators would vote according to their constituents’ desires, rather than voting for the overall top vote-getter.
Although nothing binds the legislators to vote for the plurality winner, the odds were stacked against Milne’s favor. Democrats rule the majority of both the House and the Senate in Vermont. Republicans only hold a third of the state’s total 180 seats. Thus Milne would have needed to secure every Republican vote and a strong crowd of both Democrats and Independents.
The consequence of a secret ballot is legislators would not publicly be held accountable to their vote. Therefore, neither candidate could do much to lobbying for votes.
Multiple legislators weighed in on the different strategies of lobbying by both candidates, but almost all agreed that it was likely they and their colleagues would elect Shumlin.
Both candidates released statements after Thursday’s vote. Milne acknowledged that although he did not prove to be victorious, “I was happy to be a part of it. I think the road that’s led us here has a lot of people feeling like one person can make a difference.” Shumlin remarked, “It’s been an incredible honor to serve as Governor of Vermont, and I am so grateful for the opportunity to continue serving this state I love.”
(10/30/14 3:05am)
Vermont’s next biggest business venture has nothing to do with maple syrup or ice cream – that is, unless you want to share a picture of it. Ello is the newest social networking website sensation that was founded in Burlington, Vermont. Dubbed as the “anti-Facebook,” Ello is a social networking website that mirrors Vermont’s own decree against billboards dedicating itself to being completely and totally ad-free. With a minimalist design platform, Ello is, as its slogan states, “Simple, beautiful, and ad-free.”
On Ello, users can bump friends into two different categories: “friends” for people with whom the user is closer or interested in following and “noise” for everyone else. Currently, users can only post text or pictures, but creators have said that video and audio capacity is coming. It has a reputation for being the artsier, hipster version of Facebook and has been called a “Twitter-Tumblr hybrid.” Ello designers say that the website was created “to display large images beautifully.” Unlike other social-media websites, Ello tolerates users posting pornographic images, but asks that users flag their posts to warn those who do not wish to view it.
In the last month, Ello saw its user popularity soar. The spike in popularity was mostly credited to the rift between Facebook and the drag queen community. In September, Facebook disallowed drag queens to hold accounts in which they did not use their legal names. As a result, drag queens, much of the LGTBQ community and their supporters started flooding Ello, which allows users to create a profile under whichever name they want. “We embrace the LGTBQ community … including their adult-oriented content needs,” CEO Paul Budnitz said.
The network is invite-only and at its peak in September, Ello was receiving 40,000 user requests per hour. The website’s booming success has caused the creators to slow the number of new users. Creators of the website say that this is partly to keep up with the overwhelming activity the site has seen, but also to echo the idea that Ello is not meant for everyone.
“We don’t want every person in the world to be on it, so we don’t have to design for the lowest common denominator,” one of its co-founders, Lucian Föhr, said. Currently, those hoping to gain access to the website can only do so if they are invited by an existing user. These invites were in such high demand that they were being auctioned on eBay for a whopping $500. The website has picked up national attention as Budnitz has been interviewed by several prominent business magazines such as Forbes, Fortune, and Bloomberg.
While Ello has triumphed with its users, business elites have questioned Ello’s ability to remain a for-profit company. The question is how Ello will make any money without advertisements. Ello plans to be a “freemium” social network, which means that users will be able to add on features for a small fee of one to two dollars. Ello users can personalize their homepage through these features, like buying an app on an iPhone. Just last week, Ello legally filed as a public benefit corporation (PBC). As Budnitz puts it, the moves to become a PBC lets Ello “embed a cause in our charter that the company has to consider on par with making money.” That means there will never be any ads, nor can a future buyer ever change their mantra. Along with their promise to be ad-free, the website also states in their mission their view against data mining.
“Every post you share, every friend you make and every link you follow is tracked, recorded and converted into data. Advertisers buy your data so they can show you more ads. You are the product that’s bought and sold … we believe there is a better way. We believe a social network can be a tool for empowerment. Not a tool to coerce and manipulate – but a place to connect, create, and celebrate life,” says their manifesto.
So what does Ello mean for Vermont? Ello began with $435,000 from FreshTracks Capital, an investment company out of Shelburne, Vt., that works with New England businesses and has since raised $5.5 million for Ello. Budnitz said that they will continue to accept from investors, but only those who share his philosophy. Budnitz is already a well-known name to entrepreneurs in Vermont. He currently runs Budnitz Bicycles and Kidrobot out of his Maple Street, Burlington office.
“Paul is the perfect type of person that we love to see found Vermont companies,” commented Lee Bouyea, the managing director of FreshTracks Capital. “We invested in Paul and his team because we believe in their ability to grow a successful company without the billboardization of this media platform.”
Why not try Vermont’s own social networking site? User requests are currently so backed up right now that requests usually have to wait six to eight weeks to be accepted, which is plenty of time to change your mind. For a quicker alternative, Ello invite prices on eBay are now selling for only five bucks.