Inland Celebrates 75 Years: Our Past, Our Present, and Our Future – Part 3
July 15, 2019
Well, that is a wrap! Summer is half over and our month of 75th Anniversary celebrations is over! We had a great time celebrating at each of our locations with fun stories around the history of Inland and how we came to be the company that we are today! If you missed out on the first two portions of our history, have no fear, we’ve got you! The John Era and the Jack Era were covered a few months ago and you can catch up! If you are looking for the cliff notes version of the first two blogs, here we go: John Glendenning moved his family including his son Jack, from Detroit Michigan to La Crosse Wisconsin to run Inland Printing Company. After growing up in the business, Jack took over the company in 1974 with a new vision based around growth and expansion beyond commercial printing into labels. Now, let’s see how that evolved and expanded during the Mark Era!
1988 – present // Mark Glendenning Era
As we mentioned in our last blog, Mark’s career with Inland started in 1988 when he joined the company as a Sales Representative based in Chicago IL. Jack’s era started the time of growth, we were building additional facilities and investing in additional presses and continuously looking to improve processes. One of the most important impactors of our growth was customer satisfaction. John had built the base for customer loyalty, Jack was building upon that with growing the company, and Mark continues to do the same. Our main driver of customer satisfaction revolves around quality. Through the 90s Inland implemented a quality management system and the base of that system is still in place today. The established customer satisfaction and quality management system did not go unnoticed, as our customers started to recognize us with awards such as “Partners in Excellence” or “Supplier of the Year” as well as being recognized in the print industry as “Best Workplace in America.”
Mark’s role within the company quickly evolved from Sales Representative to VP of Process Improvement and COO in 1994, and five short years later into President and COO of Inland Printing Company. In the 2000s, we expanded our footprint at our Airport Road and West Avenue facility as our cut and stack business continued to boom. The label and packaging industry was evolving and we wanted to expand our product offerings beyond the cut and stack and in-mold labels world because we knew our customers needed more than just labels. Up until this point we were known as the “Label Experts” and we needed to align our brand with our growth strategy. In 2015, we rebranded and Inland’s new tagline “We power great packaging” alluded to our current portfolio in food, beverage, and consumer product packaging, promising further innovation. Mark said it best, “We have developed into a robust resource for our customers, and have always been a strategic partner rather than a simple supplier. Our new identity recognizes that.”
We found the perfect opportunities to acquire locations that supported our product offerings in shrink, pressure sensitive, and flexible packaging. Our company doubled in size quickly, in late 2015 we acquired our Pennsylvania plant which would be our primary pressure sensitive facility, and six short months later we acquired our Neenah facility which would support our shrink and flexible packaging offerings. Since those two locations joined our family, we’ve continued to invest in state of the art equipment to provide our employees with the best manufacturing tools to create award-winning products for our customers.
During the Mark era, his two sons Trent and Brad have joined the Inland team as well. Both boys spent time at Inland as interns during their college years and started their careers at companies outside of Inland. Trent started out as an intern in our R&D department and he came back to Inland as an Innovation Specialist since 2016. Mark’s youngest son Brad, had a similar path. He was a sales intern during his college years and then worked for a larger company right out of college. He just recently re-joined the Inland family as our newest Business Development Sales Representative. We had the perfect opportunity to put the Glendenning men—Jack, Mark, Trent, and Brad — in the hot seat to talk about what it’s like to be a part of a company that has been going strong for 75 years. I won’t ruin the fun of what these four had to say, check the video out for yourself.
Celebration of 75 Years
75 Years is something we’ve been looking forward to celebrating! And we did it right! We met with Mark every week in June at a different Inland location to get his take on how we’ve evolved into the global supplier that we are today. There are some interesting tidbits in these videos with a sneak peek of our new Downingtown facility, stories about how we used to make business decisions (Hint: How does their beer taste?), and what it is like to have four generations part of the company. Sit back and enjoy as we relive some of Inland’s history: La Crosse // Neenah // Downingtown.
This month was nothing short of exciting, and we will always fall back on our core vision: Growth, for our customers, our team members and our community. When we hit the end of a workday, we want the best for our employees and the people and companies that have supported us through the last 75 years. And remember… It’s been a great 75 years so far, but don’t go anywhere, we are just getting started!
