Vox Packaging: Package Deal

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Robert Reid, president of Vox Packaging, remembers that Jim Tygart’s call seemed to be just another salesman making a cold call, a shot in the dark. “Jim called my brother David and asked if he would like to buy a packaging plant and equipment. David laughed and said no. Tygart asked if he was interested in coming down to look at it. David said no.” At that point, other salesmen might have stopped, said goodbye and moved onto another name on the list, but not Tygart. He saw Vox Printing and the empty former Venture Packaging facility in Denison as a perfect match, and he had a few more questions, and David Reid’s interest grew a bit. “It just so happened we were coming down to Dallas to look at a piece of equipment that we ended up buying,” Robert Reid recalled, “so we said, ‘Yeah on our way back we’ll stop by Denison and see what you have’.”

Robert Reid, president of Vox Packaging, Jim Tygart, and Audy Compton, general manager of the Denison manufacturing plant in the board room at Vox

When Jim Tygart, a volunteer with the Denison Development Alliance, took on the chore of finding a new business for the vacated plant in Denison, the stars and planets were lining up in his favor. A Tulsa native, Tygart spent thirty-five years in Houston, selling mainframe computers to the likes of Exxon, Shell, Reliant Energy, and the City of Houston. When he retired in 2004, he moved north and a year later settled in Grayson County.

After a few years of golf and television, Tygart decided to retire from his retirement, and that’s when he went knocking on the doors of the DDA. “The DDA is an organization that is based highly on the skill sets of its volunteers,” said President Tony Kaai. “As we do special projects, I continually search for volunteers that want to make a difference in Denison.”

Kaai was impressed with Tygart’s qualifications and was ready to put him to work. “If you want to do something, let’s do something big,” Kaai said, and at the time, nothing loomed bigger for Denison than trying to fill the old Texoma Medical Center.

While getting up to speed on that project, Tygart recommended the DDA buy a database of manufacturers from Dun and Bradstreet to help in the marketing effort. With that database purchase came the ability to acquire additional names at no charge. Then Kaai pointed Tygart in another direction, finding a company to move into the eighty-five thousand square-foot building on FM 84 that once housed Venture Packaging.

“I got the names of fifty printers in Oklahoma, Louisiana, Arkansas, and Texas, Tygart said. “All those companies had at least two million dollars in sales. I figured that anybody with two million dollars in sales would have the revenue necessary to do the deal.”

In early November of last year, after researching the companies and narrowing the list of names down to twenty, Tygart was ready to start making phone calls. Although it was at the bottom of his alphabetical list, Tygart’s first call was to David Reid, president of Vox Printing, in Oklahoma City. Vox is a family-run company that supplies printed tray liners, coupons and flyers to fast food chains, including McDonald’s, Burger King, Arby’s, Sonic, and Cotton Patch.

“I went onto their website,” Tygart said. “You see a family-oriented business. You see the family is management. Most of their employees have been with them a long time. The facilities are absolutely beautiful. When I saw that I said, we’ve got to try them first.”

Denison Development Alliance chairman Doug Holzbog, volunteer Jim Tygart and DDA executive Tony Kaai.

With opportunity about to knock on Denison’s door, Kaai and Tygart moved into high gear to get a presentation ready for the group. “We didn’t have everything together,” said Kaai, “so Jim and I got together and quickly developed a lease and incentive package and all the building information. We spent about three hours putting it together.”

The folks from Vox got a firsthand look at how things moved in Denison when they sat down with Kaai and Tygart in the conference room of the idle plant. “They already had contracts drawn up with our names on them,” said Robert Reid. “It showed some Texas confidence in what they had planned. They showed us around, and we got to thinking about the possibilities.”

After the initial meeting at the plant with Tygart and Kaai, Vox held several meetings with the previous operators of the packaging plant. “We started putting the pieces together, and everything looked like it could work with some of the things we could bring to it,” Reid said.

If the deal were to be done, there was urgency on the part of everyone involved to get it done quickly. Although the building is owned by the Denison Development Foundation, the mortgage on the equipment at the plant was held by CIT, a financial institution that was going into bankruptcy and which was just two weeks away from auctioning off the equipment previously used by the now-out-of-business Venture packaging.

Two other situations also dictated speed. While some former Venture employees had found other work, some were still available to bring their experience to the new enterprise. It also appeared that some of Venture’s previous clients would hang around and come on board with Vox if the deal could be completed quickly.

Typical package die design.

“Within five weeks of that initial visit, we had a contract that was signed and we had our announcement,” said Tygart. “It was a great opportunity. Everything was there. We had the facility. We had the equipment. We had the urgency. They had a need. They saw the need. They were in production within eight weeks.”

Vox Packaging cranked up production in Denison on January 4, with seventeen employees, most of them former Venture workers. Audy Compton, who was working at Vox Printing in Oklahoma City, was named plant manager of the Denison facility. A native of Weatherford, Oklahoma, Compton said maintenance neglect was the biggest challenge in getting the plant up and running. “We have a very different standard at Vox. Our plants are commonly known as the cleanest plants across the line, and hopefully in not too much longer amount of time that will happen here.”

Although maintenance on the facility, which had been shuttered for several months, was a high priority, there was no time to waste. Barely twenty-four hours after they took possession of the plant, their first order was on the press.

Vox is a family-run company that supplies printed tray liners, coupons and flyers to fast food chains, including McDonald’s, Burger King, Arby’s, Sonic, and Cotton Patch.

Vox can design, print and cut packaging for a variety of products. “The packaging industry is one of the segments of the printing industry still doing well and is projected to do well. It seemed like a good thing to expand into,” said Reid. “We’ve been doing business with some of the biggest names in the fast food industry for forty years and those good relations are a way to expand Vox Packaging.”

Recalling how quickly the pieces of the deal that brought Vox to Denison fell into place, Reid had high praise for both Tygart and Kaai. “It actually took me by surprise how much they were willing to work to get us to come here,” Reid said. “They moved so quickly to gather all the information we needed and to do whatever was needed to try to get a deal to work. They made us feel comfortable with this purchase, comfortable with this town, the employees, and everything, and they have not stopped since we got moved in here.”

Everyone connected with bringing Vox to Denison has been amazed at the speed with which the deal was done after just a single random phone call. For Tony Kaai, Jim Tygart, and the Reids of Vox Printing, it seems a deal that just was meant to be.

Facts about Vox Printing, parent company of Vox Packaging

• David Reid, President
• Established 1971
• Headquartered in Oklahoma City
• Founded by LaVerna and Dennis Reid
• Specializes in production of trayliners with the ability to print 180,000 per hour
• Recognized as one of Oklahoma’s Best Places to Work for the past 3 years

Facts about Vox Packaging in Denison

• Robert Reid, President; Audy Compton, General Manager
• Located at 2407 Texoma Drive
• Equipment includes state-of-the-art computer to plate prepress equipment.
• 85,000 square foot facility
• Produces retail cartons and packages for products including pet food, ice cream bars, deluxe confections, and other items.

Facts about the U.S. Packaging Industry

• Folding cartons were first mass produced in 1879 and in the early 20th century marketing-oriented packaging began to evolve where packing became more than just a container for sale shipment.
• In 1966, the Fair Packaging and Labeling Act gave the Food and Drug Administration authority to assure that packages are accurately labeled and contain nutritional information.
• Single-serving packages (those styrofoam take out boxes, primarily) account for less than 1.2 percent of public landfills, according to a packaging industry trade group.