What do a sales report and a pillowcase have in common? Plenty, according to Dean F. Shulman, senior vice president of home appliance and business/industrial product powerhouse Brother International Corporation, which has been marketing and distributing products for the home, office, and home office since 1954. In Shulman’s view, Brother’s mission is to provide customers with the tools to bring their vision to fruition—whether that vision is a four-color business plan for the board of directors or a one-of-a-kind set of placemats decorating the dinner table. Since joining the company in 1986, Shulman has been instrumental in reimagining Brother’s product offerings and positioning the company for success in today’s competitive retail market.
Merging technology and creativity has been a hallmark of Shulman’s career. Soon after he graduated from Washington University of St. Louis in 1977 with a BA in biology, a temporary job as a model maker for a doctor working on an artificial pancreas derailed his medical school plans, as he realized the medical profession would not fulfill his creative side. Switching gears, he joined the evolving industrial technology bandwagon, entering a training program at Savin Corporation, a pioneer in the industrial photocopier market, in 1979. As a copier salesman during the early 1980s, Shulman donned his “first polyester suit” and patrolled a territory on New York’s Upper East Side, using creativity and innovation to bypass the gatekeepers and get his products seen by potential customers. “I’d be pushing a 200-pound copier from 57th to 63rd, balancing trays of coffee and donuts,” he recalls, explaining his tactic of luring office workers from behind their closed doors for complimentary snacks and impromptu copier demonstrations in the hallway.
Intrigued by the potential offered by technological innovations, Shulman knew that he didn’t want to be a salesman for the rest of his life. Earning an MBA degree from Baruch gave him the solid business foundation to move up the ranks within Bridgewater, New Jersey–based Brother International, which recruited Shulman to be its first director of marketing. The company, founded in 1954 and a wholly owned subsidiary of Brother Industries, Ltd., of Nagoya, Japan, had undergone a management transition in 1984, and the new management team tasked Shulman with positioning the company to respond to a changing retail landscape. “The company was looking to move toward a higher-value dealer distribution model rather than the prior model of building and shipping to mass merchants,” he explains, noting that the emergence of specialty office technology stores such as Staples and Office Depot dovetailed with Brother’s new marketing initiative.
Trend Spotting and Trend Setting
Shulman credits much of his success at Brother to his ability to recognize emerging trends. “I’ve been lucky to catch lightning in a bottle several times, being at the right place with the right idea,” he notes. “It’s not often you get to hit something like that more than once.” One such trend was the emergence of the home office, fueled by technological innovations that made computers and peripherals less cumbersome and more accessible. Shulman spearheaded Brother’s efforts to position itself as an innovator in the market, setting a “magic price point” of $399 that, says Shulman, “hit a home run in that market. For that price, you could get a tool—a printer, a fax machine—that wasn’t the least expensive, but that offered the greatest value in terms of features and capabilities. It gave consumers the best answer for the money they were willing to spend.”
Increased visibility was key to Brother’s marketing plans. Shulman recalls a bold ad campaign that tied into the election of President Clinton to his first term: a full-page ad in the then–newly launched newspaper USA Today featured a picture of the White House and the message: “Dear President Clinton: Welcome to the ultimate home office, from the ultimate home office company,” accompanied by a prominent Brother logo.
Pop-Culture Cred
Translating technological innovations into marketable products remained Shulman’s mantra as he headed up a range of key business functions at Brother International in subsequent years. Among his greatest “lightning-in-a-bottle” moments was the introduction of the P-touch electronic labeling system, which resonated with consumers who sought to better organize their increasingly complex home and business offices. Shulman reveals that Brother was the first “corporate” company to advertise on Howard Stern’s popular radio show; Stern’s promotion of the P-touch product line made Brother synonymous with electronic labeling systems and was integral to the tremendous success of the product.
Currently, Shulman and Brother are riding the “do-it-yourself” wave popularized by current pop culture icons like television’s Project Runway and its offshoots, Project Runway All-Stars and Under the Gunn. The programs have tapped into society’s modern-day quest for uniqueness and heightened the awareness of fashion design as a trendy yet accessible vehicle for self-expression. Recognizing the synergy between the Project Runway concept and Brother’s heritage sewing machine business, Shulman pursued the opportunity to integrate the two. Today, Brother has garnered wide exposure as the exclusive sewing and embroidery licensee of the programs, marketing a line of Project Runway machines and providing the equipment on which contestants create their runway fashions.
Brother’s arrangement with the franchise would not have borne fruit, however, if the company was not offering innovations in its product line. When Shulman was named senior vice president in 2006, he was also asked to take the helm of Brother’s Home Appliance Division; in this role, he was faced with reinvigorating Brother’s sewing and embroidery product line, whose traditional customer base was aging out of the market. “What excited me was the challenge of making sewing interesting to the next generation by using technology to offer a better tool,” he explains. “It took more than two years to convince the parent company that our ideas were both implementable from an R&D perspective and saleable.” Those ideas—innovations such as high-definition color display screens, laser cutting guides, needle-embedded cameras, and LED lighting—resulted in increased sales in a mature market and accolades from industry insiders and customers alike.
Building a Better Hammer
Although prime seating at NYC Fashion Week events and wrap parties with designers and models are nice perks, the aspect of the Project Runway association that most excites Shulman is seeing contestants use Brother-provided tools to push the limits of their creativity. His favorite Runway moment involved a Brother digital garment printer capable of printing an image on a t-shirt in 60 seconds. “In one episode, a contestant won a design challenge by using the machine to create an original fabric on the fly—the fabric as the contestant envisioned it didn’t exist, until our garment printer was used to create it,” he says proudly. He adds that he would love to see a design challenge incorporating Brother’s recently introduced “ScanNCut” electronic cutting machine, which garnered the Innovation & Design Award at the 2014 Consumer Electronics Show and was voted #1 Most Creative Item by the Craft & Hobby Association earlier this year.
Shulman’s success is built on keeping that link between technology and creativity at the forefront of his product development plans. He considers himself great at “looking at an existing category or item and reinventing it. All of these things—office equipment, sewing/embroidery machines—already existed as tools; I just made them a lot better and more engaging to the user.”
With Brother products well positioned to help soft goods hobbyists and professionals express their vision, is there anything exciting on the horizon for the office/home office market? Likely, Shulman already has the seed of a new “a-ha moment” that will unleash customers’ creativity and productivity in a different venue. “I have some ideas…but that will be the next chapter,” he says enigmatically.
—Sally Fay