Spotlight On: Southern Imperial

Steve Vandemore likes to view Southern Imperial as a “small company with big company dreams.” Now, as chairman, CEO and president of the Rockford, Ill.-based organization, he is determined to help the company reach its potential, a goal that he says will ultimately help retailers be better and more efficient merchandisers across their stores. 

In business since 1956, Southern Imperial has long built a reputation as a supplier of retail merchandise solutions, including display hooks, sign holders and merchandising accessories, to retailers across the country for decades. But Vandemore, who joined the company in his current roles in early 2015, and his growing team are confident that the efficiencies and changes they have implemented over the past year will take the company to the next level. 

“Our goal is to deliver unmatched value to our customers,” he says. “We are in the midst of a cultural change at Southern Imperial, from a small, family-run business to a much more sophisticated, process and goal-driven company, focused squarely on our customers. We are already well on our way to becoming the leading supplier of innovative retail fixture and display solutions, with a longer-term goal of providing preeminent customer service throughout the entire order-to-delivery cycle.

“We are starting to see some early signs where our customers are already noticing the performance-based culture shift at Southern Imperial. While still early in our reinvention, our customers are becoming increasingly impressed with our ability to design best-in-class products, and consistently deliver those solutions on a timely basis. Further, the strength of our design and engineering teams allow our company to propose cutting-edge designs and systems which our customers may not even realize they need yet.”

The revamping of Southern Imperial was not a rash decision, Vandemore says. He has served on the company’s board of directors since 2010, and through that experience, saw incredible potential for the company to transform itself into a world-class organization, with the ultimate goal of delivering unmatched shareholder value year-after-year. 

The foundation of Vandemore’s strategy is one of operational excellence, company officials say. Vandemore says that he recognizes it is impossible for a company to be everything to everybody, so by focusing on customer-centric best practices throughout every functional area, the company will be able to deliver a value proposition others will find difficult to match. Already, Vandemore has refinanced the business, upped the investment in talent and technology, reengineered the order-to-delivery process and improved on-time delivery rates to what now exceeds the 95 percent threshold. At the same time, he notes that the team has taken significant costs out of the entire business, while significantly improving operating performance across the board. “While it is still so early in the game, we are nonetheless very proud of the steps taken thus far, and how these foundational initiatives will position ourselves for long-term, sustainable success,” he says. 

“Recruiting, developing and retaining the best talent possible is how I spend 90 percent of my time,” says Vandemore. “We are all about the team, and we accept nothing less than excellence in all we do. The talent pool we have recruited to the company over the past twelve months has already had an incredible impact. Going forward, my job is to refine and develop our strategy, knock down barriers and obstacles for my leaders, provide them the support they need and let them run their businesses. Our goal is to be the best-in-class supplier to our customers, and we will not stop until we get there.”

He may be on to something. Supermarket retailers across the country are making it well known that they need help with merchandising solutions to fit an increasing number of products into a finite amount of space. At the same time, grocery retailers are looking for displays that will catch the eye of harried consumers as they rush down aisles in search of products that will end up on the dining room table.

​Vandemore says merchants need to look no further than his company for those solutions. Southern Imperial and its nearly 500 full- and part-time employees has expanded its product offering to now include sophisticated electronic loss prevention products and LED lighting solutions, in addition to its already comprehensive offering of wired-based and resin-based display products. “The expansion of our product lines is a direct result of the investment we make in problem-solving for retailers,” says Vandemore. “We’ve had solutions for loss prevention and lighting for some time, but we have increased the investment and development of these products as retailing demands continue to evolve on an almost daily basis. Being able to provide such a wide range of proprietary solutions is just one dimension of value that we can bring to our customers.”

The company, which operates two domestic factories (one attached to headquarters in Rockford and the other near Atlanta) and one factory in China, now has more than 2,000 catalogued items, and Vandemore quickly adds, the ability to offer custom solutions for virtually any retail merchandising need. 

“Custom products are crucial to the future of our company,” he says. “We leverage our staff of more than 15 designers and engineers to make sure we are on the cutting edge when it comes to creating customized solutions for our customers.”

Supermarkets were not always the primary focus for Southern Imperial. In fact, the company started as a manufacturer of hanger bolts mostly because its hometown of Rockford was then a bustling furniture manufacturing area. Merchandising solutions came into play when it started to make store fixtures for the Ace Hardware chain in the 1960s.

According to Robb Northrup, the company’s director of marketing communications and an 18-year veteran of the firm, Southern Imperial was more focused on creating merchandising solutions for mass merchandisers for many years. But sensing an opportunity to help grocery retailers better merchandise products, the company started to offer solutions for the food trade. 

“We have had a lot of success with supermarkets, perhaps because there is so much opportunity,” Northrup says. He notes that it can be as simple as giving a retailer the ability to have a display that places frozen pizzas face forward and at the front of the freezer as opposed to being on their side where it is harder for the consumer to see and find them. “There are a tremendous number of solutions we can offer a grocery retailer right out of the box, such as sign solutions, display racks and NEXT trays. Plus we can also provide any customized solution for them.”

Vandemore and Northrup are very pleased with how far Southern Imperial has come in the past 15 months. More importantly however, they remain extremely excited about the future of the company, which has been employee-owned since 1996. “The cornerstone to our operational excellence strategy will always be to develop and strengthen the capabilities of our team,” Vandemore says. “At the same time, we want to strengthen our partnership with retailers by offering more merchandising options as well as custom, needs-based solutions. Along the way, we will continue our relentless pursuit of driving improved value for our shareholders, who also happen to be our employees.”