I’ve always had a fascination with old. Old trees, old buildings, old people, old objects, and old businesses.
The world is constantly pushing the old out of the way to make room for the new. So if something can stand up to the world, push back, and go the distance, then there’s probably something special about it. I believe those things are worth celebrating.
Today we launch THE DISTANCE, an online magazine that celebrates one type of old thing – the old business. THE DISTANCE is about interesting private businesses that have been in business for 25 years or more.
Everyone talks about how hard it is to start a business. It is hard, but it’s not as hard as staying in business. Every business is new at least once, but very few actually survive to old age (or even adolescence). We want to celebrate those who’ve figured out the hardest thing to do in business: how not to go out of business.
Some of the businesses we’ll be covering have been in business for a hundred years or more. Some are still run by the original founder. Some are now run by a long-time employee. Some are run by the son or daughter of their father’s grandfather who founded the business way back in the day.
Every month we’ll be publishing a new article about one of these businesses to thedistance.com. We’ll introduce you to some real characters, some amazing stories, a few secrets, and the sustained blood, sweat, tears, and persistence required to keep the lights on for so many years.
Our first article is about the Horween Leather Company out of Chicago Illinois. A fourth-generation business founded in 1905, Horween makes leather the old fashioned way. As the last remaining tannery in Chicago, they’ve stood strong, learned how to survive – and thrive – in a challenging environment. They have a lot to teach us.
If you like these kind of stories, we invite you to follow @distancemag on Twitter. We’ll be sharing all sorts of things about old businesses, long-time employees, and other tidbits you may find interesting. Whenever we publish a new story to THE DISTANCE, we’ll announce it first on the Twitter feed.
So, here we go! Head over to thedistance.com to read the story of Horween Leather, the last tannery in Chicago.
And BTW, if you know of great little 25+ year private businesses that would be a good fit for THE DISTANCE, we’d love to hear about them. Could be the mom and pop shop around the corner. Could be the holdout manufacturer on the edge of town. They’re all interesting to us! Drop an email to [email protected] and we’ll follow up. Thanks for helping us with THE DISTANCE.
Toni
on 07 May 14It would be very useful to have options to subscribe by RSS or email
Erica
on 07 May 14@Jason
I’m confused, so you either sold-off or “sunsetted” a bunch of services to stay “focused on a single product (Basecamp)” ... as you wrote just 6 weeks ago.
http://www.inc.com/magazine/201403/jason-fried/basecamp-focus-one-product-only.html
And now you’re launching a new service … a magazine ?
Let’s just recap what you have sold/sunsetted recently:
- Highrise
- Know Your Company
- Campfire
- Job Board
- Tada List
- Writeboard
- Product Blog
- Answers
- Backpack
- Breeze
- Draft
- Softfolio
- Basecamp Classic
I assume this was in the works when you publicly announced 6 weeks ago that you will be focusing entirely on Basecamp.
Just seems very odd.
Jason Fried
on 07 May 14Erica, I can see how that might be confusing. Let me clarify…
We’re paring back on products, not on publishing. We continue to write this blog (Signal vs. Noise), I continue to write a monthly column for Inc., we continue to speak at conferences, we may continue to write books, and we’re writing The Distance. Sharing and publishing is a big part of what we do here. That doesn’t change.
Publishing is very different from designing, building, maintaining, and improving products. Running a product requires significant 24/7 resources and ongoing perpetual attention. Publishing a story or writing a book is a singular event that doesn’t generate future work to maintain or improve itself.
We made this distinction when we published the 37signals becoming Basecamp announcement at http://37signals.com:
Q: What about other stuff like your Signal vs. Noise Blog, your books, etc?
We will continue publishing to Signal vs. Noise, writing books, and sharing as we always have. We will also be launching another online publication this year called THE DISTANCE. More details on this later.
Erica
on 07 May 14Is that really true?
I ask because isn’t the intent of publishing something (or the hope at least) is that it will then generate a conversation? A conversation that you (the publisher) should be actively involved in.
That involvement in the conversation, post publishing, is work. And that conversation doesn’t stop just because it’s 10pm bedtime, it continues throughout the night because of the global reach we have with the Internet.
Just a thought.
[Anecdotally, this blog post even created future work for you by responding to my comment :) ]
Jermaine
on 07 May 14@Erica, you’re just being a pain in the ass. You could just do something more useful with your time.
I very much enjoyed the first issue. Any plans to eventually put it in print?
Scott Asai
on 07 May 14I think it’s cool to see a business stay up and running for so long. They’re doing something right. I also like how he mentioned, “we’re not cheap.” I think the brands with longevity don’t worry about price as much as quality. Nice story.
Mig Reyes
on 07 May 14@Jermaine :)
Jason Fried
on 07 May 14Erica, we’ve run products for a long time, and we’ve run small publications for a long time. The difference between the two is monumental. If you haven’t had the experience, you’ll have to trust us on that.
Kevin Mosre
on 07 May 14@Basecamp
How do you plan to make money from The Distance?
Or do the companies pay you in order to be featured?
Jason Fried
on 07 May 14Kevin, no one pays us to be featured.
We don’t plan on making money from The Distance at the moment. It’s more a labor of love. A passion project. Helping to expose these companies to our audience is a way to give back to the small long-term companies we admire.
Glenn
on 08 May 14To be honest, my first reaction was the same as Erica’s.
After I took a breath though, I’m glad to see that you guys will still be following your passion because we benefit from it. Also, I’m glad that you will be highlighting more old-school companies instead of tech companies (if I understand your premise).
Everyone always talks about the latest and greatest tech stuff and they forget the rest of the businesses that all the tech companies rely upon.
Thanks! Also, please write on the SVN more often. It was so long between posts that I almost came to the conclusion that SVN was another thing you guys were writing off.
Brian Shea
on 08 May 14I loved your profile of Horween. It reminds me of your Bootstrapped Profitable and Proud series. Can’t wait to check out the next issue.
It’s interesting how Horween’s business has evolved over the decades. Moving from razor strops into new products, and then into luxury goods as the lower end business moved elsewhere. It would have been interesting to read about how their finances evolved as well. How has their revenue grown (or shrunk) over the years? Have their margins improved as they moved to higher end products? How many products do they sell a year? This is sensitive information, so I can understand why it’s not included in the article, but they were questions that came to my mind as I read the profile.
Thanks for putting this series together. It’s awesome.
Peace, Brian
Dirk
on 08 May 14After investing into training and business processes around Highrise as a CRM and being burnt by your neglect of that product, we are glad we finally moved our last 37s-service in use, Basecamp for project management, to another company (Asana, also saving a lot of money with the move). – As inspiring as you guys once were, today you look more like „business by ADD“.
DHH
on 08 May 14Dirk, best of luck with the new products. Happy to hear you found something that you feel better about. There’s such great choice in the market for everything from CRM to product management tools that everyone should be able to find a system they can gel with.
Devan
on 08 May 14I am enjoying this publication. I sent a list of suggested companies to Wailin which I hope to see in the future. I understand starting the first profile with a company in your own backyard, but I hope that in the future you will profile companies across the entire globe.
What a pity that temple building company in Japan closed down a few years ago after about 400 years (!) in business. Theirs would have been an AWESOME story to tell.
Devan
on 08 May 14Did I say 400, oops, I meant 1400 years… Here is the story of Kongo Gumi… http://www.businessweek.com/stories/2007-04-16/the-end-of-a-1-400-year-old-businessbusinessweek-business-news-stock-market-and-financial-advice
Dick Kusleika
on 12 May 14I would love to hear why you chose Twitter over RSS to syndicate. Actually, I’m curious why you just don’t use both.
J.A. Ginsburg
on 12 May 14Bravo for looking beyond the startup world! A few years ago I was researching a story on business resilience and came across a factoid that the average lifespan of a corporation is roughly 40 years. There is tremendous attrition at the beginning. A lot of startups rev up and die. Mergers and acquisitions syphon off another chunk. Family businesses often sputter in the third generation. Then, of course, there is disruptive innovation where new inventions and ideas sweep in, replacing existing goods, services and scores of businesses (see liquid paper, music CDs and wall phones…).
Last summer Larry Keeley of Doblin (now part of Deloitte) published a book called “The Ten Types of Innovation.” Although hardly the only attempt to dice and slice what makes some companies so much more successful than others, I found it to be on one of the best. Over the last 15 years, Keeley’s team have analyzed a couple of thousand companies collectively spanning a multi-century time frame. The ten types of innovation arc from sales and distribution to production and design. Businesses that are innovative in at least five categories tend to thrive. Less than that and not so much. It will be interesting to see how many types of innovation “Distance” companies on average exhibit: http://trackernewsdots.tumblr.com/post/52633242126/tentypes
••••••••
Re the inaugural story on Horween leather, it’s wonderful to read about a company of artisans who are expert and true to their craft. That said, it was unsettling to read about their work with horse hides. In 1905 when the company was founded, horses were part of the scenery, pulling plows, hauling freight and providing transportation. Not only were horse hides abundant, but using the leather from carcasses was a kind of recycling. The story today is somewhat different. There are no ranches raising horses for meat and hides the way there are for cattle. The horses that supply the meat and hides are often wild born or former race horses (http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/1000-racehorses-a-year-in-uk-abattoirs-shocking-failures-in-checks-how-do-we-know-thoroughbreds-arent-in-our-food-8496027.html). The reason Horween has had to source horse leather from French-speaking Canada or Europe is that equine abattoirs have been illegal in the US for several decades. That may change—it’s very political (http://www.usatoday.com/story/money/business/2014/01/17/horse-slaughter-blocked-by-federal-law/4604929/) Still, the horses that end up in Canada may have started out in the US. There is a constant battle against “slaughter buyers” buying up wild horses that have been rounded up by the BLM in the West. On 9/11, I was working on a television segment for National Geographic filming a helicopter roundup on the Wyoming / Montana border. When the no-fly order came in, my cameraman and I ended up spending several days cooling our heels with a crew working on a documentary for PBS. It was an eye-opener (http://www.jaginsburg.com/2/post/2009/08/on-911-wild-horses-symbols-hope.html).
Horween may be very ethical in how they source their leather. Clearly, a lot of horses die every year and it makes sense to use what can be used. It is, however, a market fraught with peril.
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