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Discontinued Wallpaper Co
 Houston, TX  1972 to 1997
A 25 year pictorial study and memory review of a business entrepreneur. See 11B.

 A business analysis review of what we did and why we did it. Hopefully this might help some entrepreneur look at a business from the inside and apply the principles of what  had been learned by owner Brian Nelson. With 20-20 hindsight you can operate your business without  some of the mistakes made by Brian. This is page 1 of 10. There will 60 Images per page which can be enlarged with a double click. 

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Welcome to  Discontinued Wallpaper Co. archive historical website  This is a A 25 year Pictorial Business Study of an entrepreneurial venture started with no money and ended with no money after 25 years of creative  successful business practices in Houston, TX from 1972 to 1997. Each business will have a description of what was going on at the time. Sometime there will be a learning lesson where an error educated owner Brian Nelson to do things differently  the next time. New  methods had to be devised to help solve problems that developed.

Decisions  where made with  simple logical conclusion. This was not rocket science. Each time a problem came up one had to ask himself " Is there a better way to do this?"   Today with the value of the the internet the business would have to be different manner.  Or it would have never survived for 25 years. There were  hundreds of other competitors over the 25 year period. DWC made great competition for the industry.

If you ever shopped at this store please send me an e-mail or your story about your shopping  experience at Discontinued Wallpaper Company.  Click: E-mail me
This will be an on going website. It will take hundreds of hours to upload and formulate all photos and the data.  Brian Nelson 713-467-3025.

The important words found on this site include:

Contact information for this Website:
Brian Nelson
Webpage Marketing Consultant 
31 Gessner Rd. ,  Houston, TX 77024
713-467-3025  Fax 713-467-3192
 Click: E-mail me


You can find this site again by typing in the Google search engine  the very unique word " 1repapllaW  "  which is  "  Wallpaper1 " backwards.

Article Word Count                                MSW

 

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You are at: http://www.DiscontinuedWallpaperCo.com    ud 01/02/2008 03:45 PM -0600  Bookmark this page now!

 
Misspelled words used to find this page 1 of 3 Discontinued  Wallpaper Co Company Houston, TX . archive historical website Pictorial Business Study  entrepreneurial venture  investment  learning lesson  errors  educated owner Brian Nelson thinking outside the box. wallcovering, retail stores.   benefit   decisions  logical conclusion.  internet business  survival competitors  job journal
  website.  data.  Brian Nelson 713-467-3025 Pictorial Photo Retail Stores

 Page Title, Keywords  Description Metas, BB & Channel Post Pending.
1   Dear Friends, 
We started our business working out of our house in in 1971 the Maplewood South Subdivision   southwest Houston, TX We moved here with 1 daughter from Rochester, NY looking for employment.

I used to love to hang wallpaper. It totally changed the personality of a room with in a few hours. We put up our first wallpaper in  1969 in Webster, New York. it was a red flocked wallpaper.  When we moved to Houston in  1970 we started bought wallpaper at a very busy garage sale. A few months later I went back to buy some quantities for an investment house they referred me to a wholesaler who I bought a trunk full of wallpaper surplus wallpaper for $50.  That was the start of a retail business that lasted over  25 years. It was the beginning  of self employment in  Houston.  We started  by advertising in the local paper with 30 cent ads and Ads in the Houston Chronicle for about $1.  Sometimes I would sell the wallpaper to customer who came to our house. Some of these customers also wanted someone to hang it.  I had advertised under the name Quality Paperhanging.  I ventured out and bid jobs sometimes driving 30 miles to bid on a $ 50 job.  Gas was about $ .25/ gallon then as the gas war helped the travelers.   If I got the job I would go back to complete the job when it would fit into my  schedule.  Often I would hang wallpaper for many people on the same street as customers told their friends about someone who could do the job for them. I started getting referrals from paint store like Cook Paint and contractors like Kitchen Designers. I did jobs in River Oaks in big mansions, high rises and for a few famous people like Leon Jawarski. I tended to prefer the more complicated challenging things like kitchen. Straight bedroom walls were boring. I usually charged more than other paperhangers at that time. I guess it was a supply and demand balance.

Some customers would not come to a residence to buy wallpaper. We rented a warehouse location facing a busy street at 10914 S. Post Oak. The rate  $ .10/ sq. ft. for about 2400 sq. ft. This web job journal may bring back some valuable memories for my kids, my  relatives, my employees, my customers and most of all for me. I don't know how long I will be around to tell my kids about things we did as a family business. You can read my cancer journal..... www.IamFightingCancer.com . I am feeling great after 3 different bouts with cancer. Creating these pages also gives me reminders of the crazy things I did to earn a living for 25 years. Today I  more interested in helping others reach their goals. I recently lectured to  4 classes of students at Prairie View A & M University. It was difficult to get those students to become interactive thinking about running their own business. Developing this business journal is a great reminder for me in teaching others how they can avoid the mistakes that I made. I love to do consulting to help others solve business critical problems. I call it ' Idea Possibility Thinking. "

Because we advertised that  all or our  in stock wallpaper was 40% to 80% off the original price, we had many repeat customers who drove long distances  to  get to our stores. Often customers would visit all of our stores before making a purchase to be sure they bought the pattern that best fit their needs.  The requested that we locate a store closer to them. It sounded like a good idea. If I was in the wallpaper business today I would tell them to go to my website and not have the headaches of multiple stores.

These pictures will not be in any specific order, at least not at this time.  I just don't have the mind set to do that. I am going through thousands of photos taken over the 25 years.  Each web page will have about 60 pictures. When you click on the picture you should be able to see a larger picture which you may want to make a print of it. If  you were an employee at that store I would love to hear from you. I often wonder what those younger employees did with their lives.

There were cumulatively  about 100 people who worked on my payroll..   There were over a thousand temporary labors who unloaded trucks, built shelves, stocked shelves or completed other  tasks. They came through Macs Men, Peakload, and a number of other temporary agencies. Without the temporaries I would have never been able to  accomplish what I had to do.

A phone call would put  1 to 10 men on my door step within an hour. A 4 hour minimum was required. The better workers were often given a repeat ticket.  Some who were totally broke could not work long enough to finish unloading a truck and missed an opportunity to get  a repeat ticket to  work the next day because they had to get back to the temporary office to get paid  that day as money was critical. I am sure many of the temporaries lived under the bridges and this day labor of  employment was critical to their survival. Take a look at the pictures below and on the linked pages. If you have any comments you can e-mail me by clicking here. Click: E-mail me

 Brian Nelson  Houston, TX 713-467-3025.
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This was our 3nd Store. It was  1500 sq. ft.  on I-10 aka Katy Freeway at Silber Rd, In Houston. The porcelain sign was moved to a 5,000 sq. ft location a mile west on the same side of the I-10 Freeway a few years later. Rent was about  $.25 sq. ft.		  


After the first year in business most everything was purchased in truckloads including wallpaper paste. You will see many pictures of my son Avery who wanted at an early age to always be with me when he didn't have other plans. That changed when he became a teenager.

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Note the round scale. Early on in the business we had rolls of various sizes. We would individually price each  roll. If we priced it at say $ 7.04 the 04 would indicate that it came in as the 4th truckload.  Some creative customers would roll the wallpaper out and roll it back up the other way and put their own price on the unmarked end of the wallpaper. We started  to carry wallpaper seconds which meant it had a flaw in it. In pricing each roll we did not open each roll. Sometimes the customers would call from home stating there was a spot in the middle of the roll. Now we have a problem.  We decided that maybe we could sell the stock by the pound. That saved pricing  every roll. We gave the customers scissors and big checking tables as you can see in the background. The customers were encouraged to cut out anything that was bad. This eliminated the problem of the customer complaining about the quality of the material. If they didn't' check it at all it was their problem. They had the opportunity to do so. The concept was used for the next 23 years.
Early on I purchased a set of about  8  10 ft long  12 inch wide  steel skate wheel conveyors. I used these for 25 year. They were a life saver in moving cases of wallpaper down the conveyor by gravity where at the end they would be easily  picked up with a 2 wheel dolly . The conveyor had adjustable stands that fit into a v slot on the bottom of the section.  The conveyor sections had pins and hooks so they could easily lock together. Later I purchase lighter weight  aluminum sections but they were not as stable as the steel units. When you push on one end it would move all the cases toward the other end where they were unloaded.
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In  1977 When I got to 3 stores I wanted to hand customer something that they could take home with them and not throw away. This double sized business card in photo color had a calendar on the reverse size. It showed the store from the outside so they knew what the other store looked like when they got there.		  

I could have done a similar thing on the internet a whole lot cheaper but we didn't have that at that time. I think I bought about 20,000 of these but used only a fraction of them. It was costly to get them distributed to potentially new customers.

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This is the sign going up at 15715 North Freeway. Years later after I moved out of the store they reduced the front parking lot to almost nothing  via eminent domain as the expanded the width of I-45 North. A shopping center also moved in adjacent to the property that was out by itself orignally .


I used this  licensed portable sign as low cost advertising at multiple stores as needed.  I was able to chain it down as trailers are easily stolen in Houston.  I think the opening here was  pasted over other text on the sign. Note that the phone no does not have the area code 713 which was required a few years later,
9
This picture  of the 2nd location at 10902 S. Post Oak.. It is taken from the  business card above in section 7. . This was a warehouse store.  The center tables were used to inspect wallpaper before purchasing it.  Often customer would leave unselected rolls on the tables which had to be returned to their place on the shelves by the employees.  All of the shelves were in 6 ft long cabinets with 27     27" long x 12 inch storage tubes. All cabinets were on 6  4" steel casters lag screwed to the bottom   2x6's  Carts from one part of the store were often moved  entirely to another part of the store as the layout was needed for better  customer use.
Avery is standing on a electric material handling  machine made by Big Joe.  It could lift about about 500 lbs 4 feet.  This was  high enough to get into a 40 ft 18 wheeler truck. Each cart was on wheels.  We could load 3 across and 6 deep for  a total 18 cabinets going to another store. If the new store did not have a loading dock we had to have a way to get those cabinets off the truck. I would roll the Big Joe on my  6x10 trailer that I pulled behind my car or van.  After a few errors we learned to nail down  2 x 4's chocking the wheels on the last cabinet so they would not roll around in the truck. My 6x10 trailer was also used to haul 2 cabinets at a time to another store. Many were made  by a retired man in Conroe, Mr. _____.   I carried  a large tarp for my trailer. It was secured to special rope hooks at numerous places in the side walls of the trailer.
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Customers loved to watch us price merchandise  or stock the shelves with new inventory. They liked to get the items that had not been picked over by someone else.  It seems that sales often increased as we filled the aisles with so many  cases from recent truckloads that you could barely walk down them until we could process the inventory  for proper placement on the shelves. Customers would help open the 30" tall boxes so they could get first choice on possibly  the perfect pattern for them before others got it. Since the wallpaper was by the pound it was no problem to help them get what they wanted from new stock.
Other tenants shared some of the costs of my porcelain sign.  The Time Tunnel was a club that entered from the back side of the building. Note that the Century 21 Real-estate  sign has their name printed twice. As an outside drive by  sign where the speed is 50mph. duplicating the name  allows them only 1/10th of the value if the letters were larger being used only once.  So many businesses make this mistake trying to get as many words as possible on a reader sign. To test this just notice which signs you can read when you  drive by a store at  50 miles per hour.  The perpendicular street sign is about 5 times as effective from an advertising point than  a sign on the building. They lose the potential real  value by displaying your name on the outside of a building.  The landlord required lit channel letters on the building. The problem with that type of sign is that the neon wears out, the plastic can be broken with a rock, It can be blown out with high winds. It does not have the flexibility of changing copy as a porcelain sign would have.

Blue Box 1 Scan Below

Nelson Plan to "Save the Planet"
 http://www.NelsonPlanSaveThePlanet.com 81008 -514pm   ARN
1. Use the Pickens Plan For Energy
 www.PickensPlan.com T. Boone explains the Pickens Plan briefly  6 minutes.
www.PickensPlan.com/news Boone Speaks Click Video Topeka Town Hall
7-30-08 1 hour 5 min
 www.EndAddictiontoOil.com  www.TheWindTurbines.com   
  www.TheNaturalGasCars.com   www.UseSolarPowerEnergy.com   
2. Conserve the Planet 
www.DropOfOil.com   Reduce waste saving "One Drop Of Oil" at a time.
www.DropOfOil.com/SaveThe/Planet1.html   Reduce consumption saving "One Drop Of Oil" at a time.
 3. Change our Culture and Patriotism
 www.AmericanPatriotismNeeded.com  Getting Americans to be patriotic is a big order.