Before 2007, Tom Sega was a sales and marketing man in the paper, pulp, and paper manufacturing machinery business for over twenty years, and he traveled a lot. “For my complete career I’ve been a road warrior. I had traveled, some years, 30 weeks a year; and when you travel that much you get pretty particular about the gear you carry whether it’s a briefcase, an overnight bag, your rolling luggage, your shaving kit – dang the wallet you carry. I mean, [even] the notebook you carry, because you’re living out of hotels and airports and rental cars… And I had a bad experience with a very expensive briefcase in the old Detroit airport, oh geez, about 25 years ago… [the briefcase] was only six months old. I was trying to catch an earlier flight, and I’m running like crazy through the airport and the handle broke off it, and when it hit the ground the zipper broke and I watched my computer and all my stuff in my briefcase go flying. I was just really upset.”
As he gathered his travel-life off the airport floor, he thought of the Made in the USA company that was creating durable gear nearly in his backyard, and said to himself, “I’m going to buy one of their briefcases because I’m sick and tired of buying these expensive leather briefcases every six months and having to replace them.” Tom went home and bought a Computer Portfolio bag at the Duluth Pack store in Canal Park, Minnesota. It was the first Duluth Pack product he’d ever owned.
“I bought that first briefcase and I was like, ‘Wow!’ After carrying it around and bopping through airports and hotels and rental cars… I went back to the Duluth Pack store and I bought an overnight bag for quick trips. Then I broke a zipper on a shaving kit so I went back down there and I bought a shaving kit, which I still use today. All of this stuff is still used today years and years later.”
“Both of my kids were young [then] and I said, ‘You know what? We’re going down to the Duluth Pack store, we are buying you a new backpack for school, and you better choose your color wisely because you’re going to graduate college with it,’ I told both kids; and low and behold both of my kids graduated college with the same backpacks they had from fourth and second grade.” His daughter now works at the company in-house, but for a while she worked remotely and, like her dad, travelled. Tom says, “I’d meet up with her at a trade show and there she comes in with that khaki backpack over her shoulder that she had when she was in fourth grade; and there’s just something to that.”
But back to when Tom was just a customer of the company, “I fell in love with it. I just kept buying more and more of this Duluth Pack stuff. Anytime we’d get gifts for friends or relatives for Christmas or what have you it’s like, ‘We should buy them something from Duluth Pack.’”
“It was like a hidden gem, a hidden secret. I approached the company and said, ‘Hey would you guys be interested in selling your company?’ And I was pretty much told to go away; and for a guy who’s been in sales and marketing capacities his whole life, ‘Go away,’ pretty much means I haven’t done my homework to get them to say yes. And so just being very persistent over the next three years, just coming back to them, and coming back to them, and on April Fool’s Day of 2007 I became the operating partner of the company.”
Tom had sold some income properties he’d acquired over the years, and talked to a friend for what he thought would be some financial industry introductions – “I’d known Mark Oestreich for many, many years and actually he had just phoned me to congratulate me on my new endeavor, and I said, ‘Hey, Mark, we really need to have lunch. You’re networked pretty well and in with all these financial guys and I need some help there.” And Mark said, ‘How about me?’” Mark became a business partner and the CFO, Tom is the company President, and there remain some silent partners who have been with the 125-year old company from before the sale.
“…for a guy who’s been in sales and marketing capacities his whole life, ‘Go away,’ pretty much means I haven’t done my homework to get them to say yes.”
And yes, Tom still uses that same briefcase he bought way back in the early 1990’s; and he uses it daily. “That briefcase has well into the seven digits of air miles with me. And as Andrea [my daughter] always likes me to point out, and a plane crash. And it’s one of those things where I’ve literally had it repaired now because I won’t give it up. I’ve literally worn the canvas and leather right off the corners over 25 plus years of using it day in and day out. And I just brought it into the repair shop here at Duluth Pack and had new gussets put on the sides and had it fixed and away we go, good for another 25 years. And that’s what I love about this company.”
Did he say ‘plane crash’? “We had an extremely hard landing at O’Hare, broke some wheels off the plane and skidded off the runway into the woods, and some people got hurt… We hit so hard all the overhead bins blew open and everything went flying… We were never informed of anything back in the day, but I believe we hit a wind shear or something on final approach and the front of the plane just dropped. And luckily for me, I think it was just probably because I’d been on planes so much, that I ducked; as soon as the front end made a real violent move down, I ducked and just kinda bent over and everything went over me.”
“This bag has never given up. It’s my bag, it has so many stories, it’s been so many places with me and so many memories. And that’s what we hear from our customer… And when people bring them in [(for repair) from long term wear] it’s like, ‘Wow this thing is really torn up and shot, are you sure you want us to fix it? People are like, ‘Absolutely. If you only knew all the stories in that bag and the memories in that bag.’ It’s really funny because that’s one of the things that we always, always think of – is [that] our bags are more than bags to carry stuff, our bags are something that you’re making memories with. And when they last so long, you’re going to make memories.”
So back to the 90’s, inside the Detroit airport as Tom Sega collected his spilled briefcase’s contents off the floor. Did he make that flight? He can’t remember for sure; but that doesn’t really matter, because its what happened in the terminal that day, not in the air, that got him to where he is today.