Wednesday, April 28, 2010

Eric Zeanah | American Accessories

Our final meeting of the semester was with Eric Zeanah at American Accessories located in the Bank of America building on Main Street. American Accessories is a company that provides manufacturing services to fortune 500 companies such as Uniroyal, Phillip Morris, & Johnson & Johnson. The company has one office here in Knoxville and another office in China employing a total of 28 people. Essentially what they do is take the burden of manufacturing away from these larger companies. When a company wants to run a new marketing campaign with a product, they may want special packaging or some kind of trinket to be included in the box. The large company calls up American Accessories and explains what they want, then Eric and his team find a manufacturing facility in China that is capable of delivering the product. American Accessories has strong relationships with around 100 different manufacturing facilities in China.
Eric is actually not the original founder of American Accessories, the company was founded by an Industrial Engineering professor from the University of Tennessee in 1960. Eric was a student of the professors in the early 1980's and was given a job evaluating time studies as an intern. After his summer internship ended he was asked to come on full time and finish his degree at night, he agreed. Eric moved up in the business eventually managing a whole division of the company, the only division that was profitable in the 1990's. The owner of the company asked Eric if he would be interested in taking over the entire company to try to turn things around. He said he would but under one condition, that the company would become his if he succeeded in turning it around. His old professor agreed to the deal and Eric became the president of American Accessories and eventually the owner. Eric takes a conservative approach to managing his business, his company grows based on their strengths. Eric has been visiting Asia for more than 25 years and even has a house in China where he lives while working over there. His statement to us was that China is probably the most capitalist country in the world, that is a pretty interesting but also scary thought. Eric's words of advice were to align yourself personally with the people you conduct business with. You can be friends with the people you do business with. He also told us that doing business in other parts of the world has become much easier in recent years because of the advancement in communication tools. His parting words to use were encouragement to always listen and take the time to be mentored by older and wiser people. And if you ever have a business be smart enough to hire people who are better than you.

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