When Frank Gerace calls, owners and CEOs like to pick up the phone to hear what he has to say. Sometimes, just maybe, it’s an offer to buy the company. Gerace has been getting a fair amount of practice doing that recently. The company he runs is growing rapidly, its stock price is soaring, and its visibility as a producer of high quality packaging products is high and sharp.

The company is Multi-Color Corporation, and Frank Gerace is the president. Headquarters is in an office tower in downtown Cincinnati. Manufacturing takes place at six locations throughout the United States. Since October 2001, Multi-Color has made three significant acquisitions, all of which have given the corporation strengths in diverse arenas of the packaging and product decoration market.

The most recent is the purchase of the Decorating Technologies (Dec Tech) division of Avery Dennison, one of only three companies active in heat transfer label technology. Dec Tech is a $20 million supplier of heat transfer labels in North and South America to the health and beauty, beverage and food industries.

The addition of that company to the Multi-Color stable is in line with the corporate decision to offer a broad range of labeling and decorating opportunities to customers. It was Frank Gerace who made the initial telephone call about a year ago to Avery Dennison proposing the sale. The acquisition was scheduled to be completed by the end of 2002.

The broadening of product offerings that has taken place over the past four years at Multi-Color was borne, in part, out of frustration. About a quarter century ago, the corporation joined with Procter & Gamble to develop in-mold labeling (IML) technology for blow-molded containers, a market in which it is still a powerful player. But after a while, in-mold was the only card in the company’s deck.

“I felt uncomfortable selling only in-mold labels,” Gerace recalls. “I would sit across the table from a customer and try to convince him that what he really needed was in-mold labels, when I knew that that wasn’t what he needed at all. We just couldn’t offer an objective alternative.”

Gerace and his energetic and talented team of executives went shopping for a pressure sensitive label converting company, and since then have acquired shrink sleeve capability, a promotional packaging business, and now the heat transfer label operation. And that’s all since 1999. Multi-Color Corporation — a public company trading on the NASDAQ under symbol LABL — will see sales revenues reach $92 million for the fiscal year that ends in March, a handsome increase from $72 million in the previous year. In the past two years, the stock price has appreciated more than 200 percent.

From prime labels to IML
Multi-Color Corporation is an old company. It was founded in 1916 as a press manufacturing company. “One of the early customers was William Wrigley’s company,” Gerace says. “He wanted Multi-Color to print labels on its machinery. Within a couple of years the company stopped manufacturing presses and went into the prime label printing business.”

Prime labels sustained the company for the next 70 years.

In the mid-1970s, Procter & Gamble, also based in Cincinnati, got together with Owens Illinois container company and with Multi-Color to develop a new method of applying labels during the manufacture of the bottles. “That was the advent of the in-mold label,” says Gerace. “By the mid- to late-1980s we began winding down our prime label business — which used offset and gravure processes.”

Also in the ’70s, a group of private investors purchased Multi-Color from Georgia-Pacific, which had become its owner some years earlier. At the end of the 1980s, the group put together an IPO and took the company public.

“Plodding along” is how Gerace describes Multi-Color Corporation in the latter part of the previous century. “Though the company had great technologies and a solid customer base, the financial performance was inconsistent,” he says. “There was a lack of good manufacturing and operational skills in the management group.”

The board of directors and the shareholders made a decision in 1998 to bring in a management team with a strong manufacturing background. “At the time, sales were about $48 million, and they needed to do a turnaround because the company was in serious financial condition.”

Gerace was hired in that year as vice president of operations. “There was nothing wrong with sales,” he recalls, “but we needed good manufacturing practices, quality control, production systems — things of that nature.”

Multi-Color’s chief executive officer left in 1999, and Gerace became president. Changes were made. “We were on solid ground, and we were doing well,” he says, “so we asked ourselves: ‘What should we do to grow our business, and how?’ At that time, IML was 95 percent of our business. Today it’s 50 percent.

An eight-station 18″ Comco press at Multi-Color’s Batavia, OH, plant

A diecutter for in-mold labels

Multi-Color also has a Komori sheetfed offset press in Batavia.

A Comco 18″ press with 10 print stations, producing in-mold labels with UV curable inks.