PPB September 2019

The A l l en Company Raising A Glass To 60 Years The Allen Company team gets ready for the start of The PPAI Expo 2018 in Las Vegas. The Allen Company, a supplier that specializes in custom glassware, celebrates a business that has truly stood the test of time. by Danielle Renda C linking glasses and saying “cheers” is synonymous with celebrations. Some of life’s most treasured memories are reveled in these moments, from personal markers, like graduations and marriages, to professional achievements, like landing major clients or reaching significant goals. And at the center of all these landmarks— and more—is glassware personalized by The Allen Company, which celebrates its own benchmark of 60 years in business this month. The Blanchester, Ohio-based supplier has been personalizing drinkware—frommugs and glassware, to ceramic tile, acrylic and stainless steel—since 1959, when Bill Allen, uncle of the current owner, Allen Dohan, founded the company. Allen found himself in the promotional products industry when Osborne-Kemper- Thomas, Inc., a direct house best known for its calendars, where he worked as vice president of manufacturing, discontinued its glass and ceramics division. He saw an opportunity and purchased the company’s lehr, which is a temperature-controlled kiln used in glassmaking, its equipment and machinery. And because Osborne-Kemper-Thomas was already in promotional products, the company had enough business to give to Allen. “Within six months, he was making a profit,” says Dohan. “Then he gradually built up the promotional products part of the business.” Allen retired in 1980, after leading the business through more than 20 successful years of growth and expansion. The Allen Co. started expanding outward by establishing partnerships. In 1971, a major partnership was established with Georges Briard, an American designer known for his glassware and signature dishware in the ’50s, ’60s and ’70s. Together, the two companies entered retail, producing items sold in luxury boutiques and the gift sections of department stores, including Saks Fifth Avenue, Marshall Field’s and Hudson’s. But when the companies parted ways 10 years later, The Allen Co. was left at a crossroads. “The glassware retail portion was half of our business,” says Dohan, who became president and CEO of the company in 1977. That’s when The Allen Co. started importing full containers of English ironstone, Dohan says, which was manufactured by a company in Stoke-on- Trent, a city in England known as a major hub of glassware machinery in Great Britain. The ironstone was used to craft mugs, and by the late ’80s, the supplier had introduced 64 | SEPTEMBER 2019 | THINK