Commonwealth Packaging Brings More Clients into the Fold

Thinking Outside the Box

Elizabeth Gosselin Kouflie didn’t plan on taking over the family business, but she eventually found a passion for it.

Elizabeth Gosselin Kouflie says she can’t pinpoint the time when she first came to realize the COVID pandemic was likely to be the best thing to ever happen to Commonwealth Packaging.

But she started to get that sense when customers and potential customers didn’t even bother asking for a price on a job — which, in this business, is saying something.

“Normally, it’s ‘I’d like a quote on this many.’ Then, it was ‘how fast can you get me this; I don’t care what it costs.’ That’s when we knew this was going to be a real opportunity,” said Kouflie, adding that, as the world shut down and people couldn’t get the products they wanted, everything had to be shipped. And that added up to a banner year for Commonwealth, the company started by Kouflie’s father, Joe, in 1982, which she was now managing.

Indeed, in a business where margins are as thin as the cardboard sheets in the warehouse and customers can be lured away by competitors offering to do things for a few pennies less per item, Commonwealth recorded more than 20% growth year over year in 2020, said Kouflie, adding that the plant was busier than it had ever been.

“COVID opened my eyes to what we can produce out of this one-shift factory, and that’s what I want to get back to,” said Kouflie, who officially took ownership of the business in 2019 and has been bringing much-needed change to a company where there had been little of it in the three and half decades prior.

That includes a thorough renovation of the plant on Sheridan Street in Chicopee, its first in decades, as well as new machinery, the addition of a design team, better use of IT — and now AI — as well as a stronger push, with the addition of a sales rep, into Rhode Island.

It also includes marketing, something the company had never really done before, previously relying almost entirely on word of mouth and its reputation for quality and customer service in a business where there is so much emphasis on price.

Commonwealth has started to reach out to customers and potential customers with materials highlighting everything from Kouflie’s ties to Rhode Island (she graduated from Providence College and wears a PC sweatshirt in one marketing piece) to Commonwealth’s status as woman-owned, to the fact that its packages “go out first class” — literally.

Indeed, the shipping and safety supervisor’s name is David First Class.

“His last name is Class, and his middle name is First,” said Kouflie, adding that the marketing efforts, which began roughly a year ago, are starting to pay off.

“A lot of people are talking about Commonwealth right now — people are calling me up that never called before,” she noted, adding that the marketing piece targeting Rhode Island businesses is an example of efforts that have helped grow sales.

“I spent a couple of years just keeping the ship afloat and doing everything so I wouldn’t mess it up, because I was terrified of messing it up, and then I finally got comfortable a few years ago and made this my business. And we’ve changed quite a lot since then.”

“It’s working … we’re getting a lot of business,” she said. “People in Rhode Island love to do business with Rhode Islanders; it’s definitely getting some traction.”

These marketing efforts comprise one of many ways Kouflie is putting her stamp on the company (more on this later), while also maintaining its traditional focus on quality, service, and a ‘customer is king’ philosophy.

For this issue and focus on construction and manufacturing, BusinessWest talked at length with Kouflie about Commonwealth and how this is not her father’s packaging company — or your father’s packaging company — anymore.

A Cut Above

As she was earning her degree in business management at Providence College, Kouflie wasn’t sure what she was going to do with it. And eventually running the family business was not a thought that really crossed her mind.

Indeed, while she remembers getting rides on the forklift at the plant’s first location across from the Big E in West Springfield when she was young, and then holding a succession of summer jobs at the company during high school and college, she never intended to make Commonwealth a career.

All that changed in 2003, when, a year after graduating, she returned home to help her father care for her mother, who was suffering from Alzheimer’s disease. There was an opening for a bookkeeper at Commonwealth; she took that job thinking it would be a temporary assignment, but soon settled in at the family business.

“It was kind of trial by fire — help out wherever you can,” she recalled. “I started doing all the HR stuff, started learning how to spec build, started taking orders … in a family business, that’s typically how it goes — you do whatever needs to be done, help out with the IT, build a web page, whatever.”

Tracing the history of the company, Kouflie said her father worked for Mount Tom Box in West Springfield, gradually moving up in the ranks. When management wouldn’t make him a partner, he bought his own box company, Loreno Packaging in West Springfield.

“He used to tell me that he’d run the boxes in the morning, take customers out to lunch, get the orders, and come back in the morning and run the boxes,” said Kouflie, adding that the business continued to grow over the years, but always kept that customer-focused flavor.

Never big into titles — she says they don’t mean much in a family business — Kouflie held many in the years after joining the business, including Human Resource manager, her role when she was named to BusinessWest’s 40 Under Forty class of 2011, when she was just 30.

In 2013, her father took a step back from the business to spend more time at home and be a caregiver, while also battling cancer himself. And Kouflie continued to take on more responsibilities.

“He stopped coming to the office every day … he gave me some freedom to show what I could do — as long as I did whatever he said,” she noted with a laugh. “I’d have to send him my monthly statements showing him what I did, and he would let me know all the things I could be doing better; that’s how we operated for six years.”

She officially took the helm when her father passed away in 2019, and, after a few years of essentially maintaining the status quo — while also coping with the challenges and huge opportunities presented by the pandemic — started putting her own mark on the business.

“Before, I was running the company the way my dad wanted me to — the same way we’d always done everything; it was just follow the dotted line and do what we’ve always done,” she told BusinessWest. “When he passed away, I spent a couple of years just keeping the ship afloat and doing everything so I wouldn’t mess it up, because I was terrified of messing it up, and then I finally got comfortable a few years ago and made this my business. And we’ve changed quite a lot since then.”

The Complete Package

When asked to elaborate, she said the business model has changed, with an emphasis on being more competitive on price, while also maintaining its traditional emphasis on quality and service.

Other changes have included the addition of a design staff with a full-time designer, putting in a CAD table, marketing, renovating the entire building, adding new machinery, updating computer hardware and software, and exploring the use of AI to streamline quoting and other processes.

These steps and others are positioning the company for growth in a highly competitive industry, one often described with the single word ‘cutthroat’ and dominated historically by “price, price, price, price, price,” Kouflie said.

But increasingly, quality is becoming more a factor for many customers, she went on, citing the example of a prominent regional brewer — for years one of the company’s larger customers (Commonwealth makes its beer trays), but one that left when a customer offered a lower price.

“They dumped me, and six or seven months later, they called and I asked if I could come and sit down,” she recalled. “With their new supplier, the glue wasn’t holding on the trays when they put the beer in; the trays are coming in, the bottles are dropping in, the boxes are blowing open, and the beer is going all over the floor. They lost so much product — the pennies they saved on the boxes, they lost in product.”

It’s a story that’s been repeated countless times over the years, she said, adding that, moving forward, the company is looking to retain existing customers and add new ones by more aggressively telling its story and stressing its many qualities and selling points.

These include everything from Kouflie’s Rhode Island ties to the recently garnered ‘woman-owned business’ status.

“It’s part of a multi-pronged effort,” she said of the latter. “I think it catches people’s eyes — there are not a lot of woman-owned box makers.”

Part of the storytelling will be a focus on people — from David First Class to Customer Service Manager Kim Weagraff, highlighted in a different marketing piece.

“We want to show the end users, the buyers, who we are — our people — and the fact that we’re a young group,” Kouflie said. “A lot of our customers feel like we’re their best friends, and a lot of customers think they can just call us up and we’ll take care of them, and we will. But we want our customers to think they’re our only customer, and that we’re sitting here waiting for them to call, and we’re going to take care of them.

“These kinds of things are helping them feel connected to Commonwealth,” she went on. “I like to say that we’re not your dad’s box factory anymore. Lots of box factories are run by older gentlemen who are set in their ways; we’re trying to show our buyers who we are.”

Whether Commonwealth can return to that frenetic pace achieved during the height of the pandemic remains to be seen, but Kouflie is pushing the envelope — or, in this case, pushing the two-piece folder box — to achieve continued growth.