Upper Peninsula business contributes to economy while relying on national circumstance

Quick Trophy, a national trophy company based in the Upper Peninsula, sends trophies around the country and even the world to promote a sense of achievement and pride for its customers. Running two websites, Quick Trophy and Quick Nametags, president Terry Dehring says he and his business partners were fulfilling a need that continues to grow.  

UPSW: Why did you and your business partners decide to make trophies?

TD: (One of our partners) was a soccer coach for his kids and he saw that the method to get trophies at the time was very difficult and cumbersome. He said he had to spend five or six hours on this process and he asked, “Can’t this be done on the Internet?”  

So we came out in the spring of 2001 and since then, there have been probably a dozen other companies like us doing what we do on the web.  

UPSW: Tell me about what kind of business you attract on your virtual store front. Where are your customers from and what are they buying?

TD: They’re buying trophies for almost anything you can imagine, and they come from all over the country, some around the world but mostly just across the U.S. The ones we do ship overseas are primarily through the military.

UPSW: What goes into having a successful virtual storefront?

TD: You have to have a website that’s easy for customers to use. One of the thing that we say when we’re adding something or changing something on the website is, “Don’t make me think.” If you ask the customers to read something or think about it, they’re going to get lost. So you have to make it intuitive, easy to flow, easy to follow and make sure that it moves smoothly.

The other thing is making sure that they get found. So when customers go to the search engine and they’re looking for “trophies”–one in five people are just going to type in the word “trophies”–when the first page of Google comes up, you have to be on that first page or else they’re not going to dig very deep and you’ll get lost.

UPSW: What advantages and disadvantages come with being a national company in the U.P.?  

TD: The advantage is that I get to live here: that’s the biggest. Because you can live here, you work with the local economy, you can contribute to the local economy, you can have employees that are local, but you’re not dependent on the local economy.

The disadvantage of being in Marquette is that I’m further from my vendors. I have to pay for the shipping so it’s a higher expense and then there’s the time delay. A lot of people think that weather might be a factor, and it’s not, because people who live here are used to it, and they plow the streets.

UPSW: What do you feel makes Quick Trophy different than other similar businesses throughout the country?

TD: Quick turnaround, that’s our biggest niche. If you order something today, we’ll ship it out by tomorrow. A lot of our customers are ordering from us because they need it in a hurry, and it seems like more and more people are getting used to and dependent upon the Amazon method of business. You order something from Amazon and you know it’s going to get shipped out today. They expect it from companies, too.

UPSW: What’s next for Quick Trophy?

TD: We’re looking to rebuild our websites, redesign them. We’re adding new projects, we’re expanding the types of things that we do, we are constantly trying to add new product lines, and we’ll put out a whole new website and see if it reacts well with customers. We’re just constantly growing and constantly improving.

At the current rate of growth, we would be able to stay in this building for about three more years and then we’re probably going to outgrow it and then we’ll have to look for another place.

UPSW: Do you want to stay in the Upper Peninsula?

TD: Oh, absolutely, I have no desire to leave.

Lucy Hough is a history student at Northern Michigan University and former editor in chief of the student newspaper, The North Wind.