Annie And Kevin Shaha Urban Refugees Racking Up Success With Sandpoint Company

Along the road of life in the very fast lane in Chicago, Kevin and Annie Shaha decided to slam on the brakes.

And get out of the car.

And sell it.

Both gave up six-figure-a-year jobs at big Chicago companies, sold their exclusive executive home and searched for the ideal spot to settle and buy a new business.

The solution was Sandpoint and a little company called Racor that makes storage racks for sporting goods.

Months of hunting with business brokers for the right kind of business to run turned up plenty of dogs, said Annie Shaha.

“We’d find businesses that had, well, problems,” she said. A chance encounter at a trade show hooked the two up with Racor, then based in Vancouver, Wash.

After months of wrangling between the Shahas’ hired “suits” - as Annie called them - and the three Racor partners, a deal was struck.

Racor packed up in five big semi-truck loads in June of last year. Now spread out in an industrial park next to the new Coldwater Creek building, Racor continues to swallow bigger spaces in the park for inventory and assembly.

The company’s products complement the seemingly unstoppable fitness craze. The sight of closets cluttered with in-line skates, tennis rackets, skis and bikes brings smiles to the Shahas’ faces.

“We feel we’ve found a good segment,” said Kevin Shaha, who has the title of president but does everything from marketing the products to actually getting out on the floor and putting the pieces together.

The sturdy racks in the Racor and less expensive ProStor line can handle any sport equipment, from fishing waders to golf clubs. “We had a gal from down in the L.A. area call us after the earthquake early last year,” Annie Shaha said. “She went through the rubble of her house down there and found her rack. All she wanted from us was a new set of toggles to put it back up in her new place.”

The typical buyers of the sports storage racks are women and families with children, Annie said.

The metal parts themselves are manufactured in Los Angeles for the Racor line and in Guadalajara, Mexico, for the ProStor line. The parts are shipped to a Portland firm that powder-coats the metal for a smooth, glossy finish.

Nine employees assemble the racks, piecing together 80,000 of them just last year. The company will doubtless add more people, especially for the busy fall season, Kevin said.

“We’ve really had a lot of success finding people up in the Sandpoint area,” Annie Shaha said.

Since taking over Racor last year, the Shahas have stepped up the number of representatives selling the rack systems to stores. A lot of business still comes from catalog orders, but the real growth potential will be getting the racks in stores.

Fred Meyer Corp. agreed in April to sell the ProStor line in its 131 stores. Builders Square and other big chains are mulling over the product line, the Shahas said. “It’s a long, long process getting them to do it,” Annie Shaha said. “But that’s where we’ll grow.”

Growth hasn’t been much of a problem so far for the Shahas. The company has grown revenues more than 62 percent this year compared with last year, and all indications suggest continued expansion, Kevin Shaha said.

While their new lives in Sandpoint suit them, they occasionally need to quench their urban desires after living in Chicago and New York before that.

“We’ll spend a few days at a trade show in Chicago, and by the time we ride all the cabs and have seen everything we’ve sort of got it out of our system,” Annie said. “We knew we weren’t happy there.”

Annie worked at health care giant Abbott Laboratories and Kevin rode the commuter trains to Chicago’s downtown Loop each day to work at a marketing firm there.

The couple searched Colorado in towns like Durango and Boulder, but settled on Sandpoint because “it still wasn’t discovered quite yet,” Kevin said.

“Those places had been sort of ‘found,”’ he said. “Sandpoint and Coeur d’Alene and North Idaho still has a certain innocence left to it. It’s not overrun with strip malls.”

The Shahas get to mountain bike, water-ski from their Pend Oreille Lake home and dabble in snow skiing at Schweitzer Mountain Resort.

“I just started this year, but I think I’m picking it up really quick,” Kevin said. “I just sort of threw caution to the wind and went for it, because I figure if you’re tense there’s a much greater chance you’ll get hurt.”

, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: Photo