Bob and Judy Rogers have been the mom-and-pop owners of TBW since 1975.
Photograph by Kathy De La Torre
Keys to Success
A business founded at a poker table endures for almost 26 years
By Sandy Sims
Photographs by Kathy De La Torre
When a firefighter in Hong Kong puts on his formal uniform, there's a chance that the buckle holding up his trousers comes from Los Gatos. When the sheriff's deputies who police Saratoga go to work, their uniform includes a pin representing the city. That pin comes from Los Gatos.
When President Bill Clinton and Vice President Al Gore came to Los Gatos, the mayor gave each one a key to the town. Those keys came from the tiny office/warehouse of TBW Inc.--formerly known as The Belt Works--tucked away on Victory Lane in Los Gatos. The place TBW owners call their "world headquarters" is responsible for lapel pins, belt buckles and keys-to-the-city that are distributed around the world.
"It goes on and on," says Los Gatan Bob Rogers, the 55-year-old co-owner of TBW, as he shuffles through little plastic bags of lapel pins for places like Hickory, N.C.; Salt Lake City, Utah; Daytona Beach, Fla.; Ottawa, Ontario; Prairie Village, Kan.; Afton, Wyo.; Yulon, Okla.; Broken Arrow, Okla., Vail, Colo.; and Fargo, N. D.
Bob holds up a lapel pin that says Da Mayor. "This is Mayor Willy Brown's lapel pin," Bob says, referring to San Francisco's flamboyant politico. Bob reaches for a small stack of thick gold keys, each about 7 inches long. "Florida orders the biggest number of gold keys of any state," he says, "then Texas, then California." TBW even made the brass plates Vice President George Bush gave away in appreciation for his campaign in 1984.
This far-reaching mom-and-pop business owned by Bob, his wife Judy and their friend John Stevens, who lives in Fremont, has been a continuing success story for almost 26 years--even through a long illness suffered by Judy, waning interest in belt buckles and economic downturns.
And it all started 26 years ago at a poker game.
Photograph by Kathy De La Torre
From left, Jim Birtola, Bob Rogers and Judy Rogers package up lapel pins to ship out to the New Jersey Mayors' Conference and another package to Buffalo, N.Y.
Bob, born in New York and raised in Long Beach, Calif., was a Westinghouse engineer working in Sunnyvale in 1974. He was finishing up a master's degree in business administration at Santa Clara University when he befriended another master's candidate, John Stevens. The two men were playing poker one night when one of the other players whipped out a belt buckle. The player who'd made the belt buckle at a foundry in Oakland was looking for a distributor. "I'll sell the buckles for $1," the man said.
Bob said, "I'll take 500."
Bob, who was in his late 20s, was delighted. Selling was right up his alley. Bob says he kissed the Blarney Stone, which is said to bestow the gift of smooth talk. "I always did sell the most raffle tickets in school," says Bob, whose low-key personality seems to belie that of a stereotypical pushy salesman.
Bob and John trekked to the library and found phone numbers for leather shops located throughout California. They set up weekend appointments, and the two men peddled the 500 buckles for $5 a piece to stores up and down the state. Then they ordered more. Eventually their efforts led to wholesale accounts with major stores such as Macy's.
With sales growing, Bob, Judy and John pulled up chairs at the Rogers' kitchen table and hashed out a plan for their new business, and in 1975, The Belt Works was born.
By dividing up business tasks according to their individual strengths, the three owners have managed to stay friends while growing their business. John, who was a financial planner at Westinghouse, would handle the books; Bob was a natural for marketing; and Judy, who was a school principal in Morgan Hill and a Stanford University doctoral candidate, would be president. She never did finish her dissertation. "Between buying a house in Los Gatos and starting a business she couldn't afford to stop working. "I've never regretted it," Judy says. The Rogerses, who met at Long Beach State, have lived in their home for 29 years.
Bob quit his job at Westinghouse in 1976, to work full time for The Belt Works. "I couldn't wait to quit," Bob says. "I only joined Westinghouse and played engineer to avoid the draft. I was No. 5 in the draft lottery," he says. Top-secret clearance status at Westinghouse was enough to keep him from the trenches in Vietnam.
Photograph by Kathy De La Torre
TBW makes keys to cities all over the world, including this model for Los Gatos given to President Bill Clinton and Vice President Al Gore.
Eventually The Belt Works moved into 513 Monterey Ave. in Los Gatos, "where Hogan's Glass used to be," Judy says. By the early 1980s, Judy quit her job as a principal to help run the day-to-day business. "She went on the road to sell, too," Bob says. "Here we are," Judy says, laughing, "with all this education and selling trinkets."
"I never did quit my day job," John says. When the Belt Works started, he was employed at Westinghouse. Today, John works at Advanced Micro Devices as a financial planner, although he still does the books and financial planning for TBW.
When Bob and John sold custom buckles as a promotional item for KEEN radio and then to station KOME, they realized custom buckles were an easier sell.
Bob headed for the police and sold 500 buckles to the California Police Chiefs Association. "Then we started doing police departments all over California," he says. Bob began attending police conferences to market his wares.
Amid exhibits for finger-printing paraphernalia, high-tech identification programs and stun guns, Bob set up his display of belt buckles. This year will be his 21st year attending the International Association of Chiefs of Police. TBW has also sold buckles to fire departments all over the United States and beyond, including Hong Kong. They sell buckles to Brazil's Policia Federale. Just recently representatives from the Algerian military came to Los Gatos to discuss their contract with TBW for 80,000 buckles for the Algerian Army. TBW made the buckles for the Los Gatos Centennial celebration in 1987.
But, as the 1980s faded into the past, so did the popularity of custom belt buckles.
Photograph by Kathy De La Torre
John Stevens, left, is the partner in charge of finances for TBW.
The Belt Works needed to find other products to sell. At their weekly kitchen table meeting the three owners threw out ideas.
Judy wanted to sell jewelry. "Bob didn't like the idea," Judy says. "He even got up from the kitchen table and walked away." But John and Judy held fast. "We compromised," Rogers says. The threesome decided to go with custom lapel pins. In the early 1990s, The Belt Works was renamed TBW to take the emphasis off buckles. Rogers sold the first lapel pins--1,500 of them--to the Ohio Highway Patrol for their 50th anniversary. The department continues to be one of TBW's good buckle customers.
TBW broadened its market to city government, where lapel pins are especially popular.
Bob began attending various city conventions: the International Institute of Municipal Clerks, the National League of Cities (a mayors' conference) and the International City Managers Association. Now he was displaying pins and belt buckles in the midst of displays for index systems, storage boxes and office products.
"Bob is always at the clerks' convention," Los Gatos Deputy Clerk Bobbi Fries says. But she didn't know where this man, who sells lapel pins, came from until about a year and a half ago, when Los Gatos sent representatives to the International Institute of Municipal Clerks convention in Ottawa, Ontario in Canada. Marian Cosgrove says, "We wanted to go to Ottawa with lapel pins like all the other cities do." The town ordered pins from some company called TBW. In Ottawa, when Cosgrove was mulling over TBW's display of pins, she asked for Rogers' card. She couldn't believe his address was Victory Lane, just a few blocks from town hall.
Photograph courtesy of TBW Inc.
Lapel pins on this map are a small representation of the pins made at TBW.
Lapel pins are TBW's biggest item today. "There aren't more than three or four businesses that make these," Rogers says, rolling a lapel pin between his thumb and forefinger. "Every incorporated city has one," Judy says. The conventions' organizers hang a big map on the wall and stick hundreds of city pins from all over the world on the map. A good number of those pins are made by TBW.
Most pins have emblems on them. A few of TBW emblems are silk-screened and covered with acrylic, but most of them are cloisonné, an ancient Chinese process done in Taiwan and on mainland China. Judy says the Chinese cloisonné workers use a hypodermic needle to put bits of colored, powdered glass in sections outlined by tiny strips of metal. The emblem is then baked to melt the powdered glass. She says, the work is so intricate that the factories turn off the lights periodically so the workers can rest their eyes.
Pins vary in design with the purpose and place. The pin for Vail, Colo., has mountains; Napa's has vineyards; the pin for Buffalo, N.Y., is simply shaped like a buffalo; and the symbol for Broken Arrow, Okla., is a broken arrow. Barstow, Calif., has a pin in the shape of an interstate sign, sporting Route 66. TBW created a pin for Jello that looks like a box of the product. Saratoga's pin has an oak tree at the center, and the Los Gatos pin sports a vineyard, a sunburst, mountains and two cats.
Judy is the one responsible for design. Her new vocation, ironically, came about because of her struggle with chronic fatigue syndrome, which she contracted in 1989.
"I was in bed for seven years," Judy says. "Bob took care of me and took over my responsibilities at work." As Judy's health improved, she found her good days and her relapses unpredictable. Instead of full-time work, she took computer design classes at West Valley College. Classes were doable, and she could work on the computer at home.
Photograph by Kathy De La Torre
Judy Rogers designs emblems on the computer.
"I'm not an artist, but I can use computer programs to design," Judy says. When a request comes in, she researches her subject over the Internet. "I can access the whole Library of Congress on my computer and find out all kinds of information about towns and places," Judy says. The city of Barstow actually adopted Judy's design for its city seal.
Most of the people attending conferences collect as many pins as they can. Los Gatos Police Chief Larry Todd says his wife has a major collection of pins. "After my 31 years in this business and all those conventions," Todd says, "she's got quite a few." Todd says that Bob gives his wife a new pin every time they go to the California Police Chiefs Convention.
Todd pulls a pocket badge out of the drawer to show what TBW designed especially for him. A piece of hard plastic about the width of a breast pocket and about 6 or 7 inches long is folded in half like a large money clip. Todd hooks one half of the folded plastic into his pocket. Attached to the fold that hangs outside of his pocket is an embroidered Los Gatos Police Chief patch. "It came out well," Todd says. He slips it in his pocket when he goes to Chamber meetings or conventions. "I got Bob to create this badge for the California Police Chiefs Association," he says. "Now everyone on the executive board gets one."
Bob was at his exhibit at the International City Managers Association around 1990, when a delegation of city managers walked up. The group wondered if TBW could design and cast keys to the city for them. They told Bob that the last company that made keys during the 1960s, attached a beer opener on the back, and these days that was not "cool." Judy designed the key and TBW had them cast in Los Angeles. Rogers says he found the idea of a key to the city came from Germany, when there were walled cities. Trusted citizens were given a key to the city for unlimited access.
Los Gatan Al Jaca, wearing TBW pins on his hat, is a daily visitor to TBW.
Photograph by Kathy De La Torre
Today, TBW buckles are cast in Berkeley, Reno and Houston; lapel pins and their emblems are made in China and Taiwan, including Los Gatos' sister city in Taiwan, Chung Ho City.
Eighty percent of TBW's business consists of reorders. Still, it takes marketing to keep business strong. "Bob stirs it up pretty good," Judy says. Bob adds, "Quality sells."
Bob leaves town to attend 10 or so conferences every year. "It's expensive," he says. Each conference costs TBW about $5,000. Bob has followed conferences to such places as Ottawa and Rotterdam. He's been to Taiwan and China to check out production. He's been to Tunisia to talk to the Algerian military. "I rack up 50,000 airline miles a year," Bob says. "But it's only about 40 days out of the year."
The rest of the year, Judy says Bob gets up at 4 a.m. and reads a couple of newspapers. He does the crossword puzzle, leaves her a love note and drives to Victory Lane by 6 a.m., where he receives phone calls, faxes and emails with orders from all over the world.
Judy turns on her computer at home and boots up her design programs to create a new lapel pin for a city, somewhere far away. John will check in later with Bob, and the three of them will meet sometime at the kitchen table to discuss how things are going. And things seem to be going pretty well.
Saratoga, California Since 1955
