Interview with the CEO of this Buffalo company:
Buffalo Games | Buy Jigsaw Puzzles and Board Games
Nagendra Raina ended up in Buffalo by chance. Now he spearheads one of the region’s biggest success stories in Buffalo Games, which has grown into a national market leader in board games and puzzles. And the company’s reach is only expected to grow. Founders Paul Dedrick and Eden Dedrick recently sold Buffalo Games to a management group that includes Raina, 39, supported by private equity firm Mason Wells. The deal gives the company the ammo to double revenue in the next four years, said Raina, who enrolled in the University at Buffalo School of Management MBA program in 2003. He was hired as an intern by Fisher-Price and stayed at the venerable company’s East Aurora campus for a decade, eventually becoming director of strategy, planning and finance until he was hired at Buffalo Games in 2013. And that’s where the current story begins.
How did you go from a financial leadership position at Fisher-Price to a local game maker? At Fisher-Price I was managing corporate finances for a $2 billion business. Buffalo Games asked for a meeting and I thought, “This is never going to work. There is no way I’ll be interested in a business of this size.” But there was something really unique about what Paul and Eden had built. They put a lot of effort into making the company fundamentally strong. They just needed the right manpower to accelerate their results.
How was the transition? It was challenging the first six months in terms of culturally changing the organization into more of a corporate business, essentially. We sort of rebooted with a brand-new product team and brand-new sales team. But since then we have gone from being a small, family-owned business to being the largest producer of jigsaw puzzles in North America. We are nearing 50 percent market share on puzzles, with our biggest customers being Walmart, Target and Amazon. We have two of the top three games at Target right now.
How did you enact such success? There is a lot of innovation coming out of Buffalo Games, which is really because we have passionate employees who build playful products. That’s the culture that drives us. We think of ourselves as a national brand and our strategies involve how we build off that. One of the important things is our local manufacturing (Buffalo Games has 75 employees and manufactures from a 175,000-square-foot campus on James E. Casey Drive in Amherst). That means we have a very short supply chain to retailers, so we only ship what’s selling over the counter. This ability to be flexible and nimble due to our local manufacturing means we are able to gauge what’s popular.
You never pictured yourself in Buffalo before you came here. How do you feel about it now? I have a lot of gratitude toward America as a country to have accepted me and to Buffalonians, who have always been so warm and welcoming. I am a volunteer with Journey’s End Refugee Services and we’re also involved in Akshaya Patra (Foundation), which helps feed underprivileged children in India. My wife, Susan, is chair of the Western New York chapter.
What’s next for Buffalo games? The long-term potential of the company is to be determined. Every year over the past few years we have become a healthier company, with high profitability and a great employee base. We keep hiring a lot of new people, as well. There are about 15 nationalities and countries that work at Buffalo Games with a large part of our factory workforce being either refugees or immigrants.
Source:
https://www.bizjournals.com/buffalo/..._news_headline
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