Rexco began when a marketing man met a chemist with a good idea for a liquid product. The chemist had worked for some of the largest multinational copy machine companies that were satisfied with their existing products. On his own, the chemist had developed an outstanding product, but for internal political reasons, these companies were not interested. The product the chemist developed was an electrostatic toner that produced a copy from a copy machine that was better than the original. For instance, a copy made of a page from the telephone book would be sharper than the original page!

Our president was the marketing man. Having seen the superiority of the chemist's product, our president negotiated an exclusive distribution arrangement. The chemist would set up a lab to make the toner concentrate. And our president formed a company to package and distribute the product world wide. Thus, a company called Rexco Products was formed in 1973.

Rexco's first months were in a small warehouse on the third floor of a skid-row area building just west of the Loop in Chicago, Illinois. Rexco purchased the toner concentrate from the chemist's lab in 55-gallon drums and then resold it to packaging distributors. The first year was spent setting up distributors around the world who would package the toner in specialty cartridges to fit into various liquid office copy machines.

Distributors were established in England, Greece, and Spain and in several areas of the USA, including New Jersey and Los Angeles - but ironically, none could be found in the Chicago area. Rexco's next step was to become a packaging distributor for its own product and sell it at the dealer level. This meant buying small bottles and developing injection molds to make custom toner cartridges, which would require more factory space. At first Rexco moved to another building with space enough to park a tanker truck. But when expansion into private labeling for large dealers led to a further boom in sales beyond the Midwest to all over North America, Rexco moved into a 30,000 sq. ft. building with liquid tanks underground, located next to the Encyclopedia Britannica Distribution Center, and eventually bought the building. By this time, Rexco had its own automatic liquid filling machines, silk-screening equipment to print on the bottles, and machines to label and print on the case packaging for private labeling for the larger customers. Other related products were later added and marketed along with the original liquid toner. Additional products included a dry toner, selenium copier drums exclusively distributed from Japan, and miscellaneous replacement components needed by copier dealers.

By 1977 sales were sufficient for Rexco to open a branch in Southern California. By redistributing from a branch located in the Western States, freight costs were substantially reduced. With lowered freight costs and a warehousing branch location with its own sales force on the West Coast, Rexco by 1980 had grown to 25 employees and annual sales of several million dollars. At that stage, Rexco was sold to a larger company for further development.

Illinois

California

Inside View Of Both Locations

Examples Of Private Labeling

General Notes:
*We only work with a very few, highly selected products at one time.
*There is no cost to the inventor unless we produce results!

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