Monks carve out niche in e-commerce
By Julio Ojeda-Zapata
Knight Ridder News Service
SPARTA, Wis. — Phone calls to LaserMonks' rural headquarters are sometimes tinged with caution or outright suspicion.
Those are awfully good prices for generic inkjet or laser-printer cartridges, a caller might remark after checking the offerings at www.lasermonks.com.
What's the catch?
And, c'mon, you aren't really monks, are you?
A recent caller lost seven years of savings to an online scam artist after trying to book a cruise for herself and her daughters. She vowed never to buy anything else on the Internet.
But with three printers churning out student papers in her Pennsylvania home, she couldn't ignore discounts of up to 90 percent over name-brand cartridges. Look, she told LaserMonks, she had trust issues. She needed the firm to set her mind at ease.
LaserMonks' response helps explain why the two-year-old e-commerce venture based at the Cistercian Abbey of Our Lady of Spring Bank in Sparta, Wis. — yes, with actual Catholic monks — appears to be on a stratospheric business trajectory.
At a time when online printer-cartridge vendors can trigger mistrust because of some questionable offers clogging inboxes, LaserMonks has seen its gross revenue soar from about $2,000 in 2002 to about $500,000 in 2003. Projected 2004 sales are three to four times higher still.
To pull off this e-tailing feat, LaserMonks has had to win over disbelievers with high-quality products and top-flight customer service along with rock-bottom prices, not to mention small but meaningful gestures its clients don't expect.
The skeptical Pennsylvania mother, for instance, got four cartridges on speculation. Try 'em out, LaserMonks said. If you like them, consider sending us a few bucks. No hurry, take a few months to think it over.
The company soon got paid in full for the shipment, along with a second order for four cartridges.
The 75-year-old abbey, which has been at its current location about 130 miles southeast of St. Paul for 19 years, isn't the sort of place that screams "e-commerce hotbed."
Perched on a wooded hill, just up an unpaved road and through a decorative gateway, the low-slung composite-stone structure seems bereft of life — until Gregorian chanting tips off a visitor that white-and-black-robed inhabitants are somewhere about.
Inside a small chapel, a few Cistercian priests melodiously remind themselves of the Latin dictum "ora et labora" — prayer and work, always in that order.
Only then does the 36-year-old Rev. Bernard McCoy trod through a carpeted hallway to his modest office — the LaserMonks nerve center. From there, he oversees a nationwide network of people and facilities in his practical role as the abbey's "steward of temporal affairs."
McCoy's key role: generating cash to support the abbey along with its complex array of charitable causes around the world. That also means overseeing a modest portfolio of real-estate holdings. One recent day, he haggled good-naturedly with the local tax assessor over one property's perceived value.
Before LaserMonks came about, McCoy obsessed over other ideas for turning his perennially cash-strapped monastery into a money machine. Until last year, he sold spiritual books and other religious items on the Web. For a while, he oversaw a program to move and renovate homes due for demolition. He has considered cultivating shiitake mushrooms, building a golf resort and breeding Christmas trees.
This is a common issue for monasteries, convents and other such communities, which typically must support themselves.
McCoy says he stumbled on the idea of selling imaging supplies when he tried buying laser-printer toner cartridges on the Internet and blanched at their high cost.
"The markup for black dust was just overwhelming," he said.
Poking around on the Web, he realized "there were all kinds of possibilities" for selling inkjet and laser-printer cartridges along with copier supplies at dramatically lower prices.
So the monks came up with the snazzy "LaserMonks."
McCoy then negotiated with a number of contract manufacturers to outsource orders, which are shipped to customers from warehouses around the country (only a few are sent directly from the abbey).
