Blair Candy is a wholesaler and distributor of candy, tobacco, and paper products in Altoona, PA. Patrick Dandrea, who eventually enlisted the help of his sons Ron and Terry, established it in 1940.

Today, the Blair Candy Company is owned and operated by Patrick’s grandchildren: Patrick, Terry, Pam, and Ron.

While they continue to use many of the same business methods practiced by their grandfather more than sixty years ago, they have also turned to new technologies to help keep their company successful in the 21st century.

For over half a century, the company had been thriving. Why, then, were they interested in expanding on the Internet?

"It was a two-fold thing," explains Blair’s VP, Terry Dandrea. "We wanted to get our name out there.

We had an informational section on the site which explained our business, our delivery radius, and we definitely wanted to get that information out to as many people as possible."

"At the same time, we wanted ordering. We started out small, with a few items that we thought would be unique: some old time candy, candy you don’t see out in stores anymore."

While their first site did put the company on the map, so to speak, it failed to bring in the new business they had hoped for.

Soon, they saw that they would have to take initiative on their own to make the site successful. Even though they were new to the e-commerce world, they found solutions where the web professionals had fallen short.

It’s clear that you don’t have to create a foolproof solution with every initiative you take.

The key is in continuing to watch your performance and continuing to think about what you want.

The goal remains the same, you may just have to add more intermediate steps to get from here to there than you realized at the outset.

"We were getting zero hits, no sales at all. We took it upon ourselves to go to Yahoo and get some advertising ourselves, and we had to pay.

We had to pay to play on the Internet, but we started getting orders."

Once the orders started to come in, they decided to take their site to the next level.

In addition to extending the capabilities of their e-commerce system, they wanted to make the site easier to change and update.

A new company was hired to analyze and redesign the site. They had a number of ideas about how they could rebuild it and bring the technology up-to-date.

"We wanted to get to the next step so we could control our items a bit better, make changes more often. We’ve got that now, but we’ve gone through weeks and weeks of problems to get there."

Despite their early setbacks, Blair Candy has found its place on the Internet, and their e-commerce goals – to grow sales and increase awareness of the company – have been achieved.

But Blair Candy’s involvement with the Internet doesn’t just end with their web site.

They have found that the web is an excellent research tool. They use it frequently to find new (or cheaper) suppliers, to keep tabs on their competitors, and to discover what items are in demand, guaranteeing that their inventory will reflect the items their customers want to buy.

The research discoveries of Blair Candy are of several types. They can do searches for companies to serve as suppliers and or allies.

They can dig down into information and find research on packaging, candy making, marketing strategies, and/or management practices.

They can also use tools to track visitors to their site, and keep and manage all of the transactions from e-commerce and the like.

Finally, they can use bulletin board software to enable conversations between customers and the company, between customers and other customers within the hearing of Blair Candy, and between and among Blair Candy’s associates.

They are limited only by their imaginations.

The Internet won’t take the place of actual salesmen and delivery trucks, however.

Blair has many customers, particularly retail outlets, in the Altoona area, and they choose to service these clients directly, face to face.

What the Internet has done for them is to attract new individual clients, "home shoppers," who are looking for the hard-to-find novelty candies and paper products that are Blair’s specialty.

Pam explains: "A lot of people are moving out of this area, and they know they can get local specialty items from us, like Mallocups and the original Peanut Butter Meltaways, which are made in Altoona.

It’s opened our doors to so many people. We have our name out nation wide. We’re on the East coast, but a lot of our orders are coming from the West coast."

Pat Dandrea, the company’s president, agrees. "We’ve developed a customer base in California, Oregon, North Dakota. It has expanded our business far beyond (geographically) anything that we could have done without it."

They’ve looked beyond themselves and their traditional value proposition.

They have updated their core business assumptions based upon the possibilities Internet technology provides.

They continue to do those things that still add value; they just have been bold enough to keep up with changing business realities.

The effort was practical and doable. They didn’t change everything or spend a fortune.

They found a way for a local business to extend its reach.