The Distance

Some of the audio world's most revered headphones come out of a narrow, graffiti-covered house in Brooklyn's Sunset Park neighborhood. Grado Labs has been handcrafting phono cartridges and headphones at this location for six decades and remains under family ownership. Both vinyl and high-end headphones are having a moment right now, and that's keeping this long-running business as busy as ever.

Chicago's Fulton Market district is the city's last remaining food market, a hub for meatpackers and wholesalers of agricultural products. But a wave of new development, including high-end restaurants and luxury condos, is transforming Fulton Market and prompting many long-time business owners to question whether the neighborhood can continue to sustain their livelihoods. We talk to two Fulton Market businesses about how they're navigating this transition.

Jason Fried co-founded Basecamp in 1999 and in 2014 launched The Distance. Shaun Hildner sat down with Jason to talk about The Distance and the kinds of business stories that interest him.

In 1932, an orphan named Roy Sheffield started Ashland Addison Florist Co. by selling bouquets of flowers at a busy Chicago intersection. Eight decades later, the fourth generation of Sheffields is still delivering flowers to customers. The Sheffields have learned how to manage a business that requires a highly delicate touch, both in handling a perishable product and in brokering what can be a very emotional transaction. A flower order—choosing the right arrangement, writing the card—can offer a brief but revealing glimpse into someone’s personal life, and a florist is privy to these moments.

Albert Karoll started his custom menswear business from his Chicago apartment with just a phone, a legal pad and a book of fabric swatches that he took to customers' homes and offices. In the early 1990s, he combined his fledging business with five local bespoke tailor shops whose owners had either died or were retiring without successors. In doing so, Karoll kept the old-fashioned craft of bespoke tailoring—one that had been practiced by Italian and Eastern European immigrants for decades—from obsolescence. Today, his tailors still make men's and now women's clothing from paper patterns customized for individual customers.

Chicagoans of a certain age can recall growing up with the Victory Auto Wreckers television commercial, a low-budget ad that seemed to run endlessly on afternoons and late nights. It turns out that 30-second spot, featuring a shaggy haired guy whose car door falls off, wasn't just a childhood fever dream. Victory Auto Wreckers, an auto salvage yard founded in 1945, ran the same commercial on local airwaves for 30 years. But the business is ready for a new ad to accompany a bigger image transformation, from dirty junkyard to modern recycling center. To see photos and watch the classic commercial, visit https://thedistance.com/victory-auto-wreckers.

When Al Capone needed crates to smuggle liquor to his speakeasies, he bought boxes from a Chicago manufacturer called Ideal Box Co. Today, the company is run the Eisen brothers, whose great-grandfather started the business in 1924, and the Eisens are shaping a future that goes way beyond corrugated boxes. Ideal makes the point-of-purchase displays that dot the ends of supermarket aisles and beckon consumers into making impulse purchases. The Eisens believe that specializing in displays is the way out of the commoditized brown box. For more on Ideal, including photos, check out https://thedistance.com/ideal-box-co.

In the early days of fast food, restaurants like McDonald's and Burger King made their burgers onsite, and they relied on Harry Holly's patty-molding machine to get the job done. The patty press helped standardize the fast food hamburger by ensuring that patty sizes and weights were consistent. The fast food giants eventually changed their supply chains and stopped using the patty press, but the meat-processing equipment company that Harry Holly founded in 1937 is still carrying on the inventor's legacy. To see photos and read more about Hollymatic, visit our website: https://thedistance.com/hollymatic/

Yes, that's the actual name of this business, and there's more to it than just its 13,500 square feet. The World's Largest Laundromat serves free food, provides children's entertainment and offers workshops to customers on subjects like immigration reform and healthcare. All of these amenities have made the store a de facto community center and a destination—all unusual distinctions for a self-service, coin-operated laundromat. The debut episode of The Distance podcast tells the story of how a longstanding laundromat in the Chicago suburb of Berwyn found its true purpose as a neighborhood gathering place. For photos of The World’s Largest Laundromat, check out our text-version of this story at https://thedistance.com/worlds-largest-laundromat/ The Distance is a show about longevity in business, featuring privately held companies that have been operating for at least 25 years old. See photos, read more and sign up for our newsletter at https://thedistance.com The Distance is brought to you by Basecamp, the world's most popular project management app. Learn more at http://basecamp.com.