The Entertainment Supply Chain Academy (ESCA) is pleased to announce Stephen Strowe, chairman and CEO of Handleman Company, the first of several keynote speakers at its first event here at the Hyatt Regency Century Plaza on June 20-21.

Mr. Strome has served as chairman and CEO, the leading U.S. distributor of music CDs, since January 2001. Handleman generates $1.3 billion in annual sales, has 2,300 employees worldwide, and its customers include Wal-Mart, Kmart, Best Buy, ShopKo, Pamida, Zellers and ASDA. The company manages the music category in over 3,500 stores, representing approximately 11 percent of all music sold in the U.S., 25 percent in Canada, and 9 percent in the UK.

Strome plans to reflect in his speech on how his company has been at the forefront of entertainment supply chain distribution to retail since the mid-1970s. "The CEO at the time was a true visionary. Stores did inventories physically recorded on inventory sheets, and we had them put tear tickets on each product. When something sold, they'd tear it off and send it in to us," he explained, adding that the company was dealing with nearly 2,000 individual stores at the time.

"It's all changed dramatically. Back then there was no automation, computers or systems to do the job," Strome said. Handleman ended up developing its own barcodes and scanners because the UCC (Universal Commercial Code) hadn't yet been invented, and the company still uses mostly proprietary software, he noted.

In the mid-1990s, improved efficiencies serving its customers enabled Handleman to consolidate its 17 distribution facilities in the U.S. and four in Canada into the current two U.S. facilities and one Canadian location.
These days Handleman is focused on monitoring daily its retailer customers' inventories on a per-store basis through POS (point-of-sale) data, and has developed a proprietary new release benchmarking system. "Stores five miles apart can be completely different. One can be strong in country [music], the other in Latin." Strome said.

While Handleman is principally a music CD distributor, the company last October acquired a videogame distributor Crave Entertainment Group, Inc., which handles Sony PlayStation, Nintendo and Xbox videogame software, hardware and accessories to more than 30,000 retail stores, including Sam's Club, Costco, Toys"R"Us, GameStop, Best Buy, Target, and KB Toys.