Windsor Greetings - Chapter 2: Flashback
A summer warehouse job shows Alex the flaws in the family business—and his brother Tyler’s true colors—setting the stage for a deep sibling rift.
Hey, Friends! If you missed it last week, I started publishing a novella I wrote. Each Tuesday, I’ll be sharing a new chapter until all ten are out in the world. I’m still publishing my weekly creative roundup. So if this isn’t your thing, I’ll catch you on Friday.
In the meantime, please enjoy the next chapter in the saga of the Windsor family and their greeting card empire.
Table of Contents
Chapter 2: Flashback
Previously On Windsor Greetings:
After selling his startup, Alex Windsor returns to Whitefish Bay for Thanksgiving, where he quietly watches his brother, Tyler, get promoted to CEO of their family business, Windsor Greetings. Though the family celebrates, Alex has his own plans for Tyler and the company.
Chapter 2: Flashback
In the summer of Alex’s senior year, his father forced him to work in the warehouse at Windsor HQ. He felt it would help him build character, appreciate the value of a hard day’s work, and, at the very least, get him off his computer.
Although the work was tedious and took him away from learning to code, Alex couldn’t help but be impressed by the magnitude of his family’s business. It amazed him that so many people were willing to pay ten times the price of an average greeting card just because it was made by hand. In June of 2003, though, Windsor Greetings had a stronghold on this segment of the market, fulfilling orders from all over the world, and business was good.
Henry always told Alex, “We don’t just sell greeting cards. We sell cherished keepsakes. A Windsor Greeting card is a vessel for meaning and love.” Whether you agreed with the sentiment or not, it was clear that Henry, a true artist, believed this to his core.
Alex didn’t mind hard work if it served a purpose, but he grew increasingly frustrated at how antiquated their systems were. They still tracked inventory with paper ledgers and organized their merchandise according to artist name, not alphabetically by category. It was almost like the original Windsor brothers had put a process in place twenty years prior and had never once considered if it could be improved.
The one saving grace of working at Windsor HQ that summer was that Alex got to spend his lunch breaks with his uncle Tom, who’d always had a soft spot for him. Maybe it was their similar personality, or the fact that they had the same hair. Either way, Alex always looked to Tom as a role model, even more so than his own father, and secretly felt that he should have been CEO. Life can be cruel, though. Tom’s fiancé perished in a car accident before Alex was even born, which derailed any ambitions he had of running Windsor Greetings.
Overall, Alex’s responsibilities were pretty mindless. The job gave him some walking-around money, and he got to listen to music on his iPod all day. Alex took pleasure in imagining traveling to the distant corners of the globe that appeared on the shipping labels he was tasked with affixing to package after package. As far as high school jobs go, it was a pretty good one, and he didn’t mind it at all.
He did mind working for his older brother, though.
That same summer, Tyler returned from his MBA program in Madison to assume a greater role of leadership in the family business. As director of logistics and operations, he had direct oversight of the warehouse. Even at 17, Alex could see that Tyler’s title was mostly fluff. It’s not like he replaced someone who’d advanced to a more senior role or left the company. The position was created out of thin air.
Tyler spent most of his time cooped up in his office working on “strategy,” as he called it. The rest of the time, he micromanaged employees who also reported directly to Henry. The place actually ran much smoother when Tyler was out of the building. Despite this, with his fancy diploma in hand, he fancied himself the next Jack Welch.
On one fateful morning, after wrapping an hours-long “strategy session,” Tyler decided to check in on his little brother. Nothing he did was right. Alex moved too slowly between tasks, AND rushed too quickly through those tasks. Tyler berated him for displaying a poor attitude. He nitpicked over Alex’s shipping label placement. He even criticized the way he stacked the merchandise at the loading dock.
Alex was used to Tyler’s overbearing criticism, and for the most part had learned to tune him out, but when Tyler backed over Alex’s foot with a loading dolly, he damn near lost it, and when Tyler tried to cast blame on Alex for having his foot run over, Alex did lose it.
“Would you leave me the hell alone? Nothing you’ve said today, or ever for that matter, has helped this company even a little. You’re a complete waste of space.” Tyler, seemingly eager for confrontation, replied, “Maybe if you listened to me, you’d see how much better off we’d be.” Alex laughed in his face.
“You think this is funny?” Tyler said, now inches away from Alex, “You think this is some sort of a joke?”
Looking directly in his eyes, Alex replied, “No, Tyler. I think you’re a joke.”
While Tyler put up a boisterous front, deep down he knew he hadn’t really earned his station in life, and it drove him crazy that his little brother knew it. Tyler took a step back. “You’re such a smart guy,” he said, “Why don’t you enlighten me. What would you do differently if you were me?”
“If I were you?” Alex said. “If I were you, I’d jump headfirst off this warehouse.”
Tyler’s eyes widened. He took pleasure in pushing Alex too far. “So I should kill myself?” he asked mockingly.
Alex realized his response was a bit harsh and attempted to repair the damage. “You know I didn’t mean that,” he said.
Tyler uncharacteristically let it go. He seemed to actually want to hear what Alex would do if he were in charge. Alex thought for a moment. “If it were up to me, I’d update our inventory system. It’s ridiculous that we’re still using paper ledgers. We could use off the shelf software and save a full work day each week.”
“What else?” Tyler asked.
Alex looked around the warehouse, “Our merchandise is organized nonsensically. Everything is arranged according to the artist who designed the card, but orders come in by product name. It’s impossible to find anything. There’s also no database of what products we actually have. Again, just paper records.”
Tyler looked at Alex again, “Anything else?” he said.
Looking around once more, Alex spotted their summer catalog sitting on a table, “Yeah, we spend 80% of our marketing budget on paper catalogs. We could put it online for next to nothing. How much money would be left to actually advertise if we did that?”
“That it?” Tyler said.
“For now,” Alex replied, thinking Tyler might actually be listening to his suggestions.
Tyler’s demeanor shifted. “So your solution is computers,” he chuckled. “We’re a greeting card company, Alex. Paper is our lifeblood. We’re not going digital. That’s just not how we do things around here. This isn’t one of your Silicon Valley startups you read about in Wired magazine. Stop trying to fix things that aren’t broken.”
Tyler punctuated his point by storming out of the warehouse, back to his office, presumably to continue “strategizing.” At that moment, Alex knew he could never work for the family business, not so long as Tyler was there.
The following day, through the company boardroom window, Alex noticed Tyler leading a presentation to Henry, Ronald, and Tom titled Forward Strategy. There, in bold letters, were each of Alex’s suggestions presented as his own, and sitting at the head of the table was Henry, beaming with pride.
Stay Tuned
Want to see what happens next? Check back every Tuesday — and don’t miss my weekly creative roundup on Friday.
Until then,
-Mike
You do such a great job of carrying the story along. You varied the sentence and paragraph lengths in a way that kept me wanting to read with a well-set pace. Do you have any other books I can purchase?
I hope Alex kicks some Tyler butt. Looking good son in law