Orange County teacher builds $50 million a year business with learning materials
To learn how Rachelle Cracchiolo transformed a tiny home business creating teaching materials into a $50-million-a-year international company you must first walk past an ice cream case.
Make that a shiny red ice cream case.
Sure, there’s healthy frozen fruit bars, lime, coconut and strawberry. Fortunately, there’s also yummy chocolate-dipped ice cream bars, frozen candy, even chocolate chip cookie ice cream sandwiches which my tastebuds testify are to die for.
It’s all free, always available and Cracchiolo’s mother, who once sat at the kitchen table opening envelopes for Teacher Created Materials Publishing, wouldn’t have it any other way.
After all, you can’t be sad with ice cream melting in your mouth. But you sure can be creative.
Today, Teacher Created Materials — with it’s multi-platform print and digital activity books — offers 3,000 different teaching products.
The privately held company is in every state in the U.S., 90 countries and its materials are translated into 20 languages.
It takes up three sites in north Orange County that consume 32,000 square feet of office space and 85,000 square feet of warehouse space. The payroll includes hundreds of part-time freelance specialist teachers and 174 full-time employees.
The products don’t come cheap. Some boxes packed with colorfully printed books and digital materials as well as access to online information cost as much as $400. Much of the cost isn’t in printing though; it’s in research, exhaustive fact-checking, ensuring kids can learn. And many lessons take a year or more to write, design, code.
To listen as Cracchiolo’s story unfolds is as staggering as it is inspirational.
BRINGING VARIETY INTO CLASSROOM
Cracchiolo grew up in Covina with an entrepreneurial grandfather and father. They were modest men of modest means, but the lessons the teenager learned was that hard work pays off and self starting is the first step on the path to success.
“Dad used to say,” Cracchiolo remembers, “I had 21 jobs before I was 21.”
Still, Cracchiolo’s passion wasn’t business. It was teaching.
“I loved education,” the CEO recalls, sitting at the head of a conference table with daughters Corinne Burton, company president, and Deanne Mendoza, executive vice president. “I loved kids.”
Mom graduated Cal State Fullerton in 1973 with a master’s degree in curriculum instruction and knew exactly where she wanted to teach: anywhere near the beach.
The young graduate applied to school districts stretching from San Clemente to Seal Beach. She landed in the Fountain Valley School District, and she and her husband settled in Huntington Beach.
But over the course of her first five years teaching elementary school children, Cracchiolo realized that much was missing from the regular curriculum — like variety and imagination.
Children learn in different ways, she knew. Some are kinetic learners, others learn by hearing someone talk, others through reading. Children also learn at different speeds.
“I was always out looking for something the kids could build,” Cracchiolo recalls of those early days. If she was teaching about dinosaurs, she showed the children how to build a paper mache dinosaur. If it was Thanksgiving, she taught children how to make a turkey.
During maternity leave with her first daughter, mom decided she would create a little book for teachers about what she calls “quick, fun art for kids.”
Nobody bought it.
But just two years later, Cracchiolo found herself divorced with toddler Corinne as well as a 3-month-old, Deanne.
Cracchiolo knew her teaching salary wouldn’t be enough so she decided to give creating teacher materials one more shot.
CREATIVE TEACHING
Teaching elementary school children and being a single mother raising a toddler and new baby filled her days and evenings. So with help from other teachers, Cracchiolo worked nights and weekends to outline, write and design a series of activity books that over time grew to 14 books.
They would turn out to be the foundation of her Teacher Created Materials empire.
Her office was the kitchen. Her warehouse was the garage. Her father helped ship. Her mother, the ice cream lover, helped with sales and marketing. Cracchiolo was publisher, marketer and delivery person.
“Everything was amateurish,” Cracchiolo admits, “but it worked.”
She hand-wrote tens of thousands of letters to teachers. She followed up by driving to 60 teacher supply stores.
“I had no business plan,” Cracchiolo recalls. “I didn’t even know the difference between retail and wholesale.”
Still, Cracchiolo had tapped into a need. Teachers, principals, superintendents, even school board members said they were hungry for creative ideas to teach, for new ways to present ideas and information.
To nurture her business, Cracchiolo sunk all the profits back into the budding company.
Soon, she started traveling to trade shows, children in tow. In 1981, she attended her first International Reading Association conference and discovered that many teachers already were using her books. The company hasn’t missed a conference since.
Her adult daughters laugh, saying they learned much of the trade at, well, trade shows. “We grew up,” Mendoza says, “in booths talking to teachers.”
Mom remembers the early days a bit differently. “My kids,” she offers, smiling, “were brought up in printing companies.”
The following year, Cracchiolo was offered an interim principal position which would lead to a permanent principal spot. But Cracchiolo was having too much fun creating material and growing her company. She turned it down and left teaching to focus full time on the business.
Within six months, she outgrew her first building.
By the mid-1980s, Cracchiolo was mailing out hundreds of thousands of catalogues and heading up a company with $1 million a year in sales.
But the magic wasn’t in marketing. It was in the material.
CHANGING WITH TECHNOLOGY
A book on nutrition, health and the body, simply called “My Body,” was the company’s first smash hit and an updated version remains popular today.
“We sold more copies of that book,” Cracchiolo reports, “than there are teachers in the United States.”
The lessons demonstrate how students can trace the outline of their bodies on butcher paper, cut out and color organs, bones and muscle and then place the proper pieces in their proper places.
A “My Body” cutout even appears in the 1990 Arnold Schwarzenegger movie “Kindergarten Cop.”
As technology changed, so did Teacher Created Materials Publishing. The first sea change arrived with Apple computers in classrooms. The problem — no, the opportunity — was that teachers struggled with the new devices.
In 1994, Teacher Created Materials stepped in with “Technology for Terrified Teachers.” It was Cracchiolo’s second huge hit.
“All of a sudden,” the former teacher marvels, “we’re a big company.”
No more door-to-door sales. Instead, Teacher Created Materials sold its products through stores and online.
The firm followed up with expert-taught seminars for teachers on a variety of subjects. Many attracted 500 teachers or more. They recruited new talent that resulted in a technology curriculum, “Tech Works.”
By this time, Time magazine had invited Cracchiolo to New York for a partnership in helping children learn to write. Texas Instruments followed suit.
In September, the company will celebrate its 40th anniversary. But in some ways, Teacher Materials is only beginning its second chapter.
FROM MOTHER TO DAUGHTERS
Asked if she will retire soon, Cracchiolo smiles at being 67 years old and shakes her head. Even after four decades, she is still having too much fun to retire. “I really like what I do.”
Still, Cracchiolo admits she only comes to the office a few days a week. Burton offers that mom remains the “great visionary” while she and her sister head up much of the business.
But don’t think nepotism is everything. Burton, the president, earned her master’s degree at Columbia University and was a teacher before she was hired. Mendoza cut her teeth at The Coca-Cola Company before her mother would even consider hiring her youngest daughter.
Looking to the future, the president offers that her job — the company’s job — “is to create a world in which children love to learn, to make kids curious.”
The wonderful thing, Mendoza explains, is that millions of others share the same goals. “No matter where you go in the world,” the executive vice president says, “a first-grade teacher is a first-grade teacher.”
In one of the company’s large seminar rooms, I pick up a colorful box of teaching material. The subject is Shakespeare and the Bard’s words are tweaked so children at different reading levels can pick a role that matches their ability to read and speak.
The idea is that the readings turn into a classroom play and the repetition of learning lines is both fun and helpful.
“Oh, Horatio,” Hamlet says, “it is not even two months since my father’s death and my mother already has married my horrible uncle!”
The six-pack of books for the “Tragedy of Hamlet” is $48 and that includes a lesson plan as well as an audio CD.
It may seem surprising that kids can take on Shakespeare. But what is more of a surprise is that the book is for third- through fifth-graders. I’ll confess, I enjoyed reading this updated version of “Hamlet.”
Then I headed toward a shiny red ice cream case.