Preserving memories good business

LONGMONT — A picture may be worth a thousand words, but photos often are treated as if they were worth far less. Even those capturing some of our most treasured moments may end up forgotten and ignored, hastily thrown into drawers or old shoe boxes.

That’s where Mary Lacher comes in.

Her job is to show people how to organize their photos and creatively display them in photo-safe albums, which will preserve the pictures and the memories for generations to come.

Lacher, who lives in Longmont, started as a consultant with Creative Memories only last September and already has climbed up the organization’s corporate ladder to unit manager after sponsoring six other consultants.

She now earns commission from their sales as well as her own and is hoping to progress to director and eventually senior director, putting her in charge of up to 10 unit managers and generating even higher commission rates.

Lacher was looking for a home-based job with flexible hours that she could fit in around family commitments with husband Leo, a 6-year-old daughter and two teen-agers. When she started last fall, she was hoping to make $200 per month at best. Now things are going so well, she expects to clear at least $15,000 this year — not bad for 10 to 15 hours a week.

Creative Memories bills itself as the first company offering photo storage information, products and hands-on assistance direct to the consumer. Started in 1987, it is now a multimillion-dollar enterprise with an army of home-based workers throughout the United States and overseas.

Lacher says there are just under 45,000 consultants in the United States and Canada. Colorado alone boasts 1,595 — one of the highest concentrations of any state, though according to Lacher, there’s still room for plenty more.

Consultants pay $175 for a start-up kit and earn commission from teaching instructional classes and workshops, and from the sale of Creative Memories products.

Lacher holds all her classes at her house. “People really prefer coming to my home,” she says. “Classes last about two and a half hours and cost $10. I can take up to 15 people at one time, but that’s about the limit, as people need individual attention.”

She says classes are popular with both men and women, who are asked to bring along five or six photos. Lacher provides all the necessary materials, and by the end of the class the students should have a page of pictures nicely laid out.

“We talk about such things as cropping, mounting, preservation and caption writing. I encourage people to have a go, to get something down on the page. I tell them they’re making their own family heirlooms.”

After the first class, people who want to continue working on their scrapbook albums can attend ongoing sessions called “crops.” These can last from a few hours to an entire day and may include snacks, discount incentives and prize draws.

Lacher hosts four such workshops every month at which participants can buy supplies such as circle cutters, albums and refill pages, scissors for cutting decorative edges, pens and pencils, special tape and corner mounts, die cut shapes and stickers.

One of her early students was Alison Rzepiennik from Longmont who quickly became so keen that she found herself working on albums every day, including weekends, for about three months.

Rzepiennik got married in September, so she started on her wedding album and then did a second one. In fact she became so engrossed in her work that she still has a numb spot in one finger from using scissors so much.

“I just loved it. It was so creative, and I had done nothing really creative since high school. It virtually took me over at first until I ran out of photos!”

Such was Rzepiennik’s enthusiasm that in February she decided to become a consultant herself, despite working full-time at IBM. Meanwhile, husband Chris, who customizes, shows and races cars, is putting together his own album.

Creative Memories, which claims it was “instrumental in the rebirth of the scrapbooking industry,” has three factories making albums and accessories.

Lacher says all these products are carefully tested to be certain they will help preserve precious photos and not damage them the way many old albums — “gas sandwiches” she calls them — used to do.

Pages are acid-free and lignin-free, ensuring there is no chemical reaction with the photos, and the paper stays pure white. Paper also IS “buffered” to protect against acid attack from other memorabilia placed in the album, such as theater tickets.

Lacher says the albums will last 100 years, which is about the lifetime of photos. “At that stage photos will begin to fade. There’s nothing you can do to stop that, but we can now at least delay that inevitable process as long as possible.”

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