Squadron Mail Order In Action

If you’ve been modeling more than a few weeks, you can’t help but notice the enticing ads in various modeling publications for an outfit called Squadron Mail Order. Even on the internet it is hard not to cruise Squadron’s website to see what cool new stuff has been released. If you’ve been modeling more than a few weeks, you’ve perhaps had the pleasure of visiting a Squadron Shop while they still maintained storefronts at various locations around the country. While I was stationed in the Washington DC area in the early 1970s, I was a frequent visitor to the Rockville, MD Squadron Shop and to this day I measure the quality and user-friendliness of all other hobby shops from the outstanding example set in that store. The Squadron Shops are long since history, but there is more to Squadron than just their mail order service.

Chances are that you’ve examined or purchased an interesting title from your local hobby shop or bookstore that was produced by Squadron/Signal Publications. You may have even spotted some cool resin detail sets from ‘True Details’ and you will be seeing a new line of resin figures from ‘Carter & Crawley.' When your local hobby shop needs a reliable source of cool stuff to help ‘liberate’ you from your hobby budget, they usually turn to a company called MMD (Military Model Distributors). What do all of these entities have in common? They’re all part of the same organization, based in New Carrollton, TX (a northern suburb of Dallas, not to be confused with New York City that Texans also claim to be a northern suburb of Dallas).

Jerry Campbell, Squadron/MMD

This company has grown so much in recent years that they recently expanded their plant. Their new facility is over 51,000 square feet in size and uses all of its vertical capacity very efficiently. I had the pleasure of visiting this facility in mid-October to see the newly expanded Squadron first-hand. The first stop was to meet with Jerry Campbell, owner of Squadron/MMD. Jerry’s ‘office’ is an interesting mix of office, meeting room, mini-museum and triage space for new and prospective products. Right in the middle of our meeting, Jerry received a call from a US Army officer that was in town on other business and wanted to come by for a visit. It seems that this gentleman was one of Jerry’s early customers from the late 1960s. In fact, this gentleman and several of his colleagues would place orders via US Mail for the latest kits and supplies to enjoy what little free time they could get in Vietnam.

Squadron Mail Order

According to Jerry, Squadron was founded in 1968 and started operations as a hobby shop in Detroit. Additional storefronts were opened including my favorite spot in Rockville. As the business changed directions, Squadron phased out the stores and transitioned to mail order only retail sales in addition to its growing wholesale distribution business. Today, the mail order business is doing quite well and encompasses the traditional order forms via US Mail, faxes (especially from overseas customers), and internet sales from their website. Unlike many online retailers however, a real human is only a phone call away as the retail phone lines are always staffed. This is also one of the few mail order retailers that will actually call me to clarify an order after I’ve had a senior moment and placed a duplicate advanced order just to make sure that I didn’t really want six 1/42 scale Rigby Wombats.

MMD Order Lines

With that, Jerry took me on a tour of Squadron’s facilities. So what is the difference between Squadron Mail Order and MMD? About 12 feet as far as I could tell - that is the distance between the set of cubicles that the mail order operators operate from to the set of cubicles staffed by the wholesale operators. One group sells directly to you whilst the other group sells to the folks that sell to you in your hometown.

Squadron/Signal Publications Inventory

Around the corner from the wholesale crowd are the desks for Squadron/Signal Publications. One veteran author who is also one of the most prolific for Squadron/Signal is Lou Drendal, who has just surpassed the one million mark on the number of books sold under his pen. Evidently one of the most popular titles that Mr. Drendal has released and is still in demand is the monograph on the SR-71 Blackbird.

Adjacent to the Squadron/Signal desks is the webmaster area where the staff keep regular updates on the website as the new stuff arrives at the loading docks. Alongside the webmasters’ area is the art department where the artwork for new products, advertisements, catalogs, etc., are all generated. Not a small undertaking considering the volume of business that moves through the facility.

Webmaster	Art Department

Out into the warehouse was our next stop and into the area where orders are filled and packed. You can see folks with shopping carts and clipboards walking the aisles, picking out each item on the order (and quietly wondering how someone in New England could possibly know that the two items that they ordered were on opposite ends of the huge warehouse). One immediate thing you’ll notice as you move around the facility is the average age of the staff. Many of these folks are retired from their respective careers and want to do something different without entering the Wal-Mart universe. One of the major improvements in this new warehouse was a new air conditioning system so that the employees could work comfortably year-round. It got too hot in the old warehouse on summer afternoons.

Squadron/MMD Warehouse	Squadron/MMD Warehouse

Walking through the aisles was an interesting experience. The Squadron/MMD philosophy is to not run out of anything. It costs more to credit unfilled orders and have unfulfilled customers when inventory levels run low. This is how Squadron achieves those high order fulfillment statistics. While high demand items will sometimes run out, it is surprising how infrequently this happens. There are so many interesting products on the shelves of this warehouse that even the most particular hobbyist can find what they are looking for amongst the stacks.

Loading Docks

Beyond the warehouse lies the storage and loading docks. Here are boxes of supplies and bulk storage of many items that are waiting their turn on the warehouse shelves.

In another area of the facility, Squadron has opened their production facility. This is where the True Details line of resin detail sets are developed, cast, and packaged. I also saw the test shots from a new line of figures announced by Squadron at the Hobby Visions show called Carter and Crawley. When I wondered aloud where in England this new line had originated from, Jerry explained that Carter and Crawley are the street names at the intersection near the warehouse.

Production & Packaging	Production & Packaging

Well there you have it - a quick glimpse into the operations behind Squadron Mail Order, MMD, True Details and Squadron/Signal Publications. The tour doesn’t stop here, head over the Squadron website and look at the thousands of items that they have available and only a few days of shipping time between your computer and your front door. And believe me from my own experience, when there is a problem with an order, you won’t find a more helpful group of people with the highest standards of business ethics ready to make things right.