Tommi Crow battled Lowe’s and Home Depot and won. Now, she gets to keep selling her American-made InfoTubes.

by Jess McCuan . photos by Matt Rose

In mid-May, Tommi Crow knew it was some sort of victory when a Hillman Group executive called from Ohio. He said, as she recalls: “There seems to be some sort of confusion here. Our inboxes are filling up so fast we can’t work.”

Crow, 52, lives in South Asheville and is the inventor of the InfoTube. It’s the plastic tube you sometimes see in the yard of a for-sale home, and InfoTubes (along with another of her inventions, the InfoBox), have been used by real estate agents around the country for two decades now, after Crow partnered up with Home Depot and started selling them through the chain in 1991.

After college, Crow, a Missouri native, moved to Dallas and sold real estate. Tinkering in her garage one day, she assembled a crude tube—one she could leave her sales literature in. After a while, people started calling and saying, “Hey, where’d you get that tube?” she remembers. Brokers and customers were often more interested in her tube than the homes she was trying to sell.

So she switched gears and started manufacturing InfoTubes, employing a team of disabled people through Goodwill Industries in Dallas to assemble them. When she moved to Asheville in 1994, she worked with Haywood Vocational Opportunities to assemble the tubes, which are produced at a factory in upstate New York. Around the time she moved, she added the home-improvement chain Lowe’s to a client list that included real estate firms and hardware stores. By 2006, revenues at her company, Crow Erickson, totaled more than $2 million.

When the real estate market took a nosedive in 2008, InfoTube sales dropped off dramatically. But it was actually another pitfall a few years later that pushed her business to the brink.

Lowe’s and Home Depot hired The Hillman Group, a giant, publicly traded Cincinnati-based distributor of fasteners, keys and signs, to help both stores streamline their operations. Hillman is a mammoth middleman, controlling distribution channels from Asian factories to American chains like Wal-Mart. One of the company’s jobs, according to Crow, was to coax small vendors into using Hillman’s ultra-efficient sales and distribution systems.

But Hillman did more than streamline. Crow says the firm copied and stole her product. From the beginning, Crow has been producing the InfoTube in the U.S. and charging $9.95 for it in stores. This spring, Hillman sent Crow a letter saying they would no longer be doing business with her, since they could produce the same tubes for significantly less—around 20 cents less, to be exact. “They took my product to China, had a mold made, and then sent me an email on March 7...You have been a good vendor, but we can get this made much cheaper in China. Thanks, but we won’t be buying your product anymore,” Crow says.

She was livid and called her patent attorney. Then, realizing her one lawyer was way outnumbered by the hundreds at Hillman, she hired an Asheville PR firm to help her fight back. Toby and Jen Maurer at The Brandinghouse set up a Facebook page for Crow Erickson and instructed customers and other supporters to email executives at Hillman, Home Depot and Lowe’s. Crow’s fans’ job was to let them know how upset they were that the chains were dropping Crow’s InfoTube for a cheaper Chinese product. Asheville interior designer Minnie Branch noted, in an email to three execs, that Crow Erickson was “one of the prides of Asheville.” Branch pointed out that the company not only makes products in America but also employs disabled workers. “Most frequently, I recommend products from Home Depot or Lowe’s. Now, you have a big black blotch on your name,” she wrote. Crow tapped her network of thousands of realtors, builders, designers and others, who sent similar angry emails to the chain stores’ leaders.

By May, they’d had enough. After a summer of wrangling with Hillman’s attorneys, Crow Erickson and Hillman signed an agreement in August that allows Crow to continue manufacturing InfoTubes and InfoBoxes and selling them to Home Depot and Lowe’s. “The public opinion is what saved this,” says Crow, who laid off one office employee and cut costs by consolidating tube assembly to one plant in Buffalo. She plans to hire more workers back to her WNC operation next spring. “My consumers wrote to Home Depot and said, we’ll pay more. Keep [the InfoTube] here.”

The ending of Crow Erickson’s story is happy enough, but the larger point is not lost on Crow, who has become something of a “made-in-America” activist over the whole situation. “The American public is just now waking up to all this,” she says, explaining that if more people paid attention to where products are made and how, they’d be furious. “They’re starting to realize that, when the guy next door gets laid off, it’s because of a decision like this one. They’re starting to understand that all this comes back to them.”