Mueller Sports Medicine had humble origins. But not a humble founder.

It’s ego of excess, more than hubris, that swirls around Curt Mueller. Everything is big, starting with Mueller himself. He’s nearly 6-foot-4, a basketball forward with the Wisconsin Badgers in the 1950s, and even today his deep voice and indelicate vocabulary could take control of any sales call, meeting or conversation.

His office at the company’s Prairie du Sac headquarters is part sports bar, part fraternity house. Large, framed sports memorabilia prints and autographed basketballs mingle with photos of beautiful women—big photos, sometimes with a still-golden haired Mueller posing with larger-than-life ladies. In one corner, a giant television screen doubles as a digital aquarium.

But the biggest item in the entire office says a lot about what drives the success of the world’s largest supplier of athletic tape. Directly across from Mueller’s desk, where he sees it all the time, is a gigantic map of North America, almost 20 feet across. On that map are the names and territories of regional sales representatives in the field.

Mueller has a pharmaceutical degree from UW-Madison and invented the company’s top-selling Quench Gum, but his natural bent for sales and promotion are what distinguish him. As he ably recounts his past, from the days helping remake his father’s Prairie du Sac pharmacy to the effort required to put Quench into sporting goods stores, a belief in and a knack for selling are at the core of it all.

“There’s nobody like Curt with such a passion, for both the product and the people,” says Herb Raschka, senior vice president of sales and marketing. “It’s almost frightening. I’m glad there’s not two Curts.”

The passion translates to growth. When Raschka arrived 14 years ago, sales at the privately-owned firm were about $14 million. Hoover’s estimates Mueller’s 2009 sales at $125 million, and the company just this year opened a 150,000-square-foot expansion at its headquarters. The company has a global reach, with a wholly-owned subsidiary in Japan and 76 countries where it sells. On a Wednesday afternoon this fall, Curt Mueller produced two e-mails that detailed the top 10 Mueller vendors worldwide for that Monday and then that Tuesday. Wal-Mart was atop one list, but Mueller scanned the others and ticked off a list of represented nations—Ireland, Russia, Mexico and England among them.

“Our future growth is worldwide,” Mueller says. “[Europe] is virgin territory for places like Mueller. They’ve not had the advancements in sports medicine like we’ve had here.”

When Curt Mueller founded Mueller Chemical Co. in 1960 from his father’s Prairie du Sac drugstore, sports medicine was wholly primitive. He hit on the idea to sell liniment, bandages and such to high schools. Frustrated when his supplier forced him to buy product through a sporting goods store for an unattractive rate, he put his pharmaceutical degree to work by paging through the supplier’s catalogue and replicating—and, he says, often improving—the products.

“I built myself a goddamn Me-Too line,” Mueller says.

The first original product was Quench, a blend of citric acid and lemon oil that worked to combat dry mouth in athletes. Quench Gum followed in 1974, and according to the company’s own history, it’s been ranked number one in unit sales in all of sporting goods every year since 2002.

In just the last five years, Mueller has released a line of soccer-related products, a line of women’s support products, the Mueller Green series of braces and supports and two sugar-free versions of Quench Gum. John Fritsch, new products manager, says one of the keys to continued development is understanding the changing market.

Some of the feedback the company has received from the field is the desire for products to support the active lifestyle of an aging American population—the boomers who no longer are hardcore athletes, but still like to get out on the tennis court and golf course regularly.

Getting that feedback is also central to Mueller’s success, and among the main reasons the company utilizes a sales hierarchy different from others in its industry. Mueller employs its own sales force, instead of relying solely on independent agents. Those “factory” people, in Mueller parlance, call on high schools, colleges and pro teams but also work with team dealers such as Badger Sporting Goods in Madison or Milwaukee Sporting Goods to educate employees on the Mueller products.

“That allows us the ability to identify opportunities in the field much quicker than our competitors,” Raschka says. “Hearing directly from coaches, trainers and athletic directors what’s needed.”

The company also uses independent agents, who provide a local presence that retailers prefer.

In addition to its own product development, Mueller is a strong distributor for products developed and patented by others. Curt Mueller gleefully related one story from the mid-1980s, when a company named Mikros arrived on Mueller’s doorstep with an innovative product and a sob story.

The three-man operation invented and then patented an ankle brace that employed flexible springs to prevent the ankle from turning inward—the most common type of sprain. An agreement to sell $400,000 of product, plus the patent rights, to a man on the East Coast blew up when they shipped the product and were never paid. Ultimately, Mueller asked the Mikros people to make the product, but put his company’s name on it, playing a game of chicken with the East Coast owner of the patent.

And they did. Mueller ATF ankle braces still employ a version of that technology today, and the company’s move to braces and supports led it to a bold step—taking its products directly to retail. In so doing, Mueller essentially created sports medicine departments at the retail level.

“I took the stuff from the back room of a sporting goods store and the warehouse and put it out front so (the consumer) could buy it,” Mueller says.

In this, too, Mueller relied on his sales background. Soon after graduating from UW he worked for a time at a Walgreens in Chicago. There he learned the tricks of setting up a point-of-purchase display, and he remains obsessive about it today—how to arrange the product to attract buyers and how to maximize the space.

“We don’t sell spindles and displays,” he says. “We sell product.”

The anecdote about Mikros offers additional insight to a key component of Mueller Sports Medicine—the company vigorously defends its patents.

“We average about $600,000 a year just in legal fees,” says Mueller, with a little more than pride.

Records for the U.S. District Court of Western Wisconsin showed 10 cases since 1990 with Mueller as the plaintiff, challenging companies such as Core Products International, McDavid Knee Guard, Tru-Fit Marketing Corporation and Beveridge Marketing.

In 2005, the company won a suit against Houston-based SportStar Athletics over the patent for Mueller’s No Glare Strips, the adhesive eye-black strips that replace traditional greasepaint. According to an article in All Business, a D&B publication, a federal jury in Madison not only found that SportStar violated the Mueller patent, but did so willfully. That entitled Mueller to seek triple damages plus attorneys’ fees.

It was one of three lawsuits Mueller filed over the No Glare Strips, according to the article, and five others cases were settled before going to court. Just this fall Curt Mueller was fired up about a recent NCAA ruling that banned all writing and trademarks from eye-black strips, where Mueller has traditionally placed its logo. College football players are practically walking billboards, from the helmet maker to the uniform provider to the football manufacturer. But when players began putting personal messages on some of the strips, the NCAA stepped in and banned everything this spring, a decision that has fired up Mueller to the point of profanity.

While Curt Mueller and his attorneys fight the good fight in court, his company continues to push forward with the founder’s passion. Mueller received ISO certification in 2005, and the new plant expansion consolidated the company’s operations in one location to improve efficiency. Raschka says a SAP computer system implemented a couple of years ago enriched the company’s forecasting ability and is just beginning to pay off. That efficiency supports the company’s claim of being able to ship an order the same day or the next day, no matter what.

“We are restless,” says John Fritsch, “in not accepting anything as being good enough.”  CRW

Inside Look:
Curt Mueller

What was your first paying job?
Working for a farmer, Melvin Bickford, straightening nails—old rusty nails—and general farmwork for 50 cents an hour and noon dinner. The best food I’ve ever tasted.

What is the greatest advice you ever received?
My father talked me into being a pharmacist instead of a basketball coach

What sports medicine product needs to be invented, but hasn’t been?
As far as you know, we may be inventing it right now. No comment.

What famous athlete today would make a great business person?
Al Toon. Barry Alvarez and Bo Ryan aren’t athletes, but they would make excellent businessmen. Barry’s latest book, Don’t Flinch, is the best business book out there today. Every businessman should read it.

How far will the Badgers go in the NCAA Tournament this season?
Farther than last year.

Photography by Jerry Luterman

By Matt Schroeder