Lifetouch

Company beginnings, 1936–1949

Two traveling salesmen, Eldon Rothgeb (1916–1972) and R. Bruce Reinecker (1910–1987), had worked together for a couple of years for a school photography studio in Kansas City, Missouri. In 1936, in the midst of the Great Depression, they raised $500 and initiated their plan to open their own school photography company, setting up business as National School Studios (NSS), "School Photography of Distinction", in Minneapolis, Minnesota. They chose the Upper Midwest to launch their business, a predominantly rural area with fewer professional photographers and thus potential for greater opportunity.

By 1939, the NSS had more than a dozen salesmen selling to schools—Reinecker in charge of production and Rothgeb supervising sales—and introduced its first new products, the 3x5 enlargement and 3x5 display folder, neither of which had ever been offered by a school photography company.

Unusually for the era, salesmen for NSS were paid employees of the company rather than independent contractors.

Following World War II in 1945, the founders mortgaged their personal property and stretched the company's credit line to offer approximately 80% of their salesmen (returning veterans) no-interest financing for cars and down payments to buy homes. This drove the company into the red and the bank canceled its line of credit. Nonetheless, by 1946, NSS was one of the largest school photography firms in the country.

That same year, NSS moved to a new plant in Minneapolis and began using the first continuous processing equipment in the industry, eliminating hand-processing. The system was adapted from the U.S. Government's "V-mail" system, which printed from a continuous roll of paper, and eliminated the slower single-cut sheets. The new equipment enabled them to add hand-tinted and sepia-tone prints to the product line, which stimulated sales. In 1948, 5x7 enlargements were introduced, the first in the market. By 1949, the sales force was at work in all 48 states.