From his newly-expanded office and warehouse center in the massive former Saturday Evening Post cheap nike air max printing complex at Curtis Park in Sharon Hill, Jon Reichlin has built his dad's and uncle's old shoe-repair-products business into Penguin Brands Inc., a $40 million-plus (yearly sales) supplier of athletic accessories to Dick's, Footlocker, Modell's, Nike, Target and other big brands and retailers.There's a province map of China on the wall to track its factories, and photos of Olympic athletes and Philadelphia running-club leaders, and a line of packers filling 16, 000 boxes a day with bright water bottles and shoelaces and hydration packs and safety vests, from inventory off shelves on the first floor of the 220, 000-sq-ft warehouse space.There's construction workers finishing a new 15, 000-sq-ft design center with sweing machines and treadmills and heart monitors and computer graphics, where athletes and testers can pound, stretch, bake and freeze safety vests and shoelaces and plastic and metal waterbottles.And there's samples of smartphone accessories under development, like the planned $140 plug-in smartphone dongle for runners, in partnership with Wahoo Fitness. And there's the $20 (corrected) \Vita-brand runners' bracelet that not only supplies emergency information but can also buy you a drink, with a credit card chip, after the race. "We sent one to Reese Witherspoon after she was hit running, " says Reichlin, himself a triathlete and triathalon sponsor.How do you build a retail kingdom, from shoe polish? Kiwi, once made at a plant in Pottstown, used to be the dominant US brand. Your father probably had a tin, wrapped in rags at the back of the hall closet. Sara Lee, the industrial bakery, bought Kiwi in the 1980s, and boosted prices for what looked to customers like the same old product. Sales fell. Exton-based Kiwi was sold, with other businesses, to SC Johnson Wax last winter."We've replaced them as the dominant" shoe polish for specialty chain stores, Reichlin said. He credits his first career, as a dancer, with training him to hard work and creative problem-solving. It still took eight years of visiting New york to win the Footlocker supply contract, by designing sales promotions to appeal to salespeople and their managers. But other brands followed as Penguin got the hang of adding products to fit partners' markets.Selling to Nike made Penguin partners with "the greatest marketing company of all time, " Reichlin said. "We did the private-label game for them for years. They asked us to license shoelaces. We began to commute to Nike headquarters in Beaverton, Oregon. We'd present a new packaging strategy. They'd say 'OK', and push it aside, and pull up a photograph of a snowy field. Then a photograph of a grassy field. This was like a meditation on simplicity. They wanted to imprint on us the essence of the product and the brand. "How do you share markets with a controlling brand like Nike? Around the edges: "Running accessories, that's not where Nike has its bullseye, " Reichlin said. "Their big targets are apparel and footware. So we have this great niche in between that nobody has fully embraced and executed. " That's Penguin's space."We hunt for innovative products. We took an instant-shine sponge, a giveaway product you get free in a hotel room or 99 cents retail. We found a manufacturer in Spain and made a fundamentally better product and sold it for $5 at Kinney Shoes. They doubled shares in three successive years cheap air max Shoes. Quality matters and brings consumers back. "That's how Penguin fought the retail-supply collapse of the last 30 years, when giant chains like Wal-Mart squeezed their US suppliers. "Competitors who tried to be cheaper, they're gone. We used to sell one shoecare product for every 100 shoes. So we set a goal of 1 for 10. That way you can make some money. "Penguin works with athletes to develop products like NewRide Force Field sneaker-toe stiffeners, developed by Telfair Houston, a Boston kid who got tired of stuffing socks in his Air Jordan tips. "That young man came to us with the product, and it's gotten him a royalty of hundreds of thousands of dollars a year, " said Bridgit Lombard, a former Deloitte executive who's now Penguin's head of sales and strategy.Reichlin measures his progress partly in declining interest rates. In the '80s, "we went to a lender in New york, Burton Abrams, he charged me 21 percent, and said he was doing us favors. 'Rob a bank, ' he'd tell us. " Now Penguin banks with PNC, "which is fantastic. They say they love us. It's tough out there when your bank says it needs you. "