Indiana's party company.

• Author: Keaton, Joanne
• Position: Stumps - Company Profile

If your high-schooler is on this year's prom committee, odds are good he or she is doing business with an Indiana company named Stumps, with an address of "One Party Place."

"Anyone having a party is a potential customer of ours," says company president Shep Moyle. Customers from all 50 states and about 20 other countries--including Jordan, Poland, France and Japan--do business with the South Whitley firm.

But purchasers of party goods and other special-event supplies aren't jamming the roads to the northeastern Indiana community of 1,400. All sales are made by catalog.

Stumps sells to 80 percent of the country's schools. The business, one of the country's largest suppliers of party goods, started in 1926 as a commercial printing company. During the Great Depression, Hubert Stump had success selling a memory booklet, an event favor, to high schools around the country. Stumps then moved into the decorating area.

Moyle's father bought Stumps in 1974 and, according to his son, transformed the company. (In the early '70s, there was just one catalog but with no photography, only hand drawings.) Then Shep Moyle bought the...