When Jim Shapiro decided to grab a backpack and head overseas during a gap year from the University of Massachusetts, he wasn’t thinking about a career in logistics. He was feeding his innate curiosity about people and places.
“I had a Eurail pass and traveled for four months by myself in Europe,” said Shapiro, director of Thunderbolt Global Logistics. “That kind of opened me up to a lot of different things. I was interested in just everything.” Shapiro returned and graduated with a degree in business management, intent to focus on international commerce. He moved to Baltimore in 1984 and used a Port of Baltimore directory to conduct a job hunt.
He knocked on doors at the World Trade Center — beginning on the 26th floor — and worked his way down to the fifth. That’s where he found work at Samuel Shapiro & Company (no relation), a 100-year-old shipping and logistics firm.
“Initially I was basically doing clerical work,” he said. “I was typing export declarations with carbon paper. I didn’t have much exposure to the Port, but I realized it’s a very close-knit community. I got to know a lot of people at companies in trucking and warehousing. Your competitors were your friends and you didn’t have an issue with it.”
Thomas Albero wasn’t intending to stay for a quarter-century when he joined Alliance Material Handling in 2002. But when the owners decided to sell the company shortly thereafter, he saw a tremendous opportunity for everyone involved.
Business was booming as Alliance became a leader in material handling solutions. More and more companies were looking for forklifts, equipment maintenance and warehouse systems. Albero suggested creating an Employee Stock Ownership Plan (ESOP).
“I knew the company was in a good position, but I also knew we had a big problem retaining forklift technicians,” said Albero, now Alliance’s Chairman and CEO after initially signing on as CFO. “Back in those days, if you could get a dollar more an hour, you’d jump ship and go to a competitor. I thought if everyone owned a piece of the rock, maybe we could get away from that problem.”
By 2004, Alliance was 31% employee-owned. Four years later, it became 100% employee-owned. The change transformed retention and built a new culture.
“The kind of crazy stuff you’d see — like lights left on overnight — stopped,” Albero said. “After we became employee-owned, the place was always dark when I showed up in the morning. People just thought about things differently, even the little things that save money.”
Back in 2023, when the burgeoning startup Sindri Materials needed a place to live and grow, CEO and founder Christopher DiMarco began a nine-month research journey. He looked at private lab spaces from Maryland to New York and all the way to Boston. There were lots of business incubators in “great spaces and great ecosystems,” but he says none were the greatest fit for his graphene company.
“Then we stumbled on The Innovation Space,” DiMarco says. “The way their spaces are set up, with their leadership and their focus, they have an emphasis on advanced materials alongside life sciences. It just makes them a unique space for a company like ours.”
The residency paid off immediately. Sindri Materials won an Encouraging Development, Growth and Expansion (EDGE) Grant from the Delaware Division of Small Business in 2024 and also made the cut for Technical.ly’s RealList Startups that year. DiMarco says setting up shop at The Innovation Space has played an invaluable role in his company’s success.
Founded in 2017, The Innovation Space helps science-based startups thrive in Delaware, hopefully to the scale of companies that change the world through science and live for generations — like DuPont, which partnered with the state and the University of Delaware to develop the nonprofit. Bill Provine, a longtime DuPont director and The Innovation Space’s founder, president and CEO, says they all saw a gap in the landscape for those types of startups.
“You hear all these stories about people creating Apple Computer in their garages or some software company beginning at the local Starbucks,” Provine says. “But you can’t generate the next therapeutics company or Big Pharma company in your garage.”
DiMarco, who’s from Delaware County just outside of Philadelphia, searched far and wide before finding the ideal location right under his nose. “It’s the shortest distance of any place I looked at,” he says. “I started with Google searches and wasn’t really thinking about Wilmington. Ultimately, I heard about The Innovation Space and it was serendipitous. It was 30 minutes away from me.”
Peter O’Malley’s name often rings a bell and his face seems familiar to people as he journeys around the city and elsewhere. That’s not surprising when one of your five siblings once served as Baltimore’s mayor and Maryland’s governor.
O’Malley has spent time in government as a Chief of Staff, first for Baltimore County (2007-2010) and then Baltimore City (2011-2012). But neither position had a visceral connection to the Port of Baltimore like his current job — Vice President for Corporate Relations at ASR Group, which owns Domino Sugar.
“Dominio Sugar was established here over 103 years ago and we’re the Port’s leading bulk importer,” said O’Malley, who joined the company in 2014. “We’ve been at it for a long time and most recognize us for our big sign, which is iconic. It’s a sign that the Port is still working.”
Earlier in his career, he once lived a few blocks from the refinery and enjoyed a clear view of the landmark. He’d see sugar boats come and go, but he never realized the extent of what they represented: all the various jobs and assorted products. At ASR Group, he felt the sign’s impact right away, especially when brides called to request repairs so their reception pictures wouldn’t feature unlit letters in the background.
He was at the center of media coverage in 2021 when the 70-year-old sign was replaced and its lore grew. “People have been very pleased,” O’Malley said. “But one person said, ‘Without some of the letters being out, it doesn’t have the same character.’ So, you can’t please everybody.”
Unlike sailing enthusiasts who grew up in nautical families, Nan Nawrocki was a young adult when she discovered the joy of watercraft powered by the wind. She learned to sail in the ’80s and eventually became a boat owner, tying the knot in a love affair that’s still going strong.
Nawrocki transitioned from navigating small boats to sailing aboard bigger vessels and competing in the Great Chesapeake Bay Schooner Race. Now, as Executive Director of Sail Baltimore, she helps approximately 50,000 annual visitors meet the crew and climb aboard these amazing vessels. “Having the opportunity to actually sail on a tall ship is awesome,” she said. “It’s one of those things that’s indescribable unless you get a chance to do it.”
Sail Baltimore brings tall ships, Navy and sea service vessels from around the globe to the Port of Baltimore, part of the organization’s educational programming that covers maritime history, world culture, economic development and more. Along the way to leading the nonprofit, Nawrocki spent over 30 years at the U.S. Naval Academy, where she did some offshore sail training with the midshipmen.
She also made sure that boating was a way of life for her family. “My two girls also learned to sail,” she said.
Nawrocki continued sailing after no longer owning a sailboat. “I’ve had some amazing opportunities to sail on tall ships both in the Chesapeake and abroad,” she said, including trips on the Statsraad Lehmkuhl from Norway to Scotland and Amsterdam to Norway, and more recently a cruise on the Stad Amsterdam in the Caribbean. Locally, it’s easy to go sailing without owning a boat, she noted. “There are all kinds of opportunities to sail or learn to sail if you are interested.”
A family business doesn’t last for 90 years and through four generations of leaders in an everchanging field without navigating and initiating disruptive innovation. No one has to convince Mick Arnold of that fact.
What began in 1933 as Arnold’s Factory Supplies — a Baltimore maker of adhesives and inks for packaging materials — has since evolved into Arnold Packaging, a comprehensive firm that designs and supplies innovative packaging solutions and automation systems to optimize customers’ shipping, storage and production processes.
“The company obviously was a lot smaller under my grandfather, when we made glues and mineral pigments,” said Arnold, who became company president in 1995 after his father’s death. “Transportation wasn’t very good and things were manufactured a lot closer to point of use. You didn’t think of handing off to UPS or FedEx and competing in a market that was two or three states away, let alone on the other side of the Mississippi.”
Today, Arnold Packaging has 82 employees and the firm has boomed since 2020. “We doubled the size of the business from 2018 to 2022,” Arnold said.
WASHINGTON – Hip-hop
legend DMX, who died from a heart attack in 2021, would’ve turned 54 this month.
But the NYC gritty rapper lives on through his music and others’ renditions.
The latest example is slated for Jan. 12, when Sequoia REDWOOD Snyder drops her arrangement of “Who We Be,” a hit single from DMX’s Grammy-nominated album, “The Great Depression.” REDWOOD headlines at the Kennedy Center’s Studio K Club three weeks later, bringing the 25-year-old D.C. native to where her journey began.
The Baltimore Museum of Industry (BMI) mission statement doesn’t specifically mention the Port of Baltimore. Nor does the museum have a massive exhibit devoted to the waterfront. The mission is to “interpret the diverse and significant human stories behind labor and innovation in Baltimore” and inspire reflection on “the intersection of work and society.”
But BMI Executive Director Anita Kassof said the Port and the museum’s work are inextricably intertwined.
“Baltimore grew up from a colonial town into a major world-class city due to the Port, because of our strategic location,” Kassof said. “So implicitly, the Port is reflected in a lot of our exhibitions. Explicitly, we would actually like to have an exhibition dedicated specifically to the Port of Baltimore and we’d been working on conceptualizing that before the pandemic derailed our plans.”
The tragic collapse of the Francis Scott Key Bridge on March 26 has put BMI’s plans back on track.
“This is our opportunity to revisit those discussions and finally create the exhibition about the Port of Baltimore that belongs at the Museum of Industry,” Kassof said. “Because when the bridge collapsed, there was a moment when the eyes of the world were on Baltimore. Everybody recognized how logistically essential we are. … It was eye-opening because the Port is kind of hidden in plain sight in this community.”
In 2018, Gloria Baldwin made a major career pivot — from healthcare to transportation. An acquaintance initially steered her toward freight brokerage, cautioning her against the challenges of owning trucks. But when she and her oldest daughter began seeking clients, the message they heard was clear: “We need trucks to move our freight.” Two months later, Capital Logistics was born.
“We didn’t have any trucks at the time,” Baldwin recalled. That quickly changed. The company acquired its first vehicle in 2019, and within three years, its fleet grew to 25. Today, Capital Logistics operates 35 Class 8 trucks and is a key partner in the Clean Ports Program with the Port of Baltimore — a $3 billion federal initiative aimed at modernizing port operations and trucking fleets.
Baldwin is determined to lead the company into an electric future. Capital Logistics owns three electric trucks, with plans to transition to a fully electric fleet in the next few years. The company also intends to establish a commercial EV charging station to support small and mid-sized fleets. “We made a bold decision in 2022 to shift toward electric trucks,” she said. “Our mission now centers around innovation and sustainability.”
In March 2020, the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a global health emergency. Five months later, owners Frans Zwanenburg and Kathy Haines founded Ancora Warehousing & Logistics, LLC.
Starting a business amid a worldwide pandemic isn’t ideal and only a few would do it, Zwanenburg said.
“Nobody was working from offices anymore and we began our journey in a conference room at one of our vendors. We needed some more privacy and decided to move into a rental house owned by Kathy Haines, which became vacant during COVID-19. Then neighbors started to complain, and we signed our first office lease at the Maritime Center at Tributary Street,” Zwanenburg said.
As the company’s customer base grew, and the demand for warehouse space to hold inventories skyrocketed, Ancora’s providers strained to keep up with its volumes, which led Zwanenburg and Haines to look for their own warehouse space around Baltimore. “None was available, but finally we found a path forward and ended up getting our own large Class A warehouse and office in May 2023,” Zwanenburg said. “The best part: every step we took was done with our own capital and cashflow. No company or financial institution was willing to take any risk in financing us during these uncertain times, and without employees, there was no governmental payroll help for Ancora or any available aid programs for a startup trying to hire people. No matter what, we focused on our priorities and hard work and became who we wanted to be.”
The founders focused on the potential rewards of filling a vacancy at the Port of Baltimore and rode out the virus until business returned to normal.
“We were not afraid,” Zwanenburg said. “We just had to make decisions. We had a business plan, but a lot of things happened that nobody [expected] and the container business was becoming very difficult.”
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