Couple maps out a future in cartography.
Hartmut Schwerdt, Rita Schwerdt, and Gordon Woit of MapArt pose with the latest map book for Toronto and area. The company makes maps for cities and towns across Canada with a population of 5,000 or over, giving users detailed directions and accurate landmarks, making finding your way easy.
Staff photo/ANICE WONG
Hart and Rita Schwerdt started MapArt in 1975 with little more than a homemade light-table, a Volkswagen Beetle, and a dream of providing for their family.
True to that vision 35 very successful years later, the Schwerdts, both 70, are handing the reins of their family-run mapmaking empire - now Canada's leading creator and producer of maps with 70 per cent of the market share - over to their son, Gord.
The MapArt story begins in the early 1960s, when Hart, a gifted German cartographer, was brought to Canada to work for Toronto-based lithographic and fine printing company Rolph-Clark-Stone. He met Rita, who was on a one-year working visa at the University of Toronto, at a dance at the German Club - and the rest, as they say, is history.
They soon married and, after five years of scrimping and saving, moved out of their tiny Etobicoke apartment and bought a house in Brampton to accommodate their growing family. There, Hart had room to create his 'visual dictionaries' on a giant homemade light table in his spare time.
His first project was a comprehensive map of Toronto, complete with landmarks, police stations, hospitals and fire departments - details other Canadian maps just didn't have.
"That first map took me ten years to make, and I sold it to the Toronto Real Estate Board." Hart said. "It was just a hobby until then."
Hobby turned entrepreneurial when Hart's superiors at work, who had previously refused offers to buy his map, suddenly learned of its sale. He was let go immediately.
"He came home at lunch one day white like a sheet and said 'I'm fired,'" remembered Rita. "We had a $50,000 mortgage and two children - it was a disaster."
In the face uncertainty, the seed of a business plan was planted - MapArt was born. Rita loaded her little Volkswagen Beetle full of maps and chugged off down Dixie Road, hitting up every gas station she passed for a sale.
"Some owners were difficult to persuade because they thought 'a map is a map' but I said 'uhn uh, a Volkswagen and a Mercedes are both cars, but there's a big difference between them - same with these maps,'" she remembered, noting the poor quality of the free maps offered at gas stations in those days. "I came home that first day with a pocketful of money."
Demand for the Schwerdts products slowly grew to the point where requests for other maps began rolling in - first Mississauga, then Brampton. Today, MapArt boasts a library of maps covering every Canadian city or town with a population of more than 5,000.
Their first business hiccup came early on, when a wrong address printed on the back of an order of 100,000 maps left a customer angered and the Schwerdts in a pinch. MapArt wasn't even close to its current roster of 23 employees at that point, so Hart turned to children from the neighbourhood for an affordable fix.
"I had every kid on our street putting the correct address over the wrong one with stickers - I gave them a penny a map. But one day I came home to an empty garage and a note that said 'We're on strike. We want more money,'" he said of MapArt's first and last workers' strike. "So a penny and a half it was from then on."
Gord officially joined the company in 1988, taking over the financing of the company - a tough challenge given MapArt's quick growth. By this time, their operations had grown to the point where the Schwerdts had to buy the house next door to accommodate their expansion - which worked until the City of Brampton, acting on a tip from a nosy neighbour, cited them for running a business in a residential area.
Their first official office building, bought by Gord on the sly before the citation, was located on Advance Road in Etobicoke. Although at first reluctant to move, Hart eventually ceded the timing was fortuitous.
"I had just purchased the (Advance office) and literally days afterward, the City of Brampton gave us a year to move the business," Gord explained. So in 1990, Etobicoke became the home of MapArt.
Among their neighbours was PizzaPizza - a definite perk, said Gord. When in 2001, the fast food giant approached him about buying the office (which at that point was fast becoming too small for MapArt's operations), a delicious, albeit fattening, deal was cut.
"They really only wanted our driveway so they could put in coolers, so we said we'd sell them the building as long as we could stay here for two years," Gord said of the negotiations. "They said that was fine as long as we didn't mind not having windows on one side, and I renegotiated back that that was acceptable as long as we got pizza for lunch every day...It was a fun deal, but none of us from the old days can even look at a pizza anymore."
In 2003, MapArt once again moved its operations to Ronson Drive, where they remain today. Much like their changing locations, so, too, has the company evolved.
While many in the mapmaking business have ceded to the advent of GPS technology, watching their businesses inch toward bankruptcy, MapArt has chosen instead to embrace the change and adapt with it.
"Five years ago, we realized GPS was definitely a very important part of our future. What we've done in that time is to recreate our type of look (from the detailed map books) in a GIS (geographic information system) format," Gord explained, noting the "astronomically huge" undertaking even won MapArt federal research and development funding. "We've found a huge niche, which is a standalone for us because there is no competition with it."
The business may have evolved and grown over the years, but some things, it seems, never change: While she's traded her Beetle in for a Mercedes, Rita still drives around with a ready supply of maps at her disposal, just in case a potential customer lies on the road ahead.