Meet Betty Mills

Her name is Betty Mills and, while she doesn’t exist in the physical sense, she has most likely been a part of your daily life since 2002.

"Our mission, what we’ve set out to do, is to build a great American brand,” Hanna said about Betty Mills, a TOP 500 e-commerce company and one of the Internet’s leading janitorial and supply businesses headquartered in San Mateo. "Our company evolved quite a bit along the way. Most recently, we’ve entered the industrial supply, the office snack, over 2,000 organic and all-natural snacks and that’s a very big leading differentiator of Betty Mills. The most recent category is medical supplies. We’ve now got over 130,000 products on the site.”

Hanna, formerly of the four-person startup team that founded Onsale.com, began Betty Mills following the dot-com implosion in a time when no one wanted anything to do with the technology business. But Hanna and his founding partner, David Schulhof, saw potential in bringing customers a new way to purchase everyday household items. Despite not knowing much about San Mateo, Hanna was drawn to the city and thought it was a good place to launch his new company.

"It was very retro in 2002,” Hanna said of the place his company has always called home. "It still is. It has an old-fashioned vibe to it. Back then there was a drugstore on the corner. Slowly but surely this old-fashioned ‘retro-ness’ really rubbed off on me and I fell in love with San Mateo. So when we went to the branding of Betty Mills, the old-fashioned nature of San Mateo rubbed off.”

Initially a janitorial supply company, Betty Mills has grown to encompass a wide range of products people use in their daily lives. From hand sanitizer to toilet paper, vacuums to AA batteries, Red Bull to Bubballoo chewing gum. The company has recently branched out into the medical industry and on its website a shopper will find generic medicines, wheelchairs and first aid kits.

"We’re a lifestyle brand for your business,” Hanna said.

Despite the fact it is entirely an online business, Betty Mills knows she still has plenty of people to meet. The company hired Rana Hannoush in early July as director of search engine marketing and is branching out into the social media realm as part of their attempt to reach out to new customers.

"Search engine marketing is probably the most important aspect of our company,” Hanna said. "Social for us has bit a little much of an experiment. Our belief early on was that people did not want to be social regarding cleaning supplies, as we’ve moved on toward food, organic food and also as you get into the medical supplies category people have more interest to understand the nature of those products.”

California currently makes up just 14 percent of Betty Mills’ business but Hanna is hoping to change that.

"We’ve made it very clear to a number of our friends locally that we’re a San Mateo company, and there’s a lot about San Mateo that’s in our roots,” Hanna said. "For many years, we’ve been unknown in San Mateo. If you were asking me three years ago, ‘Who’s Betty Mills?’ I would say we’re the leading cleaning and janitorial supply company on the Internet. The branding has kind of evolved over time, it was more about a category before, now it’s about a brand.”

For more information on Betty Mills visit www.bettymills.com.