Willy’s Works Fireworks – The Beginning of a Local Legend

Willy’s Works Fireworks – The Beginning of a Local Legend ~ by Lisa J of Words on Tap Writing

PART I OF III

I am truly blessed to have the opportunity to meet some beautiful people in this little city of ours, and I have this opportunity because someone gave me a chance. This story is the essence of what it means to give people a chance, and I’m so excited to share. I will not lie; it was an interview that made me quite emotional. They say you can see a person’s soul through their eyes, and while I do believe that, you can also see their joy, their pain, their triumph and their regrets. When I sat with Ricky “Willy” Chandler of Willy Works Fireworks I could see all of these, and by the end of our conversation, he humbly thanked me for taking time to talk to him. Blessed to have had the opportunity, I could not leave without a hug. I just don’t know if he’ll ever know how grateful I am to him for the inspiration to keep following my own path.

To begin his story would mean to begin before fireworks were even a sparkle in Willy’s world. To say he started from nothing would be an understatement, however, would also be a misstatement. Ricky/Willy, born in Kentucky, but making his roots here in Indiana in 1960, started with two parents who taught him valuable lessons in life; his mom, the Sunshine lady, always encouraging him that anything was possible, and his dad, the gas station owner who knew the importance of service to customers. To this day, Willy recites his mother’s quotes, one being “God, Guts and Go For It”, and he can still tell you that the moment he witnessed his dad compliment a sweet, disheveled, 92 year old lady, by saying just how beautiful she was, and noticing her face light up with a smile, he knew what it meant to make others feel good. This is what he strives for every single day.

However, as I said earlier, to say Willy came from nothing was an understatement and this is true, but it was later in life that he experienced what exactly nothing meant. Falling into a dark time, Willy struggled with addiction and through this time, lost his family to divorce and found himself looking for a place to live. It was a good Samaritan that offered him a horse barn to sleep, and it was there that things began to turn around. Needing money to eat, a friend suggested that manure was a potential money maker and selling it for fertilizer could possibly help him get back on his feet. Desperate, this is exactly what he did, and according to him, this is where his life changed. He finally felt useful, and because he was working to eat, there was no money to feed his addiction. Someone gave him a chance, and he was filled with hope, and it wasn’t long after that he then discovered, with a little sweat and a lot of hard work, selling was his forte, and firewood was his next path, leading him exactly to where he belonged.

This was, of course, to a firework stand. Approached with an opportunity to help at a local street stand, Willy accepted and found himself not only selling fireworks, but teaching himself marketing using the very tools he was taught as a child. Noticing that there was a stand across the street, Willy contemplated on ways to draw more people. Still young, fearless, with a motto of having fun, he went to the closest convenience store and bought body paint and painted himself full of colorful fireworks at a time when tattoos weren’t the norm, and there was still a sense of shock value.  This worked, so he continued to wow the customers as he lit off fireworks to show them exactly what they were getting. When that also worked, it gave him the confidence to open his own stand the very next year.

It was at this time, that Ricky Chandler truly became Willy. He needed a gimmick, a way to stand out from all the other firework stands in the area, and for this, he drew inspiration from clown school. Yes, Willy was a clown. In our interview he said that back in time on his first day of clown school, they were told that they had 3 days to come up with a clown name, and if they didn’t, not to bother coming back. Ricky/Willy, sat in his car and recited fun names and for some reason something close to Willywohwanda kept running through his mind. Repeating it over and over, it finally dawned on him, Willy works, and Willy the clown was created. So at his firework start, to play off the name even more, instead of fireworks, Willy’s Works worked and Willy’s Works – Fireworks was born. As a fun side note, to make the story even cooler, Willy realized later that his dad’s middle name and his grandfather’s first name were both William.

It was now 1981, and Willy had gone from homeless, sleeping in a barn to owning his own firewood and firework business. While he had the marketing skills to sell his entire stock, he learned quickly that there was much more to the business than gimmicks and shows. One of those things was where to set up shop. That first year it was an 8×8 table of fireworks, where he would buy $100 worth of stock and once he sold that $100, he would turn around and buy $100 more. This was the easy part.  It was the location of the table that would trip him up over the years. He had stands in Merrillville, Lowell, Crown Point, St. John and Cedar Lake (which has a very interesting story you will read later), and some years not knowing left him on edge until the day before he was to open for business. Willy never knew where Willy Works would be year after year due to leases and availability, but just like Willy, he made that part of his marketing scheme as well.

Ever wonder about the hundreds of signs you see asking you Where’s Willy? Well, there is a reason. Jumping from place to place became the reality of Willy’s Works, which then became the joke, which then became part of the Willy’s Works brand. Each step or misstep gave Willy a new idea, and from that idea another one was born, but at the heart of every one was the customers themselves, and what would make them smile. Willy built his business from an 8×8 table and the cash in his pocket, and unknowingly found the secret to marketing..Heart and Soul with a desire to make people walk away feeling good.

Check in tomorrow for Part II of Willy Works and the details behind the marketing genius of Ricky “Willy” Chandler.