A Chat with Fred Meyers, President & CEO, The Queensboro Shirt
CS: You mentioned on your Web site that you eliminated print catalogs from your marketing plan. When did you do that and why?
FM: I guess it was around 1999 or 2000 that we started messing around with the Internet. Our first site was in 1998. We started to get serious about e-mail marketing in 2000 or so. It required a lot of behind the scenes development to make sure you could process the orders. You didn't want to cause more trouble than you were solving. We had always produced our own catalogs. And producing the catalog, as anyone knows, creating each catalog is like birthing a child. It's a very difficult and time-consuming process, especially if you're trying to run a business at the same time. As we started to send out more e-mails to our existing customer base and began to build a file, we found that we were getting pretty good response from these promotional e-mails. We found that we were getting worse and worse at getting our catalog deadlines met for production. So we went from producing 12 catalogs per year to producing 10 because we missed a couple of deadlines. Then we went to eight and then to four. And the next thing you know, we never got around to producing a catalog this year. We'd sit at our meetings and decide on what to do. And we always said, we'll do this one things first, then get back to the catalog. And we eventually saw we were able to replace the catalog with the e-mails, and our sales actually went up without going back down. Our last catalog was in 2003. We sent four that year. Right now we send some postcards about once a month or every six weeks to our customers. That's the only marketing we're doing offline right now. Doing away with the catalog wasn't a planned death. It happened over time, from neglect more than anything else.