A Chat With April’s Profile, Tim Burns, brand manager of Edmund Scientific

CS: How did the company locate the prospects to mail to with this increase in circulation? How do you find prospects today?
TB: Over the last four years we’ve shifted a lot of business away from outside lists over to the co-op databases. I’d say we were 50/50 four years ago, and we’re probably more like 90/10 right now.

CS: What factors have attributed to Edmund Scientific’s success? What will these factors be in the future?
TB: I go back to staying true to the brand. We can’t get too far outside our niche. Edmund Scientific always has been a niche business. I like to think of it as the place that science nerds went for their stuff before the Internet came along. If you were into science, if you loved astronomy, if you were the kind of person that took things apart and put them back together or built your own gadget to solve a problem around your house, you probably knew who Edmund Scientific was because it had the kind of stuff that fed that need. You could get stuff for your hobby from Edmund Scientific that you couldn’t find anywhere else. Now with the Internet you can Google pretty much everything. There’s more competition out there, but the brand is still very, very strong in that niche of people like I just described. It’s about staying true to that and not getting too far outside.
I’ll say that one of the interesting challenges in the last couple of years is a lot of the merchandise for those type of people — the really good new stuff — has been more slanted towards the technology geek than just the science geek. More of a slant towards computer science than the straight natural sciences. So you see a lot of USB gadgets and things that attach to your computer. Or binary — people that think binary like computer programmers. That’s been one of the shifts that we’ve been successful with.