A Chat With September’s Profile, Scott Drayer, director of marketing, Paul Fredrick MenStyle

Catalog Success: Where’s the company headquartered?
Scott Drayer: Fleetwood, Pennsylvania, which is about midway between Allentown and Reading. And about an hour-and-a-half north of Philadelphia.

CS: What’s your customer demographics?
SD: It’s male professionals. It’s going to be a little bit older; we look at probably about 35 to 60 [years of age], focusing on dress shirts and ties. Like I said, it’s more of a professional male, higher income and family-oriented, although there’s a good possibility that he’s an empty nester at this point.

CS: What’s the primary merchandise offered in the catalog?
SD: Men’s business dress. Our roots have been in dress shirts — the company was actually founded as an offshoot of a contract shirt manufacturing company. Initially it was a shirt factory that was developing shirts for higher-end department stores, private label. And as a way to fill in some of the production lulls, Paul [Paul Fredrick, company founder] and his father-in-law, Lenny Abrams, who was the owner of the Fleetwood Shirt Company, decided to try to go direct to the consumer.
So it started off with small advertisements in the Wall Street Journal, basically just trying to sell a white dress shirt. We’ve kind off sprouted off of that, first introducing ties, cuff links, and more recently, more business casual dress as we went through the dot-com bubble. Things like that, as well as suits.

CS: When was the company established?
SD: My belief is that we’ve been in business for 24 years. The catalog was first mailed in ’89, and then we launched PaulFredrick.com in ’95.

CS: Does the company operate any retail stores?
SD: We do not operate retail stores, just the online and catalog.

CS: What’s the average SKU count per catalog?
SD: Between 700 and 800 per book, on a style and color basis.