A Chat With March's Profile, Jason Blake, founder/president, The Pond Guy, Inc.

Catalog Success: Where's your company headquartered?
Jason Blake: Marine City, Michigan. It's about 30 miles north of Detroit.
CS: When was the company founded?
JB: The company was founded in 1996.
CS: When did you begin mailing catalogs?
JB: The company started while I was in high school; I was cleaning and servicing ponds in the neighborhood. Then I went away to college at Michigan State and I thought that I could mail out catalogs and continue to do the business while I was here in East Lansing [Mich.]. So I put a catalog together my first year … sent that out to my existing customers. I didn't really understand the catalog business at all. I just figured I would hand them out and people would buy stuff.
Luckily, the service business was able to support the catalog. I probably didn't make a dollar. In fact, I'm sure I lost money on my first catalog. I slowly started growing this list doing trade shows, advertising in magazines, yellow-page ads, word-of-mouth, etc. The catalog started to grow and become more and more dominant. By the time I graduated college in 2000, it really started going. The catalog was happening a little bit. But I still wasn't getting into buying lists.
And I still didn't understand merchandising, really. I just had these products. But I did start to do my own private-label. I started branding a few of the hot products that seemed like we sold a lot of, put my own name on them, and got those out there.
In 2001 I moved basically from my parents’ basement to the location I'm in now, which is in an industrial building. We've added on to it and actually rented more space. We have a retail store, our service business still operates out of it, and then all of our shipping and catalog services are out of this building.
- Companies:
- Abacus
- Amazon.com
- Best Buy
- NextAction
- People:
- Jason Blake
- Tom Beddows

Joe Keenan is the executive editor of Total Retail. Joe has more than 10 years experience covering the retail industry, and enjoys profiling innovative companies and people in the space.