A Chat with Arnie Zaslow, executive vice president, ATD American Co.

CS: How did the company/catalog get started?
AZ: We started in 1931. We started in the retail linens business. And by that I mean bedsheets, pillow cases, all that kind of stuff. We remained in the retail business from 1931 until 1952. In 1952, we started selling to institutions. We still sold primarily through the vehicle of competitive invitations to bid, which were generated by states, municipalities, federal agencies and the like. By 1957, we decided we wanted to automate the selling function. You started to see the beginning of automation in production, automation in accounting, but nobody ever was doing much in the way of automating their selling. The closest thing to automated selling is direct-response selling, where you send out a catalog and that’s the investment in technology. And then orders will come in as a result. We published the first catalog in 1957, and we printed 40,000 of them. It consisted primarily of textile products, and these were for hotels, motels, hospitals, prisons and so forth. But we also dipped in to changing some of our product categories to allow for bigger markups, because the textile field was an extremely competitive field. So we decided to go into allied products in the furniture field. And by that I mean commonplace items such as folding chairs, folding tables, stacking chairs. And that blossomed into business furniture such as desks and some case goods. And then peripheral products: lockers, bulletin boards. So by late 1959, we had a pretty full-scale book, and that continued to grow. Now today, we’re still essentially in the business of selling to institutions. One departure from that is that we own a textile plant in Thomaston, Georgia, where we manufacture bedsheets, but we sell them only to distributors that then sell them to institutions. But that’s the only departure from our core business.