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

CS: How long have you been working for ATD?
AZ: My late father founded the company in 1931. I was virtually born into it, but I do have a little plaque in my office that says I’ve been with the company for 60 years, because I started when I was about 16.

CS: Having been with the business for this long, what are some of the bigger challenges you faced?
AZ: Particularly in the early years, the thing that drove us into the catalog business, it was figuring out how to secure better margins. Early on most of our business was secured through competitive bids. Those were so competitive, the markups were infinitesimally small. And that was the real challenge. How could we increase our markup? And the answer was direct mail and cataloging. The biggest challenge we faced in early years was increasing markup. Of course, when we launched the catalog, we began to face the challenges faced buy all catalogers, how to keep increasing response rates and dollars returned per catalog. That’s an ongoing challenge. Another significant challenge are the changes in the U.S. Postal service. When we started postage constituted only a small contribution to the cost of the catalog, today, it’s a huge contribution. In many cases, the postage approaches the cost of catalog production.