A Chat with Fred Meyers, President & CEO, The Queensboro Shirt
CS: What are your key points to success?
FM: We've not always operated 100% smoothly and efficiently. We've had periods where we made more errors than we should have and when it's taken us much longer than it should've to turn around orders. But the quality of our products always has been great. We've always guaranteed everything we did unconditionally for the past 10 years. We've never argued with the customer if they haven't been happy with the quality of our product. When we've made mistakes, we've gone to extraordinary lengths to solve the problem for the customer, whatever was involved. Even if we weren't running on all cylinders all the time, our customers knew we were going to work hard to fix any problems or issues. That's just a lot of hard work, and it can be difficult. But the fact that I've been able to keep as many customers as I have over the years because of the effort we've put into the relationship has enabled us to get through the difficult times. The other thing is just to always be innovating, and trying to improve your processes. Lower your prices whenever you can. Whenever I've been able to, I lower my prices, rather than keep that margin for myself. I've always been a believer in the fact that the lower the prices are, the more we'll sell, and the more money that we'll make. A lot of people don't feel that way, but we do a lot of price testing on our promotions, and almost invariably, the lower the price, the more money and more profit we make on the promotion. But originally, our minimum order was 12 shirts with the logo, back 20 years ago. Ten years ago we were able to drop it down to six, and four years ago we dropped it to four. And all during that time, we were lowering our prices as well. We kept trying to improve our efficiencies and invest in technology. We were early onto the Web, which gave us a big advantage over a lot of people.
