A Chat with Fred Meyers, President & CEO, The Queensboro Shirt
CS: I noticed on the Web site that you kind of selling the idea of not printing a catalog as a cost-savings to the customer. Have you always done that?
FM: We've seen the change of the economics in the business. It used to cost us more than $20 each to get an order from an existing customer, or reactivate them. Now it costs us less than $5, and sometimes less than a dollar. Our average order is $175 to $200. That's a huge cost savings there. It's really let us be a lot more competitive on our pricing. In fact, it's allowed us to under-price the market. Lands' End for example, their cotton polo shirt, their standard shirt, with embroidery the shirts end up being $28 each. And their minimum order is six shirts. Our shirts are the same quality, the same quality yarn and construction, although we style our slightly differently. We designed a shirt specifically for embroidery and office wear. And we sell that for $14.95, including embroidery, and a lot of times we put it on special for $12.50. So we're less than half the price of Lands' End, and they've got their catalogs to support.
