A Chat with John Economaki, Founder and President, Bridge City Tool Works
CS: Why is that?
JE: If you're in the direct marketing industry, what do you have to get people to make your phone ring? You've got images and you've got words. The image is probably of less importance than the words. I'm shocked that people don't spend more time trying to make the words more important. I really anticipate looking forward to what Lewis has to say. I feel like no one knows how to write anymore. If you don't know anything, you're probably not going to read Herschell Gordon Lewis. I look at writing as a craft. I like Hemingway's quote, "If it was easy to read, it was hard to write." That's so true. When you look at what your market demands from you, you have to write something you know they will read. I like reading my own stuff. I tell people that I'm the most interesting person I know, because I make myself laugh. I'm being facetious, but I do try to put myself in the shoes of the customer. I'm 50 years old, now what? And if I can sell a $19.99 book about how to fold a paper airplane to a 50-year-old guy, I think that's pretty cool. It's not my core business, and quite frankly, we still have discriminatory shipping rates to discourage orders that small. But getting people to tack a small item like that onto an order, that's pretty easy. We increase our AOV with a lot of products like that.
