A Chat with John Economaki, Founder and President, Bridge City Tool Works

So I took an ad out in a magazine in 1983 for two tools. The ad cost $2,700; it was a one-third page vertical, and I received about $2,700 in orders. I was ecstatic because I was so naive. I thought I had broken even, until I realized I needed to make the things. It was enlightening. I didn't make any money on it, but it was really encouraging to know there were indeed people who were interested in that. As you might imagine, for every order I got, I got 10 requests for a catalog and when you have only two items, it's hard to put together a catalog. So I quickly decided to put together three more things and took the $2,700 I got and reinvested that into a catalog concept, which really, basically, was a card for each tool, which was ridiculously expensive. But the cool thing was that my customers liked it; it was different. We just sort of snowballed.