A Chat with July’s Profile, Howard Flax, CEO, FLAX art & design

CS: How do you deal with the increased postal rate increases?
HF: Our mailings will not increase over last year, and we expect that the additional revenue from Web sales will offset the higher postage costs.

CS: What’s the biggest mistake you ever made in the business, and how did you recover?
HF: When catalog sales started to decline about three years ago, we reacted late because we blamed external factors instead of internal. In truth, the catalog had become dated and stale. We recovered by going through a rebranding exercise that left us with a fresh, newly designed catalog and a new companion Web site that wound up winning a Webby award. Our customers responded quite favorably to the change.