A Chat With David Isham, president/CEO, National Roper’s Supply
© Profile of Success, Catalog Success magazine, September 2005
Catalog Success: When was the catalog established?
David Isham: We mailed our first catalog in the fall of 1994.
CS: Where are your headquarters?
Isham: Decatur, Texas, a small town about 30 miles from the Dallas/Ft.Worth metroplex.
CS: How do you describe your primary merchandise?
Isham: Saddles, tack and western wear for the serious equine enthusiast.
CS: What are your primary customer demographics?
Isham: Active horse people around the country. Our catalog is the official catalog of the U.S. Team Roping Association and the U.S. Calf Roping Association. Our catalog was designed originally to be the end-all catalog for active cowboys participating in rodeo type events around the country.
CS: What are your main sales channels?
Isham: I’ve got three retail stores. One in Decatur. One in Weatherford, Texas, and one in Granbury, Texas. We’re about 40 percent retail, 60 percent mail order. Within mail order, about 20 percent of the business comes in over the Web.
CS: How did the company/catalog get started?
Isham: I’ve had my main western store in Decatur since 1989. I’m an active, competing roper/cowboy at rodeos and ropings around the country. I’ve competed since I was 18 years old. I rodeod all through college and got my accounting degree. I went to work for one of the big accounting firms in Ft. Worth after I graduated, knowing that I ultimately wanted to have my own business within my lifestyle and hobby. That was a western lifestyle and equine-related business.
When I was 24, the little western store that had existed for 15 years in Decatur went up for sale. It was owned by the parents of some friends of mine. I was able to buy that little retail store. I moved it to a larger location that we redid in Decatur. It was a really big retail store in a pretty small town. It had and continued to develop a great saddle, tack and rope department within the store, because that’s where my interests were. People that would come through my store from out of town would always say, “I wish we had something like this in my hometown.” I knew from being in the industry that there wasn’t anything like my store in most parts of the country. So I started running mail order ads.
The name of my store was David’s Western Store. That name worked because I grew up in Decatur and everyone knew me. Having David’s Western Store meant a lot in Decatur. I would run these ads in Pro Rodeo Sports newspaper and equine newspapers across the country, and the ad read “David’s Western Store, Call us for whatever you need. Boots, hats, you name it.” But I always knew that the typical person reading that ad wouldn’t be able to envision exactly what we were.
I knew that I had one of the greatest stores in the country for the active cowboy, but the name David’s Western Store didn’t conjure images of greatness. People would just envision a little, mom-and-pop, small-town western store. So I had to come up with a name that represents who I am. It was one of those middle of the night things: I’d call the mail order side of the company National Roper’s Supply. That name would instantly tell the customer what we’re all about. “If they’re National Roper’s Supply and I’m a roper, they’ve got to have what I need.”
So from one month to the next, we changed the mail order ad to read National Roper’s Supply and the phone calls quadrupled. We were still filling orders from the stock room of the store, grabbing a used boot box and packing an order. We even ran the sales from the cash register.
Everybody’s first question when they called was, “Do you have a catalog?” I’d say, “No, but I’ve got everything you need.” I had to talk everyone through the sale on the phone. But every single caller asked if we had a catalog. I knew instantly that we had to produce a little catalog.
In the fall of 1994, we sent out our first catalog, which was black and white and 48 pages. We printed 14,000 of them, that was the minimum I could get printed for a reasonable price. I couldn’t fathom to whom I was going to send the. Every person who asked for the catalog, I wrote down their names and put them in a shoe box. So we had a few thousands names, but that was it. As soon as I put “call for our free catalog” in the ads, the phone just rang off the wall. I felt like I was on to something. We started growing the catalog from there.
We’re National Roper’s Supply, so our bread and milk product in our catalog is the rope that guys use to compete. We ship about 60,000 ropes a year to competitive cowboys across the country. A guy that ropes a couple of times a week, he’ll on average buy three or four ropes a month. A rope to a cowboy is a lot like a golf ball to a golfer. If you play golf, you just love to open up a fresh new pack of golf balls. No matter what new ball comes out onto the market, you try it because you think it might increase your performance. Ropes are the same way. Guys like fresh ropes, because they’re quicker and just feel good. Needless to say, we ship a lot of ropes. The largest rope company in the industry — we’re their largest account, they’re our largest vendor — 10 years ago took the rope market and tack industry by storm. They had enlisted the help of an advertising agency that created a very effective marketing campaign for them.
So the guy who ran that campaign for them gave me a call and said, “I think I can help you with your catalog.” I hired him to help create an image for the catalog as well as a consistent marketing campaign. For the next two years, his staff produced my catalog.
At that same time, there was an association of cowboys growing in the country called the U.S. Team Roper’s Association.The USTRA has a database of over 80,000 active competing ropers across the country. They put on huge roping events. To put it in perspective, the finals are in Oklahoma City each year in October, and more than 6,000 guys compete. There’s about $4 million in prize money given away in only eight days. Guys that rope for a hobby are roping for prize money. The USTRA handicaps every roper in the country. The biggest groups of ropers are the beginner-type ropers, the hobbyist ropers.
This association was growing at the same time my catalog was, and one of the smartest things I did was to approach the association about being it official catalog. We’re now in our 10th year as the official catalog for the USTRA. What that did was give me exclusive access within the industry to the mailing list for active ropers in the United States. Plus at all of their high-profile events around the country, I was a corporate sponsor. We also got premium exhibit space at the finals rodeo. That really helped us instantly to become the source for ropers across the country.
Those first couple of years, it’s all about who you’re going to mail the catalog to. When you talk about a successful list delivering a 1 percent response rate, that’s really tough to start and grow a business with. Becoming the official catalog for these team ropers, being a part of one of the fastest-growing equine sports in the country, as well as being a part of this growth industry, we were just in the right place at the right time. We were able to achieve much greater response rates.
Our biggest goal — or barrier — was to take a person with a rural lifestyle and convince him to order via mail order. Ten years ago when a guy bought ropes, he typically would go to the store, take five or six ropes off the rack and swing each of them around. He may swing a dozen ropes before he picks out two or three that he thought were just right. And again, it’s like packages of golf balls; all the ropes are the same. Within a brand, the naked eye can’t tell the difference, and you can’t really feel the difference. I knew that, but guys historically felt as though they had to actually swing the ropes in order to pick out good ones. So they were hesitant to buy their ropes mail order. That was our challenge: letting them know buying ropes mail order was alright.
Our philosophy was if you wanted free shipping with your order, just buy six ropes. You could buy whatever else you wanted as well, but if you bought six ropes, shipping on the whole order was free. We also guaranteed the ropes. We guaranteed the ropes we shipped had never been uncoiled or swung by another person. If you walked into a typical tack store and went to the rope section, you’d find all these ropes opened up and lying around because guys were swinging them. That lowers a buyer’s confidence level, seeing that someone else had already swung the rope and rejected it. So I would guarantee that no one else had swung the rope, and our customer would be the first person to touch it. And then I included a postage-paid return shipping label so if he didn’t like any of the ropes, he could slap the label on a box and ship it right back. Those things put our customers at ease, taking the risk out of mail order.
Needless to say, we’re very confident of the products we ship. Ropes are our business, and we have extremely few returns on ropes. I feel we actually changed the culture out there. When a guy walks into a store now, he doesn’t feel like he has to swing the ropes. He now feels that as long as it’s coiled, it’s going to work just fine for him.
CS: It’s interesting that change has been made as a result of your presence in the industry.
Isham: Well, it’s a relatively small industry. The equine and western world is a big world, and everybody has had the desire to ride a horse. But our customer is very serious about it. The clothing, boots and hats that we sell mail order aren’t really outfit western wear. We’re selling stuff that guys use everyday. It’s their life. Western wear for us is just a part of life, not just because a company is throwing a barbeque on Friday night.
CS: So you had no prior experience in cataloging before you started this?
Isham: No I didn’t. I’m 40 right now, and I was 29 or 30 when we were mailing our first catalogs. I had the help of the guy at the agency I mentioned, but they really hadn’t been involved in mail order at all either. They did a great job creating marketing campaigns for companies, but we limped through the production of catalogs together. And I instantly realized how expensive it is to produce a catalog. I’m still good friends with the guy, and we joke about it now. But I was a young guy with a small company, and I was always hammering on them about how expensive it was.
So I began the process of putting together my own staff to produce my own catalogs. The first thing I changed was the photography. They hired a photographer to come in and shoot stuff. And doggone, they’d just shoot hundreds of pictures two states away at this agency. I’d ship product out there, and I’d get pictures back. But when a photographer doesn’t know anything about saddles, tack and ropes, and you send him a bridle for a horse and he’s likely to hang it upside down and shoot a picture of it. So we’d shoot just tons of pictures, and it was costing me a fortune. I’d have to tell him what was wrong with them, and he’d reshoot them.
This was at the same time that digital photography was just starting out. The nicest digital camera on the market was a 2.1 megapixel model. I decided that I was just going to shoot this stuff myself. I bought an off-the-shelf 2 megapixel camera. I went to a few seminars, and they were recommending these $25,000 cameras. I said, “That’s hogwash! It’s just saddles and tack. I’m not spending $25,000 to take pictures of that.” So I bought this typical digital camera and a little bitty light set and started taking pictures myself. My pictures were outstanding, because I knew what they needed to look like.
I hired a graphic designer who had a little experience in my industry, and she turned out to be the creative genius behind our catalogs. She’s still with me. For five years we produced all of our catalogs. Sitting right beside her I’d shoot a picture and hand her the card. She’d download them and put them together. She didn’t know much about saddles and tack, but before long she knew what I expected a page to look like. I became the creative guy behind the catalog for a while. I had a lot of horses, so I’d go out to my place, put the saddle on, shoot the picture on the horse and bring it back. We had a still shot from what I had taken inside and an action shot and our catalog became really neat. It was extremely inexpensive to shoot our own stuff digitally.
I remember talking with the first few printers, and the idea of producing everything digitally was unheard of. I hated the film processing charge at the end. You take the catalog and produce all that film to print the catalog. I didn’t understand the need for that when all this digital technology was out there. We searched around until we found a printer who would do our stuff digitally. Ten years ago, printers were just beginning to do that. Now everything is that way, but I remember talking to photographers and printers who would just laugh saying, “That digital stuff is never going to replace film.” But it did. Anyway, we were able to produce our catalog very efficiently in-house.
CS: What was your biggest challenge in the first few years with the catalog.
Isham: I owned my retail stores, so I was the head of the company. I searched out every product, wrote every piece of copy and shot every image in the book. It’s hard to get out and grow your company when you’re bogged down with the operational details. That was a big challenge.
From a financial standpoint, the catalog is a cash flow nightmare. So one of the first people I hired as we were getting into the mail order stuff was a CFO. Someone to handle the accounting side of the business. That was one of the smartest things I ever did, relieving myself of that burden. When I hired him, one of the first things he helped me do was establish a line of credit. That’s probably a piece many people are after, but many small businesspeople don’t take it seriously enough. They don’t put enough work and time into being professional in the financial side of the company. Banks are willing to loan money to growing businesses, but you’ve got to have all your ducks in a row. Hiring the CFO to keep us in order allowed us to get the line of credit that allowed us to be well-capitalized. That allowed us to bring in the necessary inventory and hire the number of employees we needed. It allowed us to ship more and more catalogs over the years.
CS: You mentioned you were running a lot of the day-to-day operations. Certainly hiring a CFO took some of the work off of your plate. How did you handle the rest of it?
Isham: As we grew, I was able to put a lot of key people in place. My CFO really became my right-hand guy. He was capable of much more than the financial side of the company. He got out of public accounting because he wanted to be more involved in the operational side of the business. He was able to take over so much day-to-day management of the company, especially when it came to our retail stores. He became the go-to guy for my store managers. Over time I was able to put buyers in place, first just for the store. I hired some great ladies who were buyers for the stores, and I got that off my plate.
I really stayed most active in the mail order side of the company until the last two to four years. I met a young guy at the trade show market in Denver who was wearing a shirt that said Teamroper.com. This was right at the beginning five years ago of everyone’s fear of the Internet. So seeing this guy, I immediately thought this sounded like competition. I introduced myself to him and found out he was hoping to become the Internet version of National Roper’s Supply. I invited him down to Decatur in the guise of a possible partnering, but honestly I was so impressed with him I wanted to try and get him to work for me. So I brought he and his wife down to Decatur and offered him a job as the key guy on the mail order side of the business. He was also an active roper and horseman. Over the last four years he’s taken over more of the responsibility for the catalog, and this past year I promoted him to general manager of the catalog.
It’s really just looking for key people, those really sharp people who can do pieces of your company better than you can do them. That’s what I’m always looking for. There’s nobody who knows every piece of my business better than me, because it’s mine and I built it. But there are a lot of people out there who can do individual pieces of the business much better than I can do them. That started out with my CFO, Jeff Jones. And that’s what I got with Jim Lamerand, head of my catalog.
CS: Is there anything that sticks out as your greatest career challenge?
Isham: Ultimately, you have to come to grips with the fact that you’re limited by what you can get done in a 24-hour day. I had to develop patience. Some things just take longer, and you have to be okay with that. My family is very important to me. I have four kids. The challenge is always to balance your family life with your professional life. And in my case, my professional life was already my lifestyle. Keeping all of that in perspective was a challenge. Early on, it was tough to give up pieces of the company. Ten years ago, it was my dad who was my mentor, and he said, “You’re getting to a point where you can’t do all of this anymore.” He gave me some words of wisdom in business. He told me that for him, he could only effectively manage three or four people at a time. At that time I had about 20 people who were reporting to me. That’s what’s stuck with me, finding good people to help you out.
CS: Tell me more about your dad.
Isham: My dad, Robert Isham, was in the manufacturing business. I grew up in the Ft. Worth area in a subdivision. When I was 10 years old, he and my mom decided to move to a small town, Decatur. We moved out to 24 acres, and it was great. My dad was never a cowboy, just a businessman who moved to the country. But I made friends with cowboys, got a horse, and by the time I was 18, I was immersed in the lifestyle. That’s what caused me to be in the business I’m in.
CS: What sets your company apart from others?
Isham: You’re not involved with horses very long before you start you realize you need to be a better horseman. You’re always learning if you want to be successful, especially in competition. When a customer walks into a tack store, he comes with a problem. I think for business, one of my favorite books is called “Raving Fans.” (Ed. note: “Raving Fans: A Revolutionary Approach To Customer Service,” by Ken Blanchard, Sheldon Bowles.) Step Two in that book is: “Find out what your customer really needs.” Everything in our catalog our customers can buy anywhere else. We have very few exclusive products. So we want to be a company that helps you become a better horseman.
One of the things we’ve done recently is build a training center. Through our catalog, we market our training center. We have 36 clinics a year. The first few pages of our catalog is all the info in our training center. We hire world champions in various events to run clinics for 12 to 20 people every weekend. People come from all over the country to participate. Half of the clinics are taught by me and my staff; half are taught by these champions. What we’re doing is serving that need, helping people become better horsemen. We show people how to use our products and become better horsemen. We’re trying to create lifetime customers through these clinics. We’ve had 1,200 people come to these clinics in the past two-and-a-half years. If you’re a fly fisherman, you bleed Orvis and want to go to their clinics. If you’re into L.L. Bean, you get involved in their rock climbing or fishing clinics.
I just can’t stress how important that is to build your brand. I look at all these catalogs, and so many companies have multiple brands and things get lost. We try to keep our customer tied to the NRS family. I’m very visible in the company and the catalog. All of our models are employees or active ropers. They’re normal people. And of our customers know this because they seem them at events. People stop me at rodeos because they recognize me from the catalog.
CS: What is your current biggest business challenge, and how do you plan to resolve it?
Isham: We’re currently in a 15,000-square-foot warehouse and distribution center right behind my store in Decatur. We’re starting to outgrow a lot of our systems. There are some great mail order and retail systems out there, but we can’t find one to fit both models. We’ve gone through a struggle in the past year trying to overcome that.
CS: What’s your definition of success?
Isham: Being happy. If you’re happy with what you do, you’re successful. If you can balance your family and your work, that’s fantastic. I have it great. I’m a roper. And that’s what I do for a living. When I go to work, I get to do my hobby. When I get home, I tell my wife that I’m home from “work.” She just laughs. My hobby is my job. It’s perfect. Sales don’t matter. It sounds corny, but it’s great to see someone’s life changed because of what they learned at one of our clinics. Seeing what I do make a difference in someone else’s life, that’s a great joy.
CS: If a new cataloger asked you to name the keys to success in business, what would you say?
Isham: Be well-capitalized.
Also, you need to have, as an owner, a passion for what it is you’re doing. That’s the biggest thing. I see from vendors in my business, the ones who struggle are the ones that don’t have anyone who’s passionate about their product. If you don’t have a passion for the product or service you deliver, it will be hard to be successful.
National Roper’s Supply
Catalog established: 1994
Headquarters: Decatur, Texas
Primary merchandise: saddles, tack and western wear
Annual circ: 800,000
# of SKUs: 15,000
# of employees: 85
Customer demographics: active cowboys and serious equine enthusiasts
