A Chat With Dyan Eagles, founder and president, DharmaCrafts
© Profile of Success, Catalog Success magazine, August 2005
Catalog Success: When was the catalog established?
Dyan Eagles: 1979, but it didn’t turn into a catalog until 1981. It started out as a little 5 1/2-by-8 1/2-inch black and white book. I started it with $10. After a meditation retreat, I came back and decided to start a business selling meditation supplies. I started out by making drawstring pants for my friends and hanging up fliers in Harvard Square. I was living in a meditation center and studying Zen with a Korean Zen Master; it just grew out of my interest in that.
CS: Where are your headquarters?
Eagles: We’re located in a barn in Lexington, Mass.
CS: What is your primary merchandise now?
Eagles: Buddist meditation supplies and Asian furnishings. The Buddhist supplies include meditation cushions that we make ourselves in our shop. We’re famous for those. That was our first real product after the pants. That accounts for about 25 to 27 percent of our total buisness.
CS: How many employees do you have?
Eagles: Eight employees, including myself. We might have to hire some additional people at Christmas, but the eight is year-round. We outsource the [catalog] design; we’ve used the same company for 10 years. We outsource the photography. We do all of our own fulfillment here — almost all of it. All the small things we fulfill from our own warehouse. And the big things, the furniture, big garden statues and granite objects, those things are fulfilled by our vendors.
CS: Tell me more about how the catalog got started.
Eagles: It turned from a little flier in Harvard Square to a small brochure. My Zen master published a book, and I learned how to make meditation pillows. So including the pants, I now had three products. I made a little brochure. At that time we didn’t rent mailing lists, but I advertised in Yoga Journal, New Age Magazine and East West Journal. That was how we began to build our mailing list, our housefile, by sending the brochure to people who requested it from our print ads. As I would get new products, the book just got bigger and bigger.
CS: What was your biggest challenge in the first few years?
Eagles: Learning to run it as a business. I had no background in business, and I really was more of a craftsperson than a businessperson, so I had a very steep learning curve. Luckily I had some good help along the way. But getting a grip on the financials, put a team together, buying the kind of computer systems I needed when I was a technophobe — those were the big challenges for me in starting it up.
CS: So you got some help from others along the way?
Eagles: The father of one of my children’s friend’s was formerly a president of Heinz Corp., and one day I took my profit and loss sheet to him and said, “I just don’t understand this!” And he said, “Dyan, it’s so simple. It’s not rocket science. All you have to do is be able to count from 1 to 100. Don’t worry about the big numbers, just look at the percentages and chip away at it.”
When I started to think about it that way, it made sense, the financial part of it. That’s still the way I do it. I see the big numbers, too, now. But I really focus on the percent of sales. Growing the percent of sales.
CS: What has been your greatest career challenge, and how did you deal with it?
Eagles: I think the greatest challenge I faced was the beginning of the dot-com phase. At that time, I guess 1996, 1997 or so, we had a 60-page catalog, and most of it was books. We were the major Buddhist bookseller in the United States, and it was a really big part of our mission.
Along came Amazon, Barnes & Noble and the big discounters. It impacted our business incredibly. In fact, I used to have a whole person whose job it was just to help me select and buy the books review them and write the copy. Then I started to see on Amazon that they were actually quoting DharmaCrafts when they wrote about a book. It was so hard.
We said, “What do we do? We know if we stay with books, we’re going to go down. And if we don’t stay with books, what’s the mission of our company?” So we made a change and figured out a way to bridge that gap. We got rid of most of the books, and we instead focused on creating sacred space in the home through furnishings and art. I tested a couple of pieces of furniture on one spread, and it was very successful. So that’s the direction we’ve kept going in, and I think that’s what kept us alive.
But it really was hard to give up being an independent bookseller. We now carry a few books. We mostly select books that are related to our products rather than trying to bridge all the aspects and traditions of Buddhism. Usually they’re very product-related, although we’re testing again, adding a few books related to Buddhist teaching and also audio-related to Buddhist teaching. Those small additions have been successful, but I don’t think we can devote several spreads to books at this point. We just couldn’t get the discounts we needed from the publishers to make it worth it. That was our big challenge, and I think we got through it.
It’s really hard when you’re such a mission-focused company to be forced by economic conditions to change the whole way you view what your company does and what it could do. That was really big for all of us here. It’s so hard when there are so many good Dharma books to have to forgo those in favor of books related to products. We do sell a few extra books on the Web, but it’s not a big part of our business anymore.
CS: What sets your company apart from others?
Eagles: Within our own little niche, I think what sets us apart is that we keep regular business hours. We have very good systems, good customer service and 24 hour turnaround on our orders. I think within our own meditation group we operate better than anybody. We have live people answer the phone rather than send customers straight to voicemail. We’re very customer-oriented, and all of our people are very well trained to speak about the products. They can refer customers who are interested in meditation practice to other sources. That’s what I think sets us apart.
CS: Could you talk about your relationships with vendors and craftspeople? What’s your relationship with them like?
Eagles: One thing we’ve tried since the catalog started was to use it as a venue for Buddhist artists and craftspeople to sell their work. To do what in Buddhism is called “right livelihood.” We try to use as many Buddhist artists as we can, especially American Buddhist artists and craftspeople. We develop a lot of our products in cooperation with them. Our overseas vendors, or those who import from overseas, we try to build a partnership. Over the years it’s developed so that when the vendor goes to Korea, he tries to find products that will be just for our catalog. Same for vendors in Thailand or Japan. They bring back things that aren’t offered elsewhere, that are specifically for us. It helps us to have exclusive products, and that’s been a really important thing, I think, in our success.
We develop products with them as well. We’ve developed several jewelry pieces, some furniture, small home-altar pieces. With artwork, for instance, we’ll tell them how we want it to look and tell them to find a calligrapher who can do something in a specific way for us. We consulted with a company that was trying to develop a seat for meditation, and although they ended up making it available through our major competitor, we were really involved in the development.
We have our whole line of Sacred Spaces, the blue and white pieces. This is my little brainchild. I’ve always been very interested in traditional Japanese craft, and I’ve always loved Japanese textiles. So I designed these fabrics based on traditional kasuri patterns; had them woven in India; and subsequently designed into floor cushions. We selected blue and white tabletop pieces that would go with it. I’m very proud of it. I love the way it came out. We developed this with one of our vendors who was already weaving in India. The farbic gets shipped to us, and we cut and sew it into our own designs. So hopefully we’ll be expanding the patterns as time goes on. I’d like to do something with lighter backgrounds.
CS: What’s your current biggest business challenge, and how do you plan to resolve it?
Eagles: Growing our housefile. My business has always been very family-centered. I’ve always worked around my main job, which is raising my kids and getting them through school. But now they’ve all gone to college, and I feel like I really want to grow this catalog. I feel like I’ve put together this really great team of people, and we’re ready to go.
Our newest challenge is growing the catalog, and that means growing the housefile. That means finding new names, turning our one-time buyers into two-time buyers and financing further growth. We started to work with someone in the industry about a year ago as far as circulation goes. We started to use the co-op databases for the first time to get new names. Prior to that we just used targeted lists.That’s what we’re doing now, and we’re trying to do that in a very planned, well-thought out way so we don’t kill the company.
CS: What’s your definition of success?
Eagles: To me, success is doing something that nurtures you and the world, something that supports both you and the world. This business has been a way for me to pass on things that I learned from my own teacher that have helped me with my life, especially the practice of meditation. How [those teachings] make you connect with a part of yourself that’s kind and wise and how to use that to help people. To me, that’s what success is in a larger sense.
It’s neat to be able to work in a business that fulfills my highest aspirations as a human being. Something that I know helps people. That’s what our company is about. We don’t preach at people or do anything like that, but it’s totally mission-driven.
CS: Expanding on that, have you had difficulty in any way approaching business from that perspective?
Eagles: I think in most cases I’ve been very lucky, because of the kind of business that we are; most of the vendors and people who we use have similar takes on things. That hasn’t been a problem.
I think the real problem for me in the beginning, at least, was when I had to deal with big printing companies — other places that operated in a way that was not so much based on your word or your promise, but on contracts. In this business, I had to connect with the real business world, too, not just the New Age kind of things. To operate like a real business, that was tough.
One of the challenges at the beginning was to move beyond our little world and our little world view. Realize that we were a part of this larger business world and had to learn the things in order to relate to and understand what people were talking about — and crunch numbers and do contracts and hold people accountable and hold ourselves accountable, just the way it’s done everywhere else.
CS: What are some key points to your success?
Eagles: The person that runs my company helped me with this one. She says it’s the fact that I was always learning. Right now I have professional management; I’m really lucky. Because I was always learning though, the things that I was scared of, technology, insurance and contracts came easier. I was able to use some talents I have, too. I think I’m really good at merchandising. I love to look for things that are beautiful that I think our customers will love. I enjoy doing the creative for the catalog. It looks nice, and it’s always looked nice. As the catalog has grown, I’ve had no problem delegating things to people. In fact, the more things I can let go of, the happier I am, and the better I’m able to work on the things I’m really good at.
CS: What goals do you have for the catalog, and what steps will you take to get achieve them?
Eagles: Besides growing the housefile, we’ll be moving from our present location. It’s part of moving from the family-centric business to being a real, professional catalog. So we’ll be moving to a new warehouse that I’m a partner in renovating. It’s actually part of a really exciting project in the inner city of Lawrence, Mass. It’s an immigrant city, and it’s just starting to rise.
What I’m looking forward to doing with this business is somehow using it to benefit this new wave of Buddhist immigrants coming into Lawrence: Laotian people. I’d like to have our business do something related to job training. We manufacture our own line of pillows, and we need labor. There probably are things we can do to make their transition to America easier.
In our plans for the new design of our warehouse, we’ve also made an area that’s going to be our homework room. So when the kids of our workers come home from school, they would be able to have an area they can come to so they don’t have to be in their houses alone. We plan to partner with early childhood development and teaching students at Merrimack College nearby and have them intern and supervise that program. [We want to use] the business in a way that contributes something to the community.
We plan to expand the workforce, that’s why we’re moving, pushing to grow the housefile, get more square footage. The move is scheduled for the first quarter of 2006. As soon as we can wrap up Christmas and as soon as the warehouse space is ready, we’re out of here.
CS: Have you had any mentors?
Eagles: My greatest mentor was the Korean Zen master Seung Sahn. He died this past November. I’ve been his student since I was 23, and now I’m 54. That’s a long time. I just learned so much from him in terms of direction, and how to use your life to help people, use your talents, just how to live.
I’ve had a few other business mentors. Through my women’s entrepreneur group there was an older woman named Irene Gainsboro who took me under her wing. She taught me how to make a marketing plan, and she’d give me homework. She and her husband started a small company making birdfeeders back in the 1970s. It grew into this mega-company on three different continents. It was called Opus. She was very helpful and taught me a lot about business planning and more formal things.
The other person who really helped me a lot was our company lawyer, Art McCabe. He’s always been a mentor too. And I don’t have to pay him
CS: What about the business appeals to you?
Eagles: I love the catalog industry. I love making catalogs and shopping for my customers. That’s something I’ve loved right from the beginning. And in the last five or six years, I’ve even begun to enjoy the analytical part of it. I love looking at the stories numbers tell. Cataloging is a really numbers-driven business. I never thought I would like that, but it’s one of my favorite parts now.
CS: In what ways do you believe you’ve succeeded?
Eagles: Because I have a lot of really happy customers. We serve our customers really well and continually strive to do that. We get many love letters from our customers, and we know they’re happy. That makes me feel really good.
We’ve been very careful about our quality, too. Quality is another area that we’re known for. We’ve never compromised on that.
The other thing is that my employees like it here. It makes me feel good that people are happy when they come into work. That they’re growing and able to try new things in their jobs. That makes me feel pretty successful.
CS: If a new cataloger asked you to name the keys to success in this business, what would you say?
Eagles: First — and this will sound so trite — be passionate about what you’re doing, because that passion is what will carry you through the rough times. Think about what you want to be and what you want the company to be. Stick to that vision if you think it’s the right one. There’s always the tempation to dilute your brand with new things or something trendy, but stick to what you know will build you up.
In our case it was crystals and New Age things. We could’ve slipped them into our catalog and made a little extra money that way. But in the long run I think it would’ve damaged our reputation with our core customers. I think that’s one of the keys.
Have a business plan. I didn’t have one when I started. I didn’t have one until maybe 10 years ago. It’s so much easier to operate with a plan. You know where you are, even if things aren’t working out, you can adjust. It’s just basic business 101.
Always be mindful of your cash. Plan your cash flow and don’t fall short. Look for sources of cash flow if you think you’re going to run out. Figure that out ahead of time, because cash is life.
