Tailoring Directly to Their Customers: A Chat With Sue & Robert Prenner

SP: Concepts were right but the execution was wrong and it was very costly mistakes. On a catalog basis, in 2003 and 2004 we did a women’s and children’s catalog which was a spin-off of the regular catalog. It was really beautiful and seemed a natural extension of where we were, because we were increasing the women’s product, but it really wasn’t the right way for us to go. We haven’t eliminated women’s, it just that we’ve kept in within the catalog. We also have a separate women’s store across the street from our men’s store rather than having them under the same roof. It wasn’t the right direction for us to go in at that time, maybe in the future it will be, but right now I still feel that we learned from that and we made our decision not to proceed in that direction.