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

SP: In shoes alone we have 16 pages in the catalog, eight spreads. And we have an average of about eight shoes per spread. Eight different styles per spread, and each of those explodes into different colors and sizes. It’s an awful lot of product.

CS: What was your biggest initial challenge?

SP: It’s very challenging having a family business; splitting the responsibilities in a way that’s fair and offers the right level of responsibility, regard within the organization and allows you to manage the staff without conflict. An initial challenge was learning about the catalog industry, because in 1980 we didn’t know anything about that.