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

CS: What got you here?

SP: We were in the wholesale jewelry business and we found that the items we were selling were just not being promoted in a meaningful way. We tried our hand at marketing them directly, creating point-of-purchase displays that would help the retailers to market them more appropriately. They weren’t participating in that effort, so we decided that we would try to sell directly to the consumer. We really didn’t know anything about the catalog business per se, we did know a little bit how to market. We did a direct marketing campaign in which we rented lists of consumers and it became a mail-order business. At the beginning we sold only jewelry items, which was true for about four years, then we got into neckwear — authentic stripes, all-English silk, all-handmade neckwear. Our niche was really very much focused on people who had a pride and particular affiliation, and who tended to be Anglophiled as well. That’s really changed. It’s now a very sophisticated niche and it builds on that, but its not necessarily Anglophilic, and it’s not necessarily related to affiliations of any particular type. It’s a classic style.