Using Alternative Media to Build a List

Michael Stopka says that 90 percent of his products are exclusive, from which he and Beardsley select representative best sellers to test in advertising.

“It’s very hard to pick the one product that’s going to sell,” says Beardsley. “If you pick a product just because it’s a best seller, it doesn’t necessarily make for a good catalog-request pull. As you look through the catalog, there’s a certain cadence to the book and the way that products play off each other, and that price point sits against this one on a page, and if you take a product out of context, often it loses everything.”