Using Alternative Media to Build a List

“I started basically as a hobby,” he says. “I would go to Europe every year, and I saw that there was a market among Americans for European reproductions.”

A friend of his owned a statuary company, and Stopka began marketing his statues in the backs of magazines and newspapers: Metropolitan Home, House Beautiful, The Wall Street Journal, The New Yorker, Traditional Home. He requested $5 per catalog from inquirers, mostly because he was using his friend’s 40-page wholesale catalog rewrapped with his cover at the hefty cost of $3 each.