Whatever Works: Where Product is King

The Canadian company was sold after a year, and for a short while, Brown was unemployed. Then one of Jay Norris’ merchandise suppliers, Len Feldman, devised the idea for a healthcare catalog and invited Brown to join him.

From his warehouse and offices near the Brooklyn docks, he was supplying many products in that field and knew the foibles of older people and the ways they deal with pain, skin problems, sore feet—the gamut of ills that plague senior citizens. At the time, only Sears had a healthcare catalog and, in Larry’s words, “By page 3 you were nauseous, what with pictures of a guy with tubes in his nose and somebody else in a wheelchair.”