November’s A chat with Ashton Harrison, founder, president/CEO, Shades of Light

CS: What is your current biggest business challenge and how do you plan to resolve it?
AH: Competition from new catalogs in our small niche market, such as Lamps Plus, Home Depot’s Paces Trading catalog. Since the market isn’t very large. Internet price competition has been a problem as well. We’ve matched Internet prices and are going towards mostly all exclusive product. Now Home Depot has started to pull some of those back, Pace’s Trading and 10 Crescent Lane aren’t being mailed on their own anymore, instead folded into the Home Depot catalog. That’s already helping us. Lamps Plus came out with a catalog. But Sincerely Yours has stopped mailing completely. It’s starting to get better, but for a while there, we had more competition than we ever had.