A Chat With January’s Profile, Ann Killeen, General Manager of Montessori Services

CS: What’s the biggest mistake you made in the business and how did you recover from that mistake?
AK: At Storybook Heirlooms we started out selling high-end bedroom furniture and we had a gorgeous catalog. We learned pretty quickly, fortunately, that furniture is complicated to deliver and that a significant part of mail order is having people rebuy from you. Because we were selling complete furniture sets, they would buy once and then they didn’t rebuy. In either our first or second catalog we put in a small insert of apparel and within a year we were an apparel catalog. We learned really fast that apparel was a much better niche for us. The second thing we learned was that if we could do our own manufacturing we could really establish ourselves in our niche. We could establish uniqueness because we were designing and manufacturing it ourselves. Plus get a better margin.