A Chat With July’s Profile, Doug Mockett, founder/owner of Doug Mockett & Co.

CS: Have there been any changes to the actual size of the catalog?
DM: It’s basically a magazine size of seven by 10. The printer said, “Look, if you make this I believe just a hair shorter you can get more [postal discounts] on it.” So it shrunk by like a sixteenth of an inch either way.

CS: What are the factors that have led to your company’s success?
DM: The first thing that we have is absolutely fantastic customer service. Our people are empowered to do whatever it takes to get an order to somebody. And if that means it needs to go overnight, and let’s say we’ve screwed it up, out it goes and we don’t care. So they’re empowered to make decisions that I don’t think you’d find common in other companies. We have fantastic customer service.
We’ve always maintained a large inventory, so we ship something like 98 percent of the orders the same day. So if we were financially-oriented, we’d have a skinny inventory and you’d have to wait. But we’re not, we’re marketing-oriented.
We’ve got good customer service, absolutely fabulous, good inventory and we have a catalog that engages you. We’re selling dull industrial furniture components. We’ve made the catalog with a lot of human interest — a lot of personal stories and a lot of stories about my dogs that drag the readers in, for example. It’s on slick paper, coated stock; it’s not just a catalog of line drawings and part number and blah, blah, blah and the dimensions and that’s it. I think that helps. Trust me, the customer service and the people we have working are absolutely fabulous.
The other thing we do is we stand behind the products 100 percent, which I learned from L.L. Bean. You can send it back anytime, we pay the freight, no restocking charge. All we ask is that it’s returned in resalable condition.