A Chat with June’s Profile, Justus Bauschinger, president/owner of Lilliput Motor Co. & Deutsche Optik

CS: Would you have an idea of the total number of SKUs offered altogether?
JB: A thousand, I don’t know.

CS: Are both books mailed the same number of times per year?
JB: Yes. I mail four catalogs at a minimum for each book, and each book is dropped in three increments. And what we do is we’ve eliminated Christmas and that kind of a thing. We just do a winter book, a spring book, a fall book and a summer book. Because in many cases most of our stuff is imported — I would say 95 percent. And a lot of it comes from very small makers or sources that aren’t huge. So we’d paint ourselves in the corner by doing a Christmas book because often times, even though we had a certain stock to start with, we’d run out of it and couldn’t deliver in time for Christmas. And that would just piss people off. And I must say, our customers are probably the most patient in the world.