A Chat With March’s Profile, Martin Smith, CEO of MindWare

CS: How did you get your start in the catalog business?
MS: This is going way back in time, I think 1984. I was working at General Electric, nothing to do with the direct business per se, but working in an internal strategy consulting role for General Electric up in Connecticut. At that time, somebody who had been a senior GE executive was the CEO at Avon Products. He was interested in recruiting people with a General Electric strategic-planning background. So one thing led to another and a headhunter contacted me to see if I’d be interested in working at Avon Products. I was interested and a job came up and that job happened to be in the direct response division, as it was called at the time. So I started in Avon’s direct response division in 1984 as a planner.