Stonewall Kitchen: Ingredients for Success

Meanwhile, Walsh continued to test lists, and she used only those that yielded an above-average response rate per book, a process she credits with helping grow the housefile to its current level of about 55,000.

In her testing, Walsh found that individuals on seemingly unrelated lists often responded better than those on lists from other food catalogs. For example, lists of clothing and decorative accessory buyers performed especially well.