Tender Heart Treasures creates 90 percent of its own products—and considers this one of its competitive advantages.

By Alicia Orr Suman

The first step was to create a positioning statement. “We needed to define who we are and what we do,” says Lisa Kuehl, advertising manager. “We encapsulated the spirit of the statement into our current tagline: “warming hearts and homes.”

The next step: a hard look at the catalog itself. “We realized our strengths were our in-house [product] design team and in-house production. And our catalogs just weren’t doing our products justice,” Kuehl continues.