Profile of Success: Leapfrogging His Way Straight to the Top

This month we profile Jason Blake, the 31-year-old founder/president of the The Pond Guy, a catalog/multichannel retailer of pond, lake and water garden supplies.

Catalog Success: How did you get started in the business?

Jason Blake: I started the company while I was in high school. I was cleaning and servicing ponds in the neighborhood. I went away to college at Michigan State and thought that I could mail out catalogs to continue the business. So I put a catalog together my first year and sent it out to my existing customers — about 3,000 people, my initial mailing list. I printed about 20,000 catalogs my first run. I didn’t really understand the catalog business at all. I just figured I’d hand them out, and people would buy stuff.

Luckily, the service business was able to support the catalog, because I’m sure I lost money on my first catalog. But as I slowly started growing my list doing trade shows, advertising in magazines, yellow-page ads, word-of-mouth, the catalog started to grow.

A couple of years ago I met consultant Tom Beddows. He’s a circulation manager who understands cataloging. That really changed my business. It went from 6,000 customers to 25,000 customers over 12 months as I dipped into co-ops and obtained lists for the first time.

CS: What’s made The Pond Guy successful?

JB: We don’t sell on price. We obviously try to offer a good value, but having our own brands and exclusive products has really made us profitable and successful.

Our product mix is close to 60 percent our own brand, 40 percent national brand. And it continues to grow larger and larger with our own brand. We’ve started to develop new products and different ways of doing things. And with our guarantee on all our own products, that’s really helped us develop a loyal customer base.

CS: How did you come up with the name of your company?

JB: Once I started making some money in my senior year in high school, I thought, “I better make this legitimate.” At the time, I didn’t have a name. I just went to people’s houses and would knock on the door, and they’d say, “The pond guy’s here.”

It defined my whole business and made a big difference. Pounding pavement obviously helped, but the name is what really kept me ahead — it came from my customers.

CS: What challenges have you encountered in the catalog/multichannel business?

JB: The biggest was our growth spurt. I was getting to that point where my circulation was getting so big. Before, I could print my catalogs, throw them in the trash and still be in business. I always had that luxury. Then I started printing and mailing so many catalogs that if each drop wasn’t successful, I could be out of business. Now we’ve gotten to the point where the company’s a little more mature and stable.

To read or listen to the full interview, click on Profile of Success (Complete Interview): A Chat With Jason Blake under Related Content, at right.