Page 254 - One Thousand Ways to Make $1000

as few words as you can, get his order, and let him go on to town. Well, it’s
the same way when you write him a letter or send him a catalog. You’ve got
to get down to cases right away.”

That doesn’t mean, though, that Henry Field’s letters and catalogs didn’t
radiate the same friendliness and intimacy which had made him so successful
as a salesman. He didn’t make the mistake of writing in a literary or
“bookish” way. He simply wrote the same way he would talk to a man if he
met him face to face. He used the common, everyday colloquial expressions
his customers used. He treated them as though they were his next-door
neighbors. He even gossiped a little, but was careful not to be long-winded
about it.

From the start, people liked his way of doing business. They got in the habit
of sending in their orders by mail, and it wasn’t long until orders began
coming in from people he had never called on in person, from Nebraska,
Missouri and Kansas. Year by year his catalogs grew larger and larger, but he
continued to write them in the first person and he never deviated from the
friendly, personal, informal style which established his early success.

Today the Henry Field Company in Shenandoah, Iowa, has over a million
customers on its books. Its volume of business has grown from a few hundred
dollars a year to $3,000,000. In addition to selling seeds and plants, Henry
Field has branched out into the general merchandise field. He sells overalls,
shoes, hats, prunes, oranges, tires and an endless variety of other products. In
order to sell them successfully by mail, he developed many innovations in the
established mail-order practices. Finding it unprofitable to sell a single pair of
overalls, for example, he sells them in units of three. Since farmers buy
potatoes, apples and corn by the bushel, he thought they’d also buy oranges
by the bushel, so that’s the way he sells them. Coffee is packaged in three-,
five-, ten- and twenty-five-pound containers. Canned goods are offered only
in units of twelve. Although stores sell prunes in one-, three- and five-pound
packages, Henry Field sells them only in twenty- and twenty-five-pound
units.

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