Bravo, digs. Well done. 
Wonderful job, digs!
My favorite ad from the catalog, and I wish I could find it, was for a caftan. You wear this caftan when you are visiting your jet-set aunt, who owns a villa in Majorca. You will be wearing it on the porch, overlooking the sea, drinking silver fizzes or martinis, waiting for the eligible men that your aunt knows, and has rounded up, and has invited to one of her famous dinner parties. (I’m fuzzy here, I think I have to change into a Zelda Fitzgerald era frock before Noel Coward and the Burtons show up.)
I never purchased that caftan. How could I live up to it? My aunt doesn’t own a villa in Majorca, and the last cocktail party she threw involved a six pack of Budweiser after her daughter and son-in-law painted her half-bath. Eligible bachelors? Father McRand stops by on occasion, and there’s the meals on wheels driver, a widower for 5 years! 
I’ve purchased a few things from them fairly recently. I absolutely love their tees–they are super soft and have a teeny bit of spandex. So comfy when I’m dashing through the catacombs after a late lunch of foie gras, toast points, and lemonade.
Go ahead and get the caftan – there’s no way ANYone lives up to any of the J. Peterman stories.
And that was part of the fun of the Seinfeld episodes, getting to see how the stories were concocted by buttoned-down junior writers in an office setting. And not on the deck of *the Frigate Matilda as she plied her illicit trade in rubber goods and spiders up and down the Mocha Java Straights from Singapore to Sinatra… *(Firesign Theater ref.)
I thought that trade route went from Milan to Minsk.
Anyone seen Rochelle, Rochelle with the original Off-Broadway cast?
It’s billed as “a young girl’s strange, erotic journey from Milan to Minsk”, but I just thought it was a mess. Though a fun, upbeat, sing-along-able mess…
But we saw it with an understudy.
I vaguely remember the catalog-and I remember wondering “who buys this shit?”
I mean, how many NYC residents need a full length australian cattle drover’s coat?
It was probably a business that catered to eccentric, wealthy people-once thos people were satisfied, demand dropped off.
Their clothes aren’t that outlandish or overly high priced. You can even get some good deals on their close-outs. I like them because you can order things that you won’t see in the local mall that look very sophisticated and slightly unusual but about the opposite of trendy so you can use it for a very long time. I might even place another order tonight. Their catalogs are a great read I read every single ad when it comes and even save them. They really do have good products although the drawings can be misleading so you never really know exactly how it will look in real life until you get it but that is just the nature of the way they do business. I wear their 1903 cologne every day and get lots of compliments on it.
The marginal cost of sending 12 catalogs to an existing customer is more than $2.50?
Besides that, how do you know what data they have about who spends what when?
2.50/12 = .20
I’m going to bet that the price of printing & mailing the catalogues, and the 14 other catalogues from “different” companies (which have suspiciously similar descriptions, photos, and pricing), costs more than that.
I’m another of those that ordered from Gurneys, and now years later (at least 6), I still get their catalog and their 2 or 4 “partner” catalogues, at least 3 times a year.
Mail order is a tough business. A friend in the direct marketing industry once told me a 1% response rate is good. 2% is great, and 3% is nearly unheard of.
You miss the part where I worked in list processing?