Business Correspondence by Anonymous

The business was saved--by postage stamps.

Formality to the winds; stereotyped phrases were forgotten; traditional appeals were discarded and a plain talk, man-to-man, just as if the two were closeted together in an office brought hundreds of customers rushing to the assistance of the house with which they had been dealing.

Sixty-eight thousand dollars collected within two weeks when money was almost invisible--and by letter. Truly there is romance in the postage stamp.

Twenty-five years ago a station agent wrote to other agents along the line about a watch that he could sell them at a low price. When an order came in he bought a watch, sent it to the customer and used his profit to buy stamps for more letters. After a while he put in each letter a folder advertising charms, fobs and chains; then rings, cuff buttons and a general line of jewelry was added. It soon became necessary to give up his position on the railroad and devote all his time to the business and one line after another was added to the stock he carried.

Today the house that started in this way has customers in the farthermost parts of civilization; it sells every conceivable product from toothpicks to automobiles and knockdown houses. Two thousand people do nothing but handle mail; over 22,000 orders are received and filled every day; 36,000 men and women are on the payroll.

It has all been done by mail. Postage stamps bring to the house every year business in excess of $65,000,000.

One day the head correspondent in an old established wholesale house in the east had occasion to go through some files of ten and twelve years before. He was at once struck with the number of names with which he was not familiar--former customers who were no longer buying from the house. He put a couple of girls at work making a list of these old customers and checking them up in the mercantile directories to see how many were still in business.

Then he sat down and wrote to them, asking as a personal favor that they write and tell him why they no longer bought of the house; whether its goods or service had not been satisfactory, whether some complaint had not been adjusted. There must be a reason, would they not tell him personally just what it was?

Eighty per cent of the men addressed replied to this personal appeal; many had complaints that were straightened out; others had drifted to other houses for no special reason. The majority were worked back into the "customer" files. Three years later the accounting department checked up the orders received from these re-found customers. The gross was over a million dollars. The business all sprung from one letter.

Yes, there is romance in the postage stamp; there is a latent power in it that few men realize--a power that will remove commercial mountains and erect industrial pyramids.

The ADVANTAGES Of Doing _Business_ By Letter

PART I--PREPARING TO WRITE THE LETTER--CHAPTER 2