100 Voodoo Dolls to Palo Alto?

IT’S NOT EVERY direct marketer that would have the hubris to run a “Build a shrine to us on your Web site” contest. But then, not every direct marketer is selling Seattle-based cataloger Archie McPhee’s offbeat merchandise.

There is a method to McPhee’s madness: Rules of the recently concluded contest stipulated the “shrine” had to feature a link to the company’s own Web site (www.mcphee.com). Previous contests have been just as unconventional, and just as marketing oriented: a midsummer “Our site has been infested by roaches” contest led browsers through a dozen of the site’s pages.

One would expect an unique approach to marketing from a marketer of unusual items (perennials include punching-nun puppets and rubber chickens), and Archie McPhee president Mark L. Pahlow delivers in spades.

“I study customer’s actual orders. I see 100 voodoo dolls going to a software firm in Palo Alto. What does this mean? A Manhattan buyer wants every nun and Catholic religious item we carry and wants them by air. What’s the rush? And here’s yet another order to Japan. What are they doing over there with all this glow-in-the-dark string they order?

“I actually walk over to the conveyer and look in the bins of picked orders on their way to the packers. How many database people and managers do that? Are any of them in the same city or the same building as catalog fulfillment?”

Archie McPhee’s 50,000-name database is somewhat limited: The cataloger records basic recency, frequency and monetary value information and, claims Pahlow, “whether they were nice to us.”

Pahlow is disdainful of list brokers (“Selling inquirers as buyers, not being honest about the origin of the names, short-paying us for bogus reasons and telling us that it’s ‘industry standard.’ I’d rather deal with the Iraqis than this crowd.”) Instead, Archie McPhee relies more heavily on the Abacus Corp. co-op database’s “ingenious business of selling names to catalogers while requiring them to turn over, for free, their own hard-won customer data.”

But he notes, “I think Abacus and its imitators are thriving because they deliver improved customer response to catalogers. I know they have for Archie McPhee.”

For the future, Pahlow is bullish on sumo-related merchandising, such as the sumo wrestler with a battery-operated fan in its stomach.

“We are bringing out a line of sumo products and Archie McPhee will dominate the sumo market,” proclaims Pahlow. “We love sumo.”