NEW YORK -- A few years ago, Hazard Reeves, the communications and computer expert, was asked to find a timing device for the bell chimes of St. Mary's Episcopal Church in Tuxedo Park, N.Y., where he lives.
He tried a dozen or so hardware and equipment stores and couldn't find it yet he knew he had once seen such a device in a mail order catalog -- but whose catalog?
This gave Reeves the idea of creating a chain of stores containing the catalogs of hundreds of mail order houses with a computerized index people could use to find practically anything and order it by mail.
Since Reeves owns and directs half a dozen companies, the idea lay neglected in his mind for awhile. Then a fellow resident of Tuxedo Park, O.L. (Pete) Bibeau, who owned a construction company, got interested in the idea and offered to come in with Reeves and help launch and manage the venture.
They named it Catalogia. The first store opened in November in an upstairs location in Tuxedo Park, the second opened Feb. 1 at Montvale, N.J., and a third will be launched soon. Thereafter Reeves and Bibeau intend to franchise Catalogia.
They told United Press International they are confident they can have 100 stores within a year or so and they think the idea will go so well they ultimately will have several thousand franchised stores.
The venture depends for revenue entirely on discounts allowed by the mail order houses. 'If customers don't order on our premises we don't make anything,' Reeves said.
The Catalogia customer will not use the computer terminal. A professional operator, by means of keyboard and cathode display screen, will dig out of the computer listings a minimum of nine versions of the requested item from various catalogs. The customer then takes the right catalogs to a table, looks up the items, and, if one is suitable, files an order.
The appeal to mail order houses is a vast potential saving on the cost of printing and distributing catalogs, which has gone up tremendously in recent years both because of inflation and because more elaborate and attractive kinds of printing now are available.
Reeves said the more he thought about his original idea and gathered information about the mail order business the bigger its potential appeared to be.
'I discovered there has been an enormous growth in mail order sales for many reasons. With both husband and wife usually holding full time jobs, there's just less time to go shopping in stores and the high price of driving is a further incentive to shop by mail.'
But Bibeau said Catalogia has an even bigger incentive for muchprica. 'I was raised on a farm in Vermont,' he said. 'Shopping facilities in rural Vermont were awfully limited and still are, and even the fattest single mail order catalog gives only a small sample of what's really available.
Catalogia can bring nearly all the world's merchandise to the residents of the smallest town to inspect and buy.'
Psychologically, Bibeau said, the Catalogia venture is in line with a rather gradual shift by Americans away from impulse buying to planned buying.
Not too many years ago it was said that nearly 75 percent of retail sales resulted from impulse buying and point-of-purchase advertising signs and displays exploited this fact. Today a somewhat larger proportion of retail sales are planned in advance and Bibeau said that fact should help Catalogia.
