Famous-Barr (FB) was a chain of department stores based in St. Louis Mo. It was owned by the May Company.

The aspect of TSI’s dealings with FB that I most clearly recall occurred before the installation. I think that this was in 1993 before TSI hired Doug Pease (introduced here) as Marketing Director, but I may be wrong. TSI received a phone call from Vicki Rosenkoetter, FB’s Advertising Director. Vicki had heard about AdDept and was interested in attending a demonstration.

I immediately phoned the IBM office in St. Louis to arrange for a room for my presentation, a ritual with which I was quite familiar. For the first time ever the woman with whom I was speaking asked me a question that I had difficulty answering: “How many customers are coming?”

I calmly explained that the audience members would not currently be customers. They were prospective users of the AdDept system that my company, TSI, had developed to run on an IBM AS/400.

She repeated, “How many customers are coming?”

“I don’t know. Is there some kind of limit?”

“Find out how many customers are coming and call me back.”

I did. Vicki provided an estimate of a dozen or so. IBM then produced enough employees so that one was seated beside each person who attended. At the time I was amazed that Famous-Barr was able to allow so many employees to attend. I was ordinarily happy to address a handful of people.

In retrospect it seemed likely that some must have been May Co. people. The parent company’s headquarters was only a block or so away from the downtown FB store that also housed the Advertising Department, and the May Co. was definitely a customer that had a lot of IBM “iron” in its data center.

As for all of those IBMers, I don’t know what their function was. They did not interrupt my presentation, which seemed to go very well.

Nevertheless, there was a considerable delay before the contract was signed and the system for FB was installed. During much of that time I worked with Dave Ostendorf², whose position at FB was “Advertising Systems Analyst & Admin”.

FB had been using a PC-based system for many administrative functions. Dave developed it. I was a little worried when I learned that Dave would be the primary contact. No coder is ever happy when his work was being replaced by someone else’s. However, Dave understood that he had squeezed as much out of his approach as he could, and it was not enough. Since he was already very familiar with both the expectations and the attitudes of everyone in the department, he was often a great help.

On the other hand, the fact that Dave was formerly their custom programmer and could deliver changes without worrying about other clients sometimes caused frustration in TSI’s relationship with FB’s users. I wrote this in 2000:

They loved this system, but they had to abandon it because the architecture could not accept the volumes they were trying to put through it. Essentially our strategy was to replicate the output from their previous system.

Because the department had a programmer on their staff, they became accustomed to quick customization. They are therefore frustrated by our inability to deliver what they want as quickly as they want it.

It is very difficult to get the managers to agree to use AdDept for anything new. They like their PC programs. They still use a lot of spreadsheets and small pieces of the old system.

Dave provided almost all the information needed from the media managers. It was seldom necessary for me to talk with them . I met often with Roxanne Shanks³, the Business Office Manager about the way that she wanted to handle financial issues. In 2000 Roxanne went to part-time, and Ervin O’Neal⁴ was named the Business Office Manager.

After Vicki left in 2001, I think that Jim Anderson became the Advertising Director. I found some photos of him, but I do not remember working with him. It is embarrassing that I have so few memories of the FB installation. It may also be a testament to the fact that Dave was an excellent liaison who made my job much easier.

At some point David Graves became the official liaison with TSI, but I think that we only worked with him on hardware and connectivity issues. I don’t remember talking with him.

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1. Vicki Rosenkoetter worked at FB until 2001. Her LinkedIn page is here.

2. After Macy’s took over the May Co. stores Dave went to work for Macy’s Corporate Marketing. He resigned that position in 2007.

3. Roxanne worked at Foley’s before coming to St. Louis. Her LinkedIn page can be viewed here.

4. Ervin’s LinkedIn page is located here.