The Bon-Ton was a chain of department stores based in York, PA. For nearly a century the company was owned and operated by the Grumbacher family. In fact, Tim Grumbacher only retired from the company’s Board of Directors in 2017. So, for 119 out of the company’s 120 years of existence members of the family were closely involved with the ownership and/or management of the company.
In the years that TSI was involved with B-T, it was expanding fairly rapidly. I am pretty sure that the original call to TSI inquiring about the AdDept system was received in 1996 or 1997 and came from Jo Harnish1, who was the Production and Finance Manager for the advertising department at B-T. This was an extremely unusual combination of responsibilities. Ordinarily the production manager and finance manager were separate people with markedly different skills.
Doug Pease, TSI’s Marketing Director, talked with her and arranged for the two of us to come to York to make a presentation. We were surprised when they suggested that the easiest way to get to York was to fly to BWI Airport, which is south of Baltimore, MD, rent a car, and drive north for more than an hour. That’s what we did. At the time US Airways offered several nonstop flights to BWI every day.
My recollection is that the entrance was in that little alcove to the right of the Burlington Coat factory. That entire area later was transformed into a Walmart Supercenter.
The address that we were given for B-T’s corporate headquarters was 2801 E. Market St. It turned out to be in the middle of a fairly large strip mall. The door through which we entered was next to a Burlington Coat Factory outlet. There was only a very small sign on the door that indicated that the corporate offices lay within. I frankly wondered what kind of operation we were getting involved with.
Jo Harnish.
I am sure that on that first trip we met with Jo and Tom Vranich2, the Senior VP of advertising. I already knew Tom. My recollection is that I had talked with him briefly at the Retail Advertising Conference3 that Tom Moran and I had attended in Chicago in the early nineties. At the time Tom V. was the Advertising Director at Hess’s, a chain of department stores based in Allentown, PA.
I remember few of the details of B-T’s requirements. I seem to recall that the paper in York still printed twice a day. I am pretty certain that none of the requirements seemed insuperably difficult to me.
I also don’t recall much about the installation itself or the support trips to the Bon-Ton offices in the subsequent years. What I mostly remember was the time in the rental car. The drive to and from BWI was not particularly difficult, but it was time consuming.
I think that the hotel in which I stayed was behind the strip mall in which the Bon-Ton office was located, but the route to get back and forth was circuitous. I probably stayed at the Hampton Inn that was (and still is in 2022) located in that vicinity. I don’t remember any restaurants that I frequented in York. I think that I generally got take-out and ate in the hotel room. On the other hand, I can visualize parts of the highway and the Market St. area rather clearly.
Bethann Matroni.
At some point Bethann Matroni4 became the head of the advertising business office and our primary contact. The only notes that I could locate indicated that in 2001 she requested that we add a third rate for ROP (display ads for newspapers). The two rates that were already on AdDept’s media schedule file and the rate table represented the actual rate charged by the paper and a marked-up rate that was shown to the merchandise departments and, for co-op advertising, the vendors. The former was often called “net” and the latter “gross”, but because those terms were also used to mean something else, we just called them rate 1 and rate 2. I don’t recall that we ever added a rate 3 to these files.
At about the same time I talked with someone named Tina Hagarman, maintained the schedule for newspaper advertising and ordered the ads. According to my notes, she had just returned from maternity leave. I think that I was in York to explain to her how AxN5, TSI’s system for management of insertion orders over the Internet, worked. The Bon-Ton was one of the first users of that system. I also promised to send Tina a copy of the booklet that I had made about inserts, the preprinted flyers that are sometimes included with the newspaper.
I think that I went into this store in Westfield once, but I don’t recall if I bought anything.
In 1998 I was startled to learn that the Bon-Ton6 was opening a store on Route 20 in Westfield, MA, which was not far at all from where my sister Jamie and her family were living at the time in West Springfield. The surprising thing was that it was the only Bon-Ton store in New England. I had to wonder how it could possibly be profitable to run only one store in an area. This was not part of an acquisition either. Someone at the Bon-Ton just decided that it would be a good idea to locate one of their department stores in this strip mall on the outskirts of a rather small town in western Massachusetts. It was also the last outpost of civilization before the sparsely populated Berkshires.
In 2003 the Bon-Ton surprised most of the retail world by acquiring the stores run by Elder-Beerman, another department store chain that had been using AdDept to manage its advertising. This move approximately doubled the size of the company in terms of the number of stores. The signage for the acquired stores still referenced Elder-Beerman, but management of the advertising for the combined operation was done at the Bon-Ton headquarters in York. Because both of the advertising departments already used both AdDept and AxN, the transition was rather smooth. I don’t think that I even made a trip to York to oversee it.
I don’ t know how much the Bon-Ton paid for the logo.
In 2005 Bon-Ton somehow came up with $1.1 billion in cash to purchase the Northern Department Store group from Saks Inc. This group consisted of three former users of AdDept: P.A. Bergner, Younkers, and Herberger’s7. So, for the second time in two years the company doubled in size.
The advertising for this group was run out of Milwaukee. The facility in Milwaukee was much larger than the one in York. It had a large area devoted to the production of ads as well as a photo studio. The Bon-Ton closed the department with which we had worked in York and moved all of the advertising to Milwaukee. None of the people that we knew in York made the move to Milwaukee.
B-T’s incursion into New England did not stop at Westfield. This store in Concord, NH, was closed in 2018.
I knew very well that there was no possibility of persuading the Senior VP in Milwaukee, Ed Carroll, to use AdDept even if we agreed to let them use it for free. However, I did make an effort to contact the newspaper manager to see if we might interest them in using AxN. It would have been difficult to construct an interface, but the new organization ran a lot of advertising in a very large number of papers. If I had succeeded in convincing him to use AxN, TSI might have been able to limp along until the entire Bon-Ton retail empire after many consecutive unprofitable years gave up the ghost in 2018 and ended up selling all of its properties to liquidators.
I might have been mistaken about the Bon-Ton store in Westfield. It stayed open until the Bon-Ton declared bankruptcy in 2018. I don’t know whether it was ever profitable.
2. Tom Vranich’s LinkedIn page is here. On it he claims (three times) that he worked as Senior VP at the Bon-Ton for over thirty years. I am almost positive that for most of that period he was actually employed at other stores that were eventually acquired directly or indirectly by B-T. Also, since his name was not Grumbacher, I doubt that he started as Senior VP.
3. The adventures of Tom and Mike at the RAC in Chicago have been described here.
4. I could find little on the Internet about Bethann Matroni. I think that in 2022 she may be known as Bethann Brodbeck.
5. A detailed description of the genesis of the AxN system has been posted here. Details about its structure can be found here.
6. A very detailed account of the long history of the Bon-Ton is posted here. Unfortunately it stops in 2001 just before things got really interesting.
The first time that I ever heard the word “Camex” was when I was researching the requirements for the first installation of TSI’s AdDept system1 at Macy’s East2. One of the job titles that Macy’s used for employees assigned to production of a newspaper ad was “Camex operator”. I asked Alan Spett, a vice president at Macy’s who was our principal contact during this period, what a Camex was. Alan told me that Camex was a company in Boston that had designed and implemented software and networking for workstations from Sun Microsystems. The workstations were used by many newspapers and some of the largest newspaper advertisers to help with the design of pages to appear in newspapers.
I later did a little research on the company. It was founded in 1974 by George White and a partner whose name I never discovered. The first customer was the Boston Globe. Once that installation stabilized, the company grew dramatically by selling expensive systems (roughly $2 million each) to newspapers around the country and then to large retailers.
In 1989 the company was sold to DuPont, the chemical giant. George White stayed with the company until 1993.
Camex had a booth near TSI’s at the Retail Advertising Conference in Chicago that Tom Moran3 and I attended in 1991 or 1992. Our booth was the smallest allowed. Camex’s booth, which was near ours, was perhaps ten times larger. They must have brought twenty salesmen and lots of workstations and network servers.
Alan may have voiced an interest in creating an interface between AdDept and Camex in those early days. However, it was included in neither the original installation nor the first set of enhancements.
Dan Stroman, TSI’s contact for the AdDept installation at P.A. Bergner & Co.4, told me that Bergner’s wanted to implement an interface between AdDept and Burgner’s Camex computers. I told Dan that Macy’s might also be interested in such an interface, and I gave him Alan’s telephone number. The two of them agreed to make a joint project of the interface.
My recollection of the details is fuzzy. I think that AdDept was supposed to create a file that contained all relevant production job information for jobs in specified ad types that had not yet been released. Camex would create files for AdDept that indicated job steps had been completed on those jobs.
There were many issues to resolve.
What was the naming convention for jobs on Camex? That field would need to be added to the AdDept database.
Should AdDept require that each Camex job name be unique? If not, will uniqueness be enforced at the time of the interface? If not, how will Camex handle two jobs with the same name?
Should the source for the interface file from AdDept be the live database or the history records?
Are history records for the interface itself necessary?
How should AdDept tell Camex about jobs that have been killed?
What if the size or shape of the ad had changed?
And so on.
There were also technical details about the nature of the interface files. IBM’s PC Support program for the AS/400 could be used to transfer data to and from a PC, but it probably would not work with a Sun workstation. So, a PC would probably be necessary between the Sun Workstation and the AS/400.
My recollection is that two meetings were held at Camex’s headquarters at 75 Kneeland St. in Boston. The first was mostly just to get acquainted and set an agenda. I have no notes from these meetings, and I don’t remember anyone’s name. I seem to remember that Alan may have attended. Sue Comparetto and I drove up to Boston. Camex’s office was very close to Chinatown, and the Camex people treated us to lunch at one of the nearby Chinese restaurants. My other vivid recollection is of my wonder at what Camex had accomplished in a fairly short time.
I am pretty sure that Dan attended the second meeting. Sue and I definitely drove up from Enfield. This meeting was disrupted by a fire alarm. Everyone was asked to abandon the building and stand around in a nearby parking lot. It does not take much for me to be cold, and I was absolutely freezing. I am sure that we were outside for at least an hour. We finally did get to go inside for an hour or two. My recollection is that we made a little progress, but at the end I still did not know what data Camex was planning to send to AdDept. This was because the people with whom we were talking knew very little about the database portion of their system, and the database programmer was not available.
I wrote up a programming quotation for the portion of the interface that AdDept would initiate. I submitted the quote to Dan and Alan. They both approved it. I even started work on it.
Then a very strange thing happened. The person who served as the client liaison at Camex called Dan and told him that Camex had decided not to participate in the interface. They also volunteered to refund deposits that Bergner’s had made for additional equipment.
We got paid for the work that we did—luckily avoiding the bankruptcies of both Macy’s and Bergner’s. Shortly thereafter DuPont split Camex up into pieces and spun them off as separate companies. Camex did not last long after that.
I cannot remember where this happened, but I overheard someone at a large retailer talking with their rep from Camex. The rep said that Camex no longer recommended the Sun workstations. Instead they recommended that advertisers just buy Macintoshes and off-the-shelf software. I was both dumbstruck and disappointed. I had envisioned our relationship with Camex as a possible entrée to many excellent AdDept prospects. Sic transit gloria mundi.
The episode has an epilogue. A few years later I had a meeting in in Mobile AL with some programmers who previously worked at Camex and Gilbert Lorenzo, the advertising director at Burdines department store. That meeting is described here.
1. The design of the AdDept system is described in some detail here.
2. The AdDept installation at Macy’s East is described here.
3. Tom’s time at TSI, including our time at the RAC, is described here.
4. The ups and downs of the AdDept installation at Bergner’s are detailed here.
For more than a decade after TSI began marketing AdDept, its software system for retail advertisers, the chain of department stores now known as Macy’s Inc. was called Federated Department Stores (FDS). The company was acquired in the eighties by Robert Campeau, a Canadian real estate magnate. For a short time it was merged with Campeau’s other stores and called Federated and Allied Department Stores. In 1992 the company emerged from bankruptcy as FDS, the same year that Macy’s filed for Chapter 11 protection. In 1994 FDS found enough cash in the cushions of the sofas in the furniture departments of its stores to purchase Macy’s shortly after Santa’s favorite retailer emerged from its own bankruptcy. Details of the takeover can be read here.
In the early nineties I was just beginning to learn about retail in America. It shocked me that a bankrupt company could stiff all of its vendors and then have the wherewithal to buy another company of about the same size. A lot of craziness like this happened in the nineties. I never did figure it all out, and the two companies involved in this transaction were a thorn in the side of TSI for the rest of its existence.
I don’t know why Val used a photo that cut off her chin.
In 1992 FDS had eight regional divisions. Each division produced and placed its own advertising from the divisional headquarters. The first FDS division that contacted TSI about purchasing the AdDept system was the Bon Marché, which was based in Seattle. I was called by Val Walser1, the Director of the Advertising Business Office there. She had received one of TSI’s mailings in late 1989 or early 1990, and she thought that the system might be what they needed. I talked with her in person twice, once at the Retail Advertising Convention in Chicago and once in Seattle. I gave Val a private demonstration in Chicago, and I showed the system to the rest of the team in Seattle. Those encounters have been described in some detail here.
No mention of Federated.
I don’t think that I knew at the time that the Bon Marché was part of FDS. Even if I did, I don’t think that I realized then that the parent company was about to declare bankruptcy. I was inexperienced; I probably made some errors in judgment. Perhaps I made a mistake by proposing a system that would only be minimally sufficient for their existing operation. Maybe we did not follow up often enough or in the best way.
Although Val informed us that she had requested funding for the system, it was never approved, and after a while we did not hear any more from her. We continued to send materials to her periodically. Until I began the research for this entry I was unaware that she had any involvement in deploying a system that was initiated by the FDS division most distant from Washington, Burdines in Florida. Val apparently oversaw the development of the administrative part of the FedAd (or whatever it was called at that time) system. By then her division was known as Macy’s Northwest, which was folded into Macy’s West, a long-time AdDept user, in 2008.
TSI’s fruitless contacts with Burdines have been documented here.
From the beginning I thought that Jordan Marsh, the Boston-based department-store chain, would be a valuable customer for TSI. Like the Bon Marché, Jordan Marsh was actually part of the Allied group before Campeau acquired Federated and merged all the stores into one gigantic chain. At one time there were also Jordan Marsh stores in Florida and San Diego, but by 1991 all of those stores had closed or were no longer controlled from Boston.
Kate Behart, whose career at TSI is described here, arranged for me to do a demo for people from Jordan Marsh’s advertising department at an IBM office. I don’t remember any of the names of employees at Jordan Marsh. In fact, the only things that I remember about our meeting with them were that Kate was very upset that I had used the word “gals” at one point and that they informed us that they wanted our system.
I am sure that Kate must have followed up on the presentation. She was very conscientious. However, nothing came of it.
Bloomingdale’s, the high-end department store with headquarters in New York City, contacted TSI several times. The last of these exchanges of telephone calls was handled by Doug Pease, whose successful marketing career at TSI is detailed here. We certainly sent them detailed materials about AdDept and the AS/400. I might have done a demo for them at the IBM office. I clearly recall that we went to their headquarters in Manhattan and gathered specs about their needs. I can still picture the Manager of the Business Office, who wore a three-piece suit and had a long pony tail. Guys with pony tails were not unusual in the creative and production areas of advertising departments, but he was the only one that I ever saw in the financial area.
Doug followed up on our visit with several telephone calls. At one point he became certain that Bloomies would buy the AdDept system. Nevertheless, not long after he had voiced his certainty, he got the telephone call that dashed his hopes. He never told me the details, but he was visibly upset about it.
One of the biggest disappointments in my career was not being able to land Liberty House, the department store in Hawaii and the Pacific, as a client. When Doug, Sue, and I flew out to Honolulu in December of 1995 to meet with Karen Anderson (detailed here), Liberty House was an independent chain of stores that included both department stores and much smaller stores in locations convenient to tourists. Those stores specialized in “resort ware”.
Macy’s on Union Square in SF.
Our presentation went very well. Karen told Doug in a subsequent conversation that she had requested funding for AdDept, but there was a freeze on capital purchases. The freeze persisted until the company entered bankruptcy in 1998 and closed most of the resort stores. When it emerged from bankruptcy it was gobbled up by FDS. At that point the remaining stores were relabeled as Macy’s, and administrative functions were transferred to Macy’s West in San Francisco, one of TSI’s clients.
So, this was as close as we came to a victory in our dealings with FDS/Macy’s Inc.. Many of the newspapers that had been used by Liberty House still subscribed to AxN in 2014.
AS/400s at FSG. I thought that I had a photo of Len, but I cannot find it.
At some point the AS/400 systems used by the three Macy’s divisions that used AdDept—Macy’s East, Macy’s South, and Macy’s West—were moved to the headquarters of Federated Systems Group (FSG) in Alpharetta, GA, a suburb of Atlanta. I flew down there to consult with Len Miller2, who was in charge of all of the FSG’s AS/400s. I don’t remember exactly what the agenda for this meeting was, but I remember that Len said that long-range plan of FDS was to replace the AS/400 systems with home-grown software running on other platforms. However, he assured me that at that point—soon after the merger with the May Company—it was a very low priority. They would still be using the AS/400s for several years.
My other vivid memory of that day was when we passed a room that contained perhaps twenty desks. At each desk sat someone working on a computer. All of the people were IBM employees who were consultants for Federated.
Len’s predictions both turned out to be true. All of the divisions except Bloomingdale’s were eventually folded into one gigantic Macy’s run from the Herald Square Building in Manhattan. The plan was apparently to use the system built for Burdines and the Seattle division, but it did not have all of the features that the people in New York needed. For several years they maintained AdDept in order to run the Loan Room (merchandise loaned to photo studio for shoots) module that TSI wrote for Macy’s East in the early nineties.
In May or June of 2005 I received a telephone call from Robin Creen3, whose title was Senior Vice-president of Macy’s Corporate Marketing. She wanted me to come to New York to discuss the AdDept and AxN systems. I made an appointment and took Amtrak to Penn Station. Robin instructed me to use the executive elevator at one of the 34th St. entrances rather than the employee’s entrance that I had always used on the other side of the building.
Robin’s office was not in the advertising department. It was on executive row. I don’t remember too much of the meeting, and I cannot locate my notes. I recall that I only got to meet with her once or maybe twice, and I never heard from her or about her again.
I did, however find a copy of a letter that I sent to her on October 7, 2005. Here is the text:
At our last meeting you told me that it was still too early to talk about the future of the existing May Company divisions. Since there have now been several definitive press releases about the makeup of the new Macy’s after the merger, I assume that those restrictions no longer apply.
Needless to say we are concerned about what effect the realignment will have on TSI. We have spent the last 17 years developing AdDept, the software product which has become the standard of the industry for administration of retail advertising departments. The May Company was our largest client.
We know that Federated Department Stores has been working with its Florida division for the last decade or so on a system which overlaps considerably with ours. I am sure that the company has by this time invested a considerable amount of time, money, and manpower in it. It may surprise you to know that I was supposed to be an integral part of the original plan. I met with Mike Rafferty and Gilbert Lorenzo in Huntsville, Alabama, back in the mid-nineties. Their plan at that time was to use AdDept for the accounting functions.
They wanted us to convert our system to run on a PC network using a home-grown relational data base and Microsoft Visual BASIC on each client. To me this seemed like a huge step backwards for us. Their approach would definitely have improved the appearance of AdDept’s front end and provided an integration with the production area, but no one could explain to me how we could possibly support such a system in many locations. The principal problem was that with their proposed architecture someone—presumably TSI—would be required to support both server software and client software. We have never had to support clients—the individual desktop PC’s and Macs. At the time networks were unreliable, Windows was not a mature product, and the Internet was in its infancy. TSI was already supporting a half dozen or more companies, including the two Macy’s divisions, which at the time were not affiliated with Federated. I honestly think that had we participated in the project at the level that they expected, TSI would not have survived as a company. Gilbert and Mike must not have liked my attitude, because we never heard from them again.
Since that time, as I wrote you earlier, most of the rest of the department stores in the country—as well as several other large retailers like Dick’s Sporting Goods—have successfully implemented AdDept in their sales promotion departments. They were able to get affordable systems tailored to their requirements. AdDept is not a sexy system, but it gets the job done.
No one in the entire country—no one—has the experience that TSI has garnered over the last 17 years in understanding the intricacies of administration of advertising systems. We are offering that experience to Macy’s Marketing. Four of the seven newly aligned Macy’s divisions—East, West, Midwest, and whatever the Marshall Field’s division is called—are long-time AdDept users. Lord & Taylor also uses AdDept. Moreover, a large number of May Company employees have considerable experience using AdDept in many different areas. If I were in your shoes, I would consider this as a valuable asset.
TSI has a very strong relationship with its users—both at the corporate and division level. If you talk with the people at the May Company, I am sure that they will verify that we have always done what they asked, that we do an excellent job of supporting our product, and that we give them a lot of bang for the buck.
There is one big additional factor. We are not on their payroll. When they wanted to spend money to make the system do new things, they used us. When they were tightening their belts, they did not have to worry about paying the salaries of programmers, system architects, data base administrators, etc.
So far in our discussions TSI has done most of the talking. What we would really like now is to learn what you and the other people in Federated’s management need to get out of the system. A goal-oriented approach works best for us. We have moved mountains for other clients, and we would definitely appreciate the opportunity to tell you how we would attack your biggest problems. We have never shrunk from such a challenge in the past. Our track record in this regard is essentially flawless. If someone will tell us what they need, we will provide it.
Do you think that we could schedule a face-to-face meeting with you and whoever else is involved in this project about this challenge? We have always been straight-shooters, and we would be eager to listen to whatever you have to say.
My last two encounters with Macy’s were both about insertion orders for newspaper advertising. TSI had developed and successfully marketed an Internet-based system for insertion orders to newspapers. Macy’s West, Macy’s South, and most of the May Company divisions that FDS acquired in the merger used it, and they all loved it. We called it AxN, which was pronounced “A cross N”.
I knew that, compared to our other AdDept clients, Macy’s East used a small fraction of the programs that comprised AdDept. Still, they were entering the ads, and, therefore, they were a good candidate to use AxN. I wrote to the Media Director, whom I had never met, and requested a meeting about AxN. He seemed very interested. We scheduled a meeting, I made a dozen or so copies of our sales materials for AxN, I packed them in my briefcase, and I boarded the 6:30 train again. I was alone because TSI had no marketing/sales person at the time.
The meeting was not what I expected. It was conducted by a man named Roman from the IT area, not the advertising department. My presentation was very well received. Roman said that it was very impressive.
He pressed me on whether TSI planned to provide a way to send the layouts for ads over the Internet. This surprised me. I thought that this was a problem that had been addressed years earlier. The market leader was the Associated Press’s AdSend service, but I also knew of several competitors. I said that TSI had no plans to enter that market. I explained that we had neither the infrastructure nor the expertise necessary to compete in that arena. Besides, none of our clients had asked for it, and they were not shy about requesting our services.
He said that we should consider it. Macy’s was looking for someone who could enable them to use the Internet for both insertion orders and the delivery of ads, “because, you know, one-stop shopping is better.”
What should I have said?
I had three hours on the train to mull this over. I had made a mistake by letting this remark go unchallenged. It seemed like such a silly thing to say. I thought that they would want expertise and experience, not fewer phone numbers.
If one-stop shopping really was the objective, then I had no chance of ever persuading them to use AxN. Therefore, nothing could be lost by asking for proof of any real value associated with having one vendor doing both tasks. I knew very well that the people who placed orders for newspaper ads were completely separate from the employees who created the actual layouts and sent them to the papers. This was true at Macy’s in New York and at every other large retailer that I had met with.
We never heard from them after that.
I learned later that Macy’s East’s advertising department had never used AdDept for insertion orders, even though they could have easily faxed the orders from the AS/400. Instead, each coordinator had developed ways to communicate with the reps at the paper. It sounded chaotic.
My last frustrating encounter with FDS (by then known as Macy’s Inc.) occurred in, I think, 2007. This one revolved around Dave Ostendorf, whom I had known quite well when he had been the liaison between TSI and the advertising department at Famous Barr, the May Company division based in St. Louis. Much more about my relationship with Dave and the installation at Famous Barr is posted here.
This is the only picture I could find of Dave Ostendorf. He is on the far left side of the table in the white shirt.
Dave called me about the use of AxN. He said that the people for whom he worked in Macy’s Corporate Advertising department asked him to find out how much we would charge for an interface between AxN and the system that had been developed internally. Dave was a very straight arrow. I trusted him (unlike everyone else mentioned in this entry) implicitly.
Of course, I asked for more details, but Dave would not provide them. He was rather sheepish about this. He advised me just to write up a proposal in our usual format with as many disclaimers as I wanted to include. He also specifically warned me not to low-ball it. So, I wrote up a quote for $20,000 that may have set a world’s record for use of phrases like “assuming that”.
A short time after I talked with him Dave resigned his job at Macy’s and moved back to his home town of Indianapolis. Needless to say, no one ever called about the quote. I have always suspected that it had been used as a justification for further investment in the corporate system.
So, my interactions with FDS and its successor Macy’s Inc. were completely fruitless. If FDS/Macy’s Inc. was the Brass Ring of our field of software, it was in sight quite a few times, but we were never able to snatch it.
My only real regret is that I do not completely understand why we continually failed. Our success with every other department store chain was close to universal, and the employees in the advertising departments at FDS and Macy’s divisions seemed enthusiastic about what TSI had to offer. However, in these situations we were up against an amorphous alternative, the system developed for Burdines and the Bon Marché, about which I knew very little.
One thing that struck me when rereading the letter that I had written to Robin Creen. I seemed to be asking for an opportunity to see the alternative. As a debater and a debate coach I was much better on the negative. I seemed to feel confident that if they just told me what they were using or planning to use, I could demonstrate what was wrong with it. Even if our software was lacking in some areas, I felt confident that we knew how to change AdDept to make it better.
Fortunately TSI found plenty of work outside of FDS/Macy’s up until the time that Denise and I were ready to dispose of the business. If some of these opportunities had gone the other way, it seems likely that we would have missed out on some of our other achievements.
1. Val Walser worked int the advertising department in Seattle until Macy’s brought all of her division’s administrative functions to San Francisco in 2008. Her LinkedIn page, which is here, says that she “directed development of a sophisticated, integrated software product, which was Macy’s premier marketing/advertising system managing all departmental functions.” I presume that this refers to the system once known as FedAd that was begun by Burdines.
2. Len Miller apparently still works for Macy’s in 2022. His LinkedIn page is here.
3. Robin Creen left Macy’s in 2008. Her LinkedIn page is here.
By the mid-eighties Sue and I really needed help with marketing. We had some good products to sell, and our service was fantastic. However, our salesmanship was poor. I could often persuade people that I could develop a solution to a difficult problem, but I was not very good at persuading them that TSI’s product and approach were better than those of our competitors.
The first person whom we engaged to represent us was Joe Danko, who lived on Cape Cod. At first the relationship was on a commission-only basis. Later we considered hiring him as our salesman, but we decided against it. The details are described here. Joe was never actually an employee, and we never paid him for his services. I don’t know how much effort, if any, he put in on our behalf.
Trust me; Paul was nothing like this guy.
We hired some consultants to help us. They, in turn, hired a graduate student named Paul Schrenker, to sit in Sue’s office in Rockville when she was on the road. We provided a list of presidents of ad agencies and their phone numbers. In only a few cases was it a direct line, but, even so, quite a few people agreed to talk with him. Ad agency executives were all about relationships. Whether Paul was a potential client or a potential vendor did not matter that much; many agency heads were always on the lookout for connections. So, a surprising number of advertising executives accepted a cold call from a graduate student who knew a lot about biology but very little about any aspect of the business world.
The Patriots debacle was not O&P’s finest hour.
One of the ad agencies, O’Neal & Prelle in Hartford, agreed to an appointment, and we eventually closed the sale. Paul did not participate in closing the sale, but he did make the first appointment.
TSI severed its relationship with the consulting firm. We decided instead to hire a full-time salesman, and we approached it in the same way we had recruited programmers and administrative people—by placing an ad in the newspapers. I think that we interviewed a couple of people. One stood out, Michael Symolon. He seemed excited about the job, and he was quite well-spoken. He was a graduate of Central Connecticut. He had worked in marketing for five years at Triad Systems, a company that specialized in software for dentists.
What about TSI?
I think that we hired Michael at some point in 1987. His LinkedIn page, which can be found here, was no help in this determination. Although he included previous and subsequent employers, he left TSI off of his list of experiences. We paid him a pretty good salary as well as commissions.
I remember that when he first began to work at TSI Michael was gung ho about setting up a nationwide sales organization. He advised me to schedule annual trips to exciting destinations exclusively for the most productive reps of our software systems.
Michael.
This attitude shocked me a little, but he eventually revised his expectations when he discovered how complicated the GrandAd product was. Our competitors could undercut us on price on the hardware, and there was not much that we could do about it. The key to selling was almost always our willingness to customize the system for the prospective client. The idea of setting up a network of sales agents seemed unworkable to me. If I could not deal with the people personally, how could I assess what changes were necessary and feasible?
We gave Michael room to be creative in his approaches, but I was not ready to discuss how to celebrate sales generated by imaginary salesmen.
9.5 rounded up.
Terri Provost left the company shortly after Michael was hired. Michael interviewed and hired Linda Fieldhouse to take her place as administrative assistant/bookkeeper. Both of them are described here. Michael assured me that Linda was “at least a nine and a half.”
I am pretty sure that Michael and I went on a couple of ad agency sales calls together. I remember driving up to Vermont with someone—it probably was Michael. When I got out of the car I realized that I was wearing the pants for my pin-stripe suit with my blue blazer. We did not get the sale, but I don’t think that my fashion faux pas was the cause. Vermont is not known for haute couture.
I also remember that Michael accompanied me to Keiler Advertising once. Evidently he had once dated Shelly, who at that time was in charge of bookkeeping there. Michael was very embarrassed by the incident. I did not ask him for historical details.
I don’t remember him closing sales of any new GrandAd clients.
We took Amtrak from Hartford’s Union Station to NYC.
Michael also came to New York City with me for at least one very important presentation to Macy’s in 1988. He was almost a hero, as is described here.
Michael invited Sue and me to supper one evening at his house in Farmington. We got to meet his wife and kids. It was a very nice house, but I don’t remember any details.
I am sorry to report that Michael was at the center of TSI’s first great crisis, which is described here.
I ran into Michael at Bradley International one day in late 1988. He told me that he was working for a company that sold advertising software to magazines. I told him that Macy’s had finally signed the contract, that I had been working my tail off to get all the software written and installed, and that TSI would send him his commission check as soon as we got the final check from Macy’s. There did not seem to be any hard feelings.
For a couple of years TSI muddled along without a salesman and with very little effort at marketing. Those were very difficult years in a number of ways. By the spring of 1991 the AdDept system had two pretty substantial accounts, and we felt that it was time to start marketing it seriously nationwide.
Meanwhile, our ad agency clients seemed perfectly content with their current hardware and showed no interest in converting to the AS/400, the system that IBM had introduced in 1988. It is described here.
We hired a young man named Tom Moran to help with marketing. He was a very nice guy, but he knew next to nothing about computers, advertising, retail, or, for that matter, marketing. He was definitely eager to learn, and he was willing to follow up on leads, which was the most important thing. Plus, both Sue and I liked him.
I remember going on two trips with Tom. The first was for a meeting with Hecht’s in Arlington, VA. Sue, Tom, and I drove down to the Washington area. A Motel 6 on the Maryland side of DC kept the light on for us, and I am happy to report that no murders were committed (or at least none reported) there that night. It was the first and last time that I stayed at a Motel 6.
The three of us met with Barbara Shane Jackson, who was in charge of Hecht’s patchwork PC system and her boss, the advertising director, whose name I don’t remember. Tom did not contribute much, but it was a good meeting on the whole. In the end we got the Hecht’s account.
The RAC was held at the Hilton in downtown Chicago.
Tom and I also attended RAC, the Retail Advertising Conference, in Chicago. It was a huge pain to get everything prepared for our booth there. We had to rent an AS/400 from IBM and to hire union employees to set everything up. Nevertheless, we did manage to get our demo computer system working by the time that the attendees came to visit the vendor area.
Some vendors who were familiar to us were there. Camex, the company from Boston that specialized in programming and selling heavy-duty Sun workstations for the production of ads, had an exhibit that was ten times as large as ours and had a dozen or more people. Tapscan, the broadcast software company. was right across the aisle from our booth. One young lady who worked there must have accidentally left her skirt at home. It appeared that over her black pantyhose and high heels, she was wearing a wash cloth that she purloined from her hotel room.
Most of the conventioneers were drunk or at least tipsy by the time that they reached our area. We made one contact with the ad director of Hess’s, a department store chain with headquarters in Pennsylvania. Tom gave him a copy of our sales materials and got all of his contact information. Unfortunately, almost as soon as we had begun correspondence with him, Hess’s was acquired by another retailer, and his position was eliminated.
The convention would have been a complete fiasco except for two things. The first was that I got to introduce Tom to the indescribable pleasure of Italian beef sandwiches purchased from street vendors in the Windy City.
The other redeeming event was the appointment that I had made to do a demo at the convention for Val Walser, the Director of the Advertising Business Office at The Bon Marché, a department store chain in the northwest. The programs worked without a hitch, and she was very impressed with what the system could do. She even invited us out to Seattle for a presentation to the relevant parties at the IBM office there.
Tom accompanied me on that trip, too. Our plane landed in Seattle very late, well after midnight. We checked into our hotel, but we only managed to get a couple of hours sleep. We went to the IBM office, where I checked that all of the software was working correctly. By this time I had been chain-drinking coffee for several hours, and still I felt very sleepy. This was an important presentation, and I had to be at my best.
The demo seemed to go pretty well. Everyone was attentive. The people from the IT department were asking tough questions, which usually boded well for us. I was so tired that I could barely concentrate. As we were putting away our materials I realized that I had been drinking decaffeinated coffee all day.
Nevertheless, I convinced Val and the other important parties. We put together a hardware and software proposal, and they submitted a requisition to the IT department, which also approved it. However, the powers that be at Federated Department Stores1, the mother ship, vetoed it.
This episode taught me that TSI needed someone who could navigate his way through the bureaucratic structure to find out what the hold-up was. Tom was not ready for this kind of responsibility. In the end, we decided that we could not afford someone who just tagged along for demos. In fact, we were really in the position where we could not afford anything.
Fortunately, we were able to use the Hecht’s installation as an entrée into the May Company, which at the time had about ten divisions. Not long after that I persuaded Foley’s in Houston to install the system, too. I also convinced Neiman Marcus in Dallas to get the system.
A grainy photo of Doug in an airport.
Those sales gave TSI both a solid base of accounts and enough revenue that we again looked for a marketing person in 1993. We found what we were looking for in Doug Pease, who had actually worked in the advertising department at G. Fox, the local May Company chain.
At first I had hoped that Doug could do some of the demos, but I soon gave up on that idea. I knew exactly what the system did, what it could potentially do, and what was beyond us. The programmers were generating a lot of code every week, and so these lists were in a constant state of flux. Besides, I had a great deal of experience at public speaking, and Doug did not. I don’t think that I would ever have trusted anyone with the demos.
Doug was a real bulldog once he had a hot lead. He was extremely good at following up on everything. In his first year we closed extremely profitable sales to Lord & Taylor, Filene’s Basement, and Michaels Stores.
Susan Sikorski
In April of 1994 I received an email from a woman named Susan Sikorski, who worked at Ross Roy Communications, Inc. in Bloomfield Hills, MI. The company at the time had eight hundred employees (!) and seven satellite offices. They wanted a production billing system that would feed their Software 2000 accounting system and some internally developed applications.
A few years earlier I would have considered this opportunity a godsend. We had already written interfaces for Software 2000 accounting systems for two AdDept clients. We loved to do interfaces, and the more complicated they were the better. However, we were so busy with programming for clients that Doug had landed that this was my response:
Unfortunately, as I looked over your package, I realized that our system does not really measure up to your requirements. We would have to make very substantial modifications to meet even the minimal requirements. Since we specialize in custom programming, this would not ordinarily be a great issue to us, but at this time we would not even be able to schedule the work for many months. So, I guess that we will have to mass.
And it was almost certainly a good thing that I was forced to make that decision. In 1995 Ross Roy Communications was purchased by the mega-agency called Omnicom Group. If TSI had been chosen for the project, I strongly suspect that the plug would have been pulled on it before the system became fully operational. Susan found a new job at Volkswagen in 1996.
Meanwhile, in the next few years Doug managed to get TSI’s AdDept system into all of the remaining May Company divisions, as well as Elder-Beerman, the Bon-Ton, Stage Stores, two Tandy divisions, Gottschalks in California, and all but one of the five divisions of Proffitt’s Inc., which later became Saks Inc..
Doug and I took many sales trips together. The most memorable one was in December of 1997 to Honolulu to pitch Liberty House3, the largest retailer on the islands.
Doug using a client’s AS/400 for something.
We had a little free time while we were there. Doug and I used it to climb to the top of Diamond Head together. He was an enthusiastic mountain biker, he had been a soccer player in college, and he was quite a bit younger than I was. I was in pretty good shape from jogging. So, neither of us held up the other.
Sue accompanied us to Honolulu, and after Doug returned home, she and I had a great time on four different islands, as is described here.
The other trip that was the most memorable for me was when we flew to Fresno, CA, to pitch Gottschalks, a chain of department stores in the central valley.
In those days you could save a lot of money by flying on Saturday rather than Sunday—more than enough to pay for a day’s food and lodging and a car rental. Doug and I considered going to Yosemite on our free day, but there was a problem with the roads there. Instead we decided to drive along the coastal highway from north to south to maximize our views of the coastline.
Somebody else’s photo.
I did not have a camera, but Doug did. His was a real camera of some sort. I was not yet into photography, and I had not brought a disposable camera on the trip. Doug took lots of photos. In fact, he ran out of film. When we stopped for lunch he bought some more film.
Doug took a lot more photos on the rest of the journey, or so he thought. When we got to Fresno he discovered that he had no photos at all after lunch. I don’t remember whether he forgot to load the camera after he took out the film. Maybe he did not wind it, or there was a technical problem. That was not the worst of it. He also somehow lost the first roll of film when we stopped for lunch, and it also contained the photos of his newborn child taken before we left.
But, hey, we got the account.
I guess that Doug is unloading new equipment in Enfield.
Doug and I almost never disagreed about what the company should be doing. However, near the end of his tenure he came up with an idea that I just could not sanction. He wanted us to start a new line of business in which we contracted for large chunks of advertising space from newspapers at a discount and then resold it to small businesses at a profit. Maybe he could have sold a lot of space; maybe he couldn’t. In any case such an undertaking would leverage no TSI products or services and none of the skills that the rest of us possessed. In short, he was asking me to backstop a new source of revenue for him. I declined to do so.
Doug and I made a great team. I gathered specs and did the demos. He attended, met the players, and subsequently followed up on everything. When the prospect had signed the contract, he made sure that all the i’s were dotted and the t’s crossed and ordered the hardware if they bought from TSI or a business partner.4 By 1999 we had more work than the programmers and I could handle. I told him to stop selling new software systems until the programming backlog could be reduced to a more manageable level, which would not be for at least a year. He made the imminently reasonable decision to look for another job.
After TSI moved to East Windsor in late 1999, we hired one more AdDept salesman, Jim Lowe. His previous experience was with a company that marketed hard cider. The challenge was to get retailers to give them adequate shelf space. It was retail experience, but not exactly the kind that we had dealt with.
Jim was a smart guy, and he could have been a good salesman for us. We went on a trip together to Wherehouse Music in Torrance, CA. Wherehouse was a large chain of music stores in California. Jim and I stayed in a nearby Holiday Inn the first night. We used MapQuest to find to the Wherehouse headquarters the next morning. At the very first turn MapQuest advised us to turn right. This seemed wrong to me, and I turned left instead. We reached the building in less than ten minutes. I don’t know when we would have arrived if I had turned right.
It was a very strange meeting. Rusty Hansen, whom I knew from Robinsons-May, had told them about us. We never got to meet with him or anyone else who seemed to know what they wanted. We did get to meet the president of the company, who was wearing jeans and a tee shirt. I never did figure out what this whole episode was about. The company went out of business within a couple of years.
Jim only worked for us for a few months. He took an offer that was very similar to his old job. Before he left he helped me with a mailing that produced some good leads. I sold the last few AdDept systems to some of those retailers by myself.
Jim’s advice to me when he left was that TSI should concentrate on AxN, which is described here. I don’t think that he ever really understood that the horse must precede the cart. We needed retailers to be sending us insertion orders in order to be able to send them to newspapers.
Bob in Denise’s office.
Bob Wroblewski was, as I recall, a relative of Denise’s husband. In November of 2003 Denise came up with the idea of paying Bob to get the newspapers signed up.
I got to know Bob on a trip taken by the two of us to California to persuade Rob-May and Gottschalks to use AxN. We both misjudged how well the two demos went. The people at Gottschalks seemed excited; Rob-May was somewhat cool. However, Rob-May soon came around, and I never did persuade Stephanie at Gottschalks to use AxN.
Here is how the marketing process worked. After a retailer’s advertising department that scheduled its newspaper ads in AdDept agreed to use AxN for insertion orders, it provided us with a list of its newspapers with contact information. I wrote a letter to each paper asking them to subscribe to the service. The letter was printed on the retailer’s letterhead and was signed by the advertising director or ROP manager at the newspaper. However, it was sent by us along with a contract that I had signed. The monthly rate was approximately what the newspaper charged for one column inch in one issue. This was a negligible fraction of what the advertiser spent. Then Bob called each one and persuaded them to sign up.
I don’t know (and I don’t want to know) what Bob said to the papers, but he had a very high success rate. He also earned quite a bit for himself in commissions. At one time we had over four hundred newspapers that subscribed for the service!
Bob’s wife died while he was still working with us. I drove to Providence, which is where he lived, for the wake.
1. Federated Department Stores owned many large chains that were all very promising potential AdDept clients. The rejection of The Bon Marché’s request may have been a blessing in disguise. In January of 1990, shortly after this meeting, Federated filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. It could have been really ugly.
2. Susan Sikorski is apparently working as a consultant for Avaya in 2021. She is featured as a graduate of Wayne State on this webpage.
3. We learned later that the advertising department at Liberty House had approved the purchase of the AdDept system, but the order was never placed because in March of 1998 Liberty House filed for Chapter 11, and the funds for new systems were frozen.
4. TSI was throughout its existence a certified member of IBM’s Business Partner program. However, because of the size of the company we were bit allowed to sell IBM hardware directly. Instead, we needed to pair up with a “managing Business Partner” who actually could place orders. We dealt extensively with several of these companies—Rich Baran, BPS, Savoir, and Avnet. There may have been others.
Needless to say we are concerned about what effect the realignment will have on TSI. We have spent the last 17 years developing AdDept, the software product which has become the standard of the industry for administration of retail advertising departments. The May Company was our largest client.
Since that time, as I wrote you earlier, most of the rest of the department stores in the country—as well as several other large retailers like Dick’s Sporting Goods—have successfully implemented AdDept in their sales promotion departments. They were able to get affordable systems tailored to their requirements. AdDept is not a sexy system, but it gets the job done.
