Another Story of How One Successful Company Came to be…

(this is from “Direct” magazine”)

Stonewall Kitchen was started in 1991 when two business associates began selling homemade preserves and plants in a local farmers’ market.

Today their website www.stonewallkitchen.com receives about 35,000 unique visitors per week. Approximately 55-60% of the people that order from the web are prodded there from the company’s catalog.

Online sales represent about 1/8 of the company’s overall business. Wholesale is about 50%, while catalog and retail make up the rest. The catalog contains about 500 items, including Stonewall Kitchen’s jams, mustards, sauces and syrups along with high-end kitchenware and utensils.

Unique visitors have increased 300% in the last year, due to links on 400 sites and e-zines through an affiliate program with Linkshare. They also use search engine optimization.

The average catalog order is $64…online it’s $69. The overall house file is 125,000. Their e-mail list house file is about 15% of that.

The company will mail 1.3 million copies of its 56 page catalog over the course of this holiday season. The first catalog printing was in 1999. The web site is only two-years old.

Here is a somewhat humorous story concerning Stonewall Kitchen…

It seems in their early days they sold a large order of preserves to ‘Crate & Barrel’. All the jars of marmalade were incorrectly labeled ‘Mamalade’. Crate & Barrel execs wanted to know ‘what gives’? A Stonewall employee thought quickly and said “That’s how we say it in New England”.

This is a good example of how a person or persons can take an average everyday kind of product and create a decent sized company out of it. They’ve done a good job merging retail with wholesale with the web and catalogs. Certainly a good marriage between on-line & off-line.

Betcha there are a lot of products and niches out there some entrepreneurial person could do the same thing with.

Take care,

Mike Winicki