China and glass are, of course, easily broken, so packaging must be done carefully. Some sets of tableware come pre- packed in manufacturers’ presentation cases, and though these may themselves need to be packed securely in outer boxes, they can simplify your handling problems. As always, the higher the quality of your product, the greater the problem of advertising but the fewer your other problems. A cheaply printed design that starts to fade in the first wash may, because of complaints and returned goods, give rise to greater costs than you would have had if you had purchased a more expensive but better product in the first place, even if you went on to sell it at the same price as the inferior product. Given a product of adequate quality, there should be few after-sales problems beyond the inevitable breakages in transit, and these, of course, must be allowed for in your pricing.

Follow-up possibilities include tablecloths/napkins, kitchen utensils and household goods in general.

After-sales problems are almost nil as, provided you have delivered the right units with the right number of nuts and bolts and instructions for assembly, there is virtually nothing to go wrong.

The mail order appeal, particularly for the domestic customer wanting shelving for a garage or workshop, is that such items are not readily available in high street shops, and the manufacturers who supply direct to industry are not usually interested in small orders for individual items from members of the public.

There are no obvious follow-ups for the domestic buyer, though business buyers, of course, will need more storage equipment as their businesses grow. It could be worth re-mailing customers annually.

Display advertising, particularly for shelving with special features, is probably better than classified advertising inviting enquiries.

The product being very heavy and bulky, this is no business for the weak or infirm or for traders without adequate warehouse space.

Detail the qualities for cooking purposes of the particular materials the pans are made of, stressing how easy it is to use and to clean them and how they enhance the excellence of whatever is being cooked — or whatever their virtues really are. High street shops tend to display their kitchenware in a rather unhelpful manner, leaving potential buyers with little upon which to base their buying decisions beyond appearance and price. Mail order can score by talking informatively to the intelligent cook.

Price/weight ratio is good for sets of items, and sometimes acceptable even for single items. After-sales problems should be few.

A well produced catalogue of items can be advertised in the classified columns. Particular items or sets can be sold off the page by well designed display advertising.

Follow-up possibilities include the complete range of kitchenware in particular and of household items in general.

The price range of different sorts of keep-fit equipment is very wide, so you should be able to choose items appropriate to the sort of advertising you want to undertake. Naturally, the cheaper or more basic items can more easily be sold off the-page than the more expensive or more complicated ones, which need good display advertising and mailing literature. After-sales problems depend very much on the equipment concerned; there is not much that can go wrong with a set of weights, for example, but other items with moving or electrical components can give rise to problems.

The real problem is how to advertise. Well illustrated display advertising is essential for off-the-page selling, and well produced sales literature is needed to send to enquirers. Only the very simplest items can be offered in classified advertising with any hope of success, eg plain 9ct gold wedding rings.

If you are a jewellery manufacturer of cheap items, you could offer jewellery in bulk lots by mail to market traders, party planners and others. Advertise in the market trade papers. Or if your work is of a higher quality and in more expensive materials, you could offer it to established retail jewellers by direct mailing them, but again you will need high quality advertising literature.

Retailing other manufacturers’ jewellery is difficult because of the large number of shops in every town which sell jewellery, most of them with extensive window displays. That’s where your competition lies, and you will need to make your mail order offer particularly attractive if you are to sell profitably direct to the public.

There are many follow-up possibilities with other safety and security devices, both for the home and the person. The potential market is very large, but the advertiser’s problem is to persuade people that they need such products. The problem relates to the typical need/demand distinction that every trader must be clear about. Few people give much thought to their need for security devices until they suffer some misfortune that the device might have prevented. To sell successfully, advertising must bring home to the potential customer the risks he runs, and the relatively small price he need pay to get some measure of protection against these risks. Well composed display advertising or mailing literature is needed. It is not easy to sell from classified advertising unless you can find a column which specifically appeals to those actively seeking security devices.

Form a clear picture in your mind of your target prospects, and develop a persuasive argument that is relevant to their particular risks and fears. As always, your task is not to describe how wonderful the product is in itself, but to make clear what it can do for the customer. Little old ladies, for example, probably don’t want to know that a personal safety device has a 95dB siren; but they may be interested to learn that there’s a gadget they can wear unobtrusively on the wrist or round the neck which can enable them to call for help in an emergency.

If you manufacture the figurines yourself, take account of possible mailing problems in your designs. For example, favour figurines of compact shape without fragile protuberances, such as a model of an angler with a thin extended rod. Items like this can be very difficult to pack and mail securely, and breakages may reach a level which renders the whole operation uneconomic. Of course, the material which the figurine is made of has an important bearing on the problem, and you would not want to embark on the manufacture of items, however charming, which in their very nature are unlikely to withstand the rigours of mailing very well.

Specially formed expanded polystyrene packs make excellent damage-proof mailing boxes, but the more specialised your packaging, the less flexible your mail order operation. Try not to be too committed to a particular item in a particular pack before having the experience to judge whether this is precisely what the market requires.

If you do not manufacture the product yourself, consider seeking out less well-known manufacturers, either at home or abroad, so that your items have a freshness of appeal.

Advertising obviously needs to be well illustrated. The cost of mounting a mail order operation in items of this kind is quite high, so be sure to choose figurines which you can reasonably _expect to command a sufficiently high price.

There is a large range of possibilities under this heading. The enthusiasts of this craft or that — knitting, jewellery making, pottery, leatherwork, marquetry, painting, toy making, modelling etc — have a continuing need for the raw materials of their crafts, appropriate craft tools and books on the subject. Few people live within easy reach of a shop that can cater for the needs of their particular craft, and it is this that gives such products their mail order appeal.

Advertise in the relevant hobby journals. With many crafts, you may be able to start your business with no more in the way of advertising than a simple printed list of items and prices sent to enquirers responding to your classified advertising.

Most raw materials are easy to pack and mail and have a good price/weight ratio. Satisfied customers can be expected to re-order basic supplies regularly, and they will also be in the market for occasional purchases of equipment.

Curtains

Various mail order opportunities can be considered here. If you are a skilled curtain maker you could offer a made-to-measure service, sending sets of specimen materials to prospective customers, together with instructions on how to measure up windows. Such a service could be advertised in the personal columns of papers and magazines.

Alternatively, you could deal in ready-made curtains of standard lengths; these are probably best sold from full-colour display advertising. Or you could deal simply in curtaining materials, selling lengths for customers to make up themselves.

Easy to pack and mail, with virtually no risk of transit damage, curtains are unlikely to cause after-sales problems as little can go wrong beyond stitching coming adrift, and that should certainly not happen in any properly made curtains.

Because heavy drapes tend to be more expensive than lightweight ones, a good price/weight ratio should be maintained throughout the range. Follow-up possibilities are, first and foremost, more curtains; every home has many windows, and customers who have used your service for one room are obvious targets for follow-up sales for their other rooms.

Don’t forget net curtains as well — even easier to handle and mail than drapes.

Correspondence courses are in their nature specially designed to exploit the postal service and so, not surprisingly, they have many favourable mail order characteristics. Almost exclusively, they are composed of written or printed material which is ideal for mailing, easily handled, difficult to damage in transit, with a good price/weight ratio.

Among the difficulties are that the market is well served by long-established schools offering a range of all the more popular subjects. A costly, sustained and highly professional advertising campaign would be needed to win a share of the popular market; but if you are offering only one subject, such a campaign is clearly out of the question. Perhaps a beginner hoping to make an effective entrance into the market should be one who can promote himself as a skilled practitioner in the field offered as a course of study, for example WRITE EBOOKS.

Even a single subject, provided you get enough students, can make at least a part-time venture, though like any business based upon the sale of your skilled personal attention, its scope for expansion is limited by the amount of work you can reasonably fit into the available time. Virtually limitless expansion, however, is possible by commissioning other experts to write — and supervise — courses on other subjects which can then be offered through your school.

Dealing in coins and medals is, of course, a matter of both buying and selling. Unlike retailing, where goods pass from manufacturer to wholesaler to mail order dealer to the public, the coin and medal business is a ping-pong game between dealer and public, goods moving from the public to the dealer and then back again from the dealer to the public. Sometimes dealers trade among themselves, and sometimes indeed the public do, and there are auctions at which all the combinations of dealer to dealer, dealer to public, public to dealer, and public to public may be found. In the main, however, the coin and medal business is from public to dealer and back again, and the mail order dealer must be able to get his prices right when both buying and selling.

Unlike the retailer of normal consumer products, the dealer can’t establish what the trade price is and then work out his own selling price accordingly, confident that he can always pick up further supplies at a known price if he gets a sudden rush of orders. If the coin and medal dealer gets a sudden rush of orders for a given item, he is likely to find himself having to buy in extra stock at a premium. The dealer has to perform a delicate balancing act if he is to pitch his selling prices attractively and yet cover his costs and show a profit. The balancing act is made the more difficult by the inevitable delays between placing advertising and having it published, and between drafting price- lists and having them printed. And yet if you are knowledgeable and able to deal shrewdly, coin and medal dealing can make a profitable mail order business.