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Warehouse Sound

My first major freelance copywriting project was a 64-page catalog for Warehouse Sound in San Luis Obispo.

The president of the company was dubious of my credentials at first, but in our second meeting I showed him my analysis of the copywriting in the previous editions of the catalog. I drew a graph of how sales had probalby gone after each of the previous nine annual catalogs: I had all the peaks and valleys correct. He hired me.

This was the secret: the original catalogs from the early years reeked of authenticity. The president wrote them himself, and he was obsessed with stereo equipment. You felt like you were getting the straight truth about the products.

As the years went by, however, the president let underlings take over the production of the catalog, and he was interested only in things like $25,000 turntables.

The target audience was college students, yet the text about the low-end stereo systems in the most recent catalog was bored and dismissive. I said we should turn it around: talk about the lowest-end system as if it were a solid system with great sound. And then each successive system was even better!

He went along with me. I wrote a couple of ads to go into Playboy magazine and National Lampoon (click on right-hand column to see them).

The campaign won a Gold Mailbox award from the Direct Mail Marketing Association.