Even my imagination, however, could not have guessed the number of letters that would pour in to Guiseppe LaVerde. One. That’s right. Only one. A thirty-three-year-old, green-eyed badminton devotee from Iowa filled out the survey and ordered the perfume. One! Guiseppe LaVerde had cost me over $25,000. No one was willing to buy his leftover perfume. No one wanted his trademark. No one wanted his formulas. No one wanted anything to do with him.
What Old Guiseppe and young Howard didn’t know was that women put on perfume to be Lauren Hutton or Elle Macpherson or Coco Chanel, not to be themselves, a middle-aged, brown-eyed librarian with a degree from a junior college. How could Guiseppe have been so stupid? How could anyone have been so dumb not to even test the idea? What grandiosity. What stupidity. What recklessness. Mea culpa; mea culpa; mea culpa!
I never ran an ad campaign without testing ever again. But that didn’t mean I avoided making the same mistake in a different way.
Distributing brochures all night to the various Manhattan hotels had made me acutely aware of the millions of tourists who visited New York annually. I had seen firsthand hundreds of them paying for bus excursions at tour desks in all the hotels in the city. Because they had their own desks at the different hotels, these bus tour companies always turned me down for brochure distribution. This was a sore point with me.
Then, one day, our family went to Gettysburg and rented a tape-recorded tour of the battleground. It seemed like hundreds of other tourists were lining up for these recorded tours. Suddenly I had an idea. While the earphone in my ear droned on about the loss of life and the magnitude of the Union victory over the Confederacy on this hallowed ground four score and seven years after the founding of our republic, I could only think of how I was going to vanquish the bus tour companies on the sidewalks of New York, not in eighty-seven years, but next week.
As soon as I returned, I was like a man possessed. I hired the chief guide at the largest bus tour company to write my recorded tour. I persuaded Acoustiguide, which has the tape tour concession in all the country’s largest museums, to provide us with several hundred tape recorders for a small cut of our potential revenues. I hired a nationally known broadcaster to record the tour. I persuaded large retailers like FAO Schwarz and large restaurateurs to pay us thousands of dollars a month to be included as stops on the tour; as soon as the tourists started flocking to their stores and mentioning our name, they’d pay up. Then I went to the sightseeing desks at hotels to ask them to rent the tours from me.
They turned me down. It turned out that they were all in partnership with the bus companies and the idea of tape tours was as appealing to them as a methadone clinic would be to a drug dealer. Undeterred, I went to the Empire State Building, the one place all tourists visit, and asked for a storefront in the lobby to rent the tours. Learning that the price was $20,000 a month, I persuaded the Empire State Building to let me have the store for free as a place from which to rent tours if I could persuade the New York Convention and Visitors Bureau to open a branch center in the building. They were anxious to make sure that tourists would continue going there (and paying $3.25 for the elevator tour to the observation deck), and not to the newly opened observation deck at the taller (but less famous and more out-of-the-way) World Trade Center. The Convention and Visitors Bureau, offered free space in the world’s most famous building with free staffing of their office (by me, who already supplied them with brochures), readily accepted the offer. The free office was now mine. I only had to spend 80 percent of my life’s savings to fix up and furnish the facility in accordance with the demands of the Empire State Building and the Convention and Visitors Bureau.
