Little Visits with Great Americans, Vol. 1 (of 2): Or Success, Ideals and How to Attain Them
History
Little Visits with Great Americans, Vol. 1 (of 2): Or Success, Ideals and How to Attain Them
Success; United States -- Biography; United States -- History -- 19th century -- Biography
Of course the young firm got business rapidly. When any man gets out
of a rut and in the direction of more enterprise, it helps him. Before
long there were great signs, each 100 feet in length, painted on
special fences built in a dozen places about the city, particularly
near the railroad stations. These told of the new firm and were the
first of a class that are now seen all over the country. New ideas
in advertising were cropping out. In time balloons more than twenty
feet high were sent up, and a suit of clothes was given to each person
who brought one of them back. Whole counties were stirred up by the
balloons. It was grand advertising, imitated since by all sorts of
people. When the balloon idea struck the Oak Hall management it was
quickly found that the only way to get these air-ships was to make
them, and so, on the roof of the store, the cotton cloth was cut and
oiled and put together. Being well built, and tied very tightly at the
neck, they made long flights and some of them were used over and over
again. In one instance, a balloon remained for more than six months
in a cranberry swamp, and when the great bag was discovered, slowly
swaying in the breeze, among the bushes, the frightened Jerseymen
thought they had come upon an elephant, or, maybe, a survivor of the
mastodons. This made more advertising of the very best kind for the
clothing store,—the kind that excites interested, complimentary talk.
SEIZING OPPORTUNITIES.
Genius consists in taking advantage of opportunities quite as much as
in making them. Here was a young man doing things in an advertising
way regardless of the custom of the business world, and with a
wonderful knowledge of human nature. He took common-sense advantage of
opportunities that were open to everybody.
Soon after the balloon experience, tally-ho coaching began to be a
Philadelphia fad of the very exclusives. Immediately afterward a crack
coach was secured, and six large and spirited horses were used instead
of four, and Oak Hall employees, dressed in the style of the most ultra
coaching set, traversed the country in every direction, scattering
advertising matter to the music of the horn. Sometimes they would be a
week on a trip. No wonder Oak Hall flourished. It was kept in the very
front of the procession all the time.
A little later, in the yachting season, the whole town was attracted
and amused by processions and scatterings of men, each wearing a wire
body frame that supported a thin staff from which waved a wooden
burgee, or pointed flag, reminding them of Oak Hall. Nearly two hundred
of these prototypes of the “Sandwich man” were often out at one time.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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