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THINK PICKING OUT the right accessories for an outfit is tough? Try choosing the right accessory to launch your mail order company.

That's what Jim Breakell, president of silver and gold jewelry cataloger J.H. Breakell & Co., had to do when he designed his first print advertisements.

Breakell began his career in the early 1970s as a metalsmith, making silver cups and bowls. His first retail experience was a partnership with a couple of goldsmiths at a shop/studio on Bowen's Wharf in Newport, RI. He then moved on to doing wholesale and commissioned work, and spent some time as a designer at Trafalgar Ltd., creating hardware for accessories like belts, bags and shoes. When that job ended, he couldn't find similar work in the Providence, RI area so in 1985 he decided to try his hand at mail order, using his home as both a workshop and business headquarters.

Today the company has a thriving retail operation on a quaint Newport side street, and expects to circulate 732,000 catalogs this holiday season. About a third of J.H. Breakell's direct orders are coming in online.

Breakell talked with Direct recently about how the company used print to get a start in direct marketing, why it turned away from the medium, and how it might go back.

DIRECT: Did you have any experience in mail order when you started the company?

BREAKELL: No. I had made a catalog of sorts when I worked out of a storefront on Bowen's Wharf in Newport in the early 1970s. We took some photos and made a flier and ran an ad in Boston magazine. It was a little black-and-white thing I had slapped together. It was a complete flop, but it was ‘technically’ mail order. When we started our mail order business, we were working out the basement of our house. I had gotten some ‘how to get rich in the mail order business’ type of books, and got a copy of SRDS out of the library, which lists every publication in the country. We wrote away asking for media kits from any magazine that looked like it had a paid circ over 200,000 and might be a fit for our product line.

DIRECT: Which magazines did you try initially? Which worked and which didn't?

BREAKELL: I think the first magazine we tried was Yankee, in the early 1980s. At the time, I had a belt with a bronze clamshell buckle and thought it might be a fit for Yankee's [readership]. We took a photo and had a ‘clever’ tagline like ‘Only 30 clams.’ That was pretty much a bust. The next thing we tried was a silver rectangular belt buckle we could engrave three initials on, for $60. We tried The New Yorker, since it had a fairly even mix of male and female readership, mostly in the Northeast, but also national and worldwide. That was interesting — we actually made money off that ad, but it was a lot of work. I made each belt buckle myself, and had to hand-engrave them, and we took orders at a little office in the house.But that kept us encouraged to follow mail order.

DIRECT: Was that your first big success?

BREAKELL: We didn't really hit a home run until [we advertised] a little silver bracelet I'd had in the line for years, a open-backed bangle with a seagull stretched across it. We were putting these ads together piecemeal with a friend who was a photographer. I remember when we placed our first ad in The New Yorker they wouldn't take my check. I had to give them a money order up front. I don't blame them, really. And in those days you couldn't just advertise in The New Yorker, you had to get approved by the editorial staff. You couldn't advertise just any old thing — they had standards. We passed the grade, and we created our own in-house ad agency so we could get both the cash and the agency discounts, which helped. We ran that little black-and-white ad an inch-and-a-half wide, and the thing really kicked in. It started making money almost from the beginning. I think one time we placed the ad and within three weeks we'd sold a couple of thousand dollars' worth of those bracelets. That seagull was a winner for years — we put it in Yankee, Smithsonian. It made money, got good response and helped us build our house file. It's still in the catalog today. But as a space ad, it stopped working for us a while ago.

DIRECT: Do you still do your creative in house?

BREAKELL: No, we started doing that out of house a while ago. We have a good digital photographer and we have an advertising group that helps us put together our print ads and catalogs, Communication Arts Group in Providence.

DIRECT: When did the first ‘real’ catalog mail?

BREAKELL: We'd been sending out a brochure, a black-and-white trifold piece of 8-12-by-11-inch paper. And then we had some postcards printed up that we sent out in envelopes. But as we built our house file we realized we needed a little bit slicker catalog. Around 1985, we consolidated our postcards into a folder that was a self-mailer. We didn't go to a stitched catalog until much later, probably around 1989-'90.

DIRECT: At what point did you start to shift away from print advertising?

BREAKELL: About five or six years ago, when we began our e-commerce business, we coded all our ads with department numbers so if somebody called we could ask them for the ad's number to figure out which publication was getting the response. We had a Web site early on, but didn't have true e-commerce until the late 1990s. When that happened, we couldn't track the ads as easily. We tried to get people to [tell us where they heard about us], but they just wanted to place their order and leave. Or they'd pick the first item in the drop-down list [without thinking]. And about four years ago we switched to a call center for our phone fulfillment and that was another place we had trouble — operators are handling 10 to 15 different accounts, and having them ask customers where they saw an ad and getting it right was getting more difficult. But even [considering that], we still noticed a steady drop-off with those codes. At the same time, the price of space advertising was going through the roof. Our first ad in The New Yorker was black-and-white, cost about $600 and was one-and-a-half inches tall and one column wide, We thought it was a small fortune. It's now over 2,000 bucks, and you've got to sell a lot of $40 or $50 pieces of jewelry to make a profit off that.

DIRECT: Where are you advertising now?

BREAKELL: In the last six months we've advertised in The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, Yankee and Harper's. We've really backed off. Instead, we're increasing our catalog circulation. We've steadily increased our prospecting, and are working with a consultant that specializes in small mail order companies to get organized for the Christmas mailing. We're boosting circulation by 25%, which we hope will raise revenue about half that. The next printing, which will carry us from September to February, we'll be circulating 732,000 catalogs over five mailings. Our house file has less than 12,000 names, but we have fairly good loyalty.

DIRECT: If you started today, do you think your approach would be different?

BREAKELL: That's an interesting question. If I was starting out today, I wouldn't be doing this. I'd go back to college and get a degree in accounting or something (Laughs). We've gotten so disillusioned with space advertising we're thinking maybe we've come full circle and need to rethink the medium. We know space had been effective. Maybe we need to shake up our system. We've been doing the same kind of space ads for so many years, maybe our approach is tired. So we're thinking of starting again.

DIRECT: What will you change?

BREAKELL: We're thinking about color, and bigger ads as well. If you're going to spend $2,000 and not make a nickel, maybe we should spend $3,500 for a slightly bigger, color ad that has a little more snap, and see what happens. In our original ads we tried to cram in so much information. We had the photo; we knew that'd do the selling. And the headline had to be snappy — you hook them there or it's all over. But then we had a street address, because people get nervous if you just have a P.O. box. And your phone number — for years we didn't have an 800 number and I can't honestly say it made a difference. But it was like being in the Yellow Pages…you had to do it. And then we put the price in, and a description, the shipping information and things like ‘satisfaction guaranteed’ and ‘catalog on request.’ We had all this stuff in there, and it started to dominate the ad. As we evolved, we started to cut things out. When we do an ad now, particularly in the local newspapers, we put the piece in, some little catchy phrase and then our address and phone number. And of course the Web site [URL] is always there. We don't even talk about how much it costs. We figure if you're interested you'll call or go online.

DIRECT: Have you noticed any changes in the seasonality of your business?

BREAKELL: One of the biggest phenomena we've noticed is that Christmas has gotten very competitive. We used to make a lot of money at Christmas when we were one of a handful of people advertising jewelry in The New Yorker. If you look at the magazine in November now, there are probably 10 companies selling jewelry. And it's all clever and it's all catchy. We don't advertise in December, because what's the point? Everybody else is, and at the price these ads cost it's too diluted. D“Yankee was the first magazine we tried. We took a photo and had a ‘clever’ tagline like ‘Only 30 clams.’ That was pretty much a bust.”