Gifts From Foreign Lands: A 1954 Campaign

Return with us now to that ever more remote year of 1954. Eisenhower was president, the Tonight Show was about to start and mailings were going out for the Around the World Shoppers Club.

A blind continuity, this successor to the Book-of-the-Month Club offered “A SURPRISE PACKAGE FROM A FOREIGN LAND EVERY MONTH!” It was the brainchild of David Marguiles, owner of the Damar mail order company.

“In my search for new products I tried to cover everything available in this country and abroad,” Marguiles told Louis Kleid in an interview. “For instance, in Italy I found a garlic press, which became one of our successful items. This and the search for other gadgets led me to establish contacts with buying representatives in key spots internationally.”

For creative help, Marguiles turned to Max Sackheim, co-founder of the Book-of-the-Month Club.

It was a more innocent time. The copy described “Notre Dame, rising majestically from its island in the Seine while bibliophiles browse among the bookstalls of the Left Bank and philosophical fishermen dangle their fishless lines in the shining waters.”

It also promised knick-knacks from “Merry England,” “Eternal Greece” and “Sweden, the land of Ancient Vikings,” all “intriguingly foreign in appearance.” The cost: $20 for 12 monthly surprises.

Stranger yet, all this was done from an industrial building on Newark’s Frelinghuysen Ave.

Unfortunately, the club ran into trouble, “lots of it,” according to a member-get-a-member letter that survives. One problem was late delivery. The copy explained it this way:

“People around the world are not Americans. In India, for example, the clocks frequently do not tell the right time, the trains run when the engineers have finished their lunches, and there is little, if any, modern plumbing. And the natives simply have no concept of time as we do…”

Then there was the problem of broken or poorly wrapped packages. Again, it was due to the fact that “the foreign craftsmen do not always know how to package the beautiful things they make. We will just have to be patient until we can educate foreigners to package gifts properly!”

“It’s a headache!” admitted Sallie Weir, direct mail manager for the company, in an interview with Kleid. “You have to deal with all kinds of personalities. Our representatives have to negotiate in a dozen languages. Remember the great flood in Holland last year? Just at that time we selected and were shipping ceramic tiles. The water completely ruined the shipping containers. Our foreign staff had to work fast to meet the schedule and saved the day by using milk containers.”

Hmmmnn. And how did they package the Delft’s Blue lamp from Holland and the “vase of perfumed Jordan water from the Holy Land?”

“We depend upon local resources for suitable shipping containers,” Weir explained. “With each package goes a leaflet printed abroad, describing the history, the background and the romance of the article. Strange and unusual foreign stamps add to the glamour and the excitement of each month’s package. We don’t know how else to do the job. It is probably the most difficult fulfillment problem in the mail order business.”

Those challenges apparently overwhelmed the business at some point. But all was well in 1954: The program won a DMA Leaders Group Award (precursor to the Echos).