Really serious reading: Delray Beach-based Levenger goes global by integrating reading, writing and revenues—$70 million in revenues, to be precise - Profile

South Florida CEO, Feb, 2004 by Van Hutchenson

When Delray Beach catalog entrepreneur Steve Leveen shares his experience with business students, his most popular topic is "When Yoda Knocks, Answer Him." Leveen, an "accidental entrepreneur" who founded Levenger with his wife Lori Granger Leveen in 1987, attributes much of the success of their $70 million company to having great mentors.

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Leveen, 49, has captured the high-end market for sophisticated products related to reading and writing, selling everything from leather-bound notebooks to fine Parker pens, primarily through a mix of catalogs and web sites. The company's 210,000-square-foot Delray Beach headquarters and processing center employs 100 year-round, expanding to 230 during the October through December holiday season. While retail has played only a small role to date (in-person sales in Delray are minimal), this past autumn a 2,300-square-foot Levenger boutique opened on the first floor of Chicago's famed Marshall Fields department store.

Leveen's first mentor came to him by accident. An elegant entrepreneur who retired to Florida paid Leveen a visit at his Delray Beach facility when it was a 5,000-square-foot operation back in 1990. "Our secretary said, 'There's a man here who is asking all sorts of questions about the size of the average order and house list. Would you like to talk with him?'" recalls Leveen. The man was Ric Leichtung, whose woodworking catalog had prospered and earned his company a place on the Inc. 500 list. Leveen gave him one of Levenger's early catalogs for a critique.

"The next day I got a single-spaced page letter where he ripped it apart from A to Z. It was right on the money. I told him it was best thing I had ever read," says Leveen. After that the two faxed ideas back and forth, resulting in a new and improved catalog that eventually grew to 25 million copies. Levenger also made the Inc. 500 (spot #8 in 1993), remaining on the list for four years.

The name Levenger is actually a collision of the surnames Leveen and Granger, created after Steve and Lori converged on the same lamp in their ill-lit but literate Boston townhouse. That's when they hit upon the idea of selling the newly-introduced halogen lamps by mail order.

"It was tough going for the first two years," says Leveen. "We'd have negative days, where we'd have no sales, just returns. There were plenty of days where I'd go to bed staring at the ceiling wondering if it was going to work out."

One of the fledgling firm's unexpected challenges was defects in manufacturing. Leveen recalls one lamp that came back without its box--just the plastic bag with a torchiere lamp bent in the middle like a paper clip. "It looked like they jacked up their truck with it," says Leveen. "All it had was a Post-It note from UPS saying, 'Sorry.'"

Customers of a more gracious sort helped the Leveens discover their niche. When buyers began asking for desks and chairs, they discovered there was a need for accessories--serious tools, for serious readers. With that tagline in their October 12, 1987 New Yorker ads, they hit the sweet spot and orders began flowing in.

Leveen's own consuming reading habits led him to his next mentor. After reading Minding the Store by Stanley Marcus, Leveen wrote to the second half of the famed Neiman Marcus partnership, who wrote back and invited the couple to visit him in Santa Fe.

"Mr. Stanley, as we called him, changed my life," says the soft-spoken Leveen, wearing butter-soft black leather slip-on shoes, surrounded by his collection of 20th-century globes. "He showed me how being a merchant could be a lot more than just buying and selling stuff. It could be a noble profession."

One of the lessons the venerable Marcus (who looks more like Obi-Wan Kenobi than Yoda) taught Leveen about retailing was that if a product is wrong for your store, the more you sell, the worse it is. Leveen illustrates: "Ten years ago we offered T-shirts in our catalog. We hired New Yorker cartoonist Ed Koren to do a couple of shirts. One was called 'Book Beast.' Stanley called me up and said, 'I don't care how many T-shirts you can sell. They don't belong in your catalog!' We took them out. He taught me the thing that separates the great merchants from the not-so-great--it's not what you sell, it's what you don't sell."

More recently, shortly after reading about one of his heroes in American business, Marshall Field, Leveen got a call from Southfield, MI-based retail design company JGA. The agency's Chairman, Ken Nisch, invited the Leveens to be on the ground floor, literally, of the retailing icon's massive renovation in downtown Chicago. Leveen had been studying how to move into bricks-and-mortar outlets and knew the opportunity was right. His strategy now is to carefully expand retail operations in the major markets of Chicago, New York and Boston; later he will consider a broader national retail expansion.

While still a neophyte at street-level retailing, Levenger's cyber real estate has come a long way. Levenger.com was an early adopter, with a large web presence as far back as 1996. But those early marketing efforts drained cash from the more profitable catalog operation, and even during the venture capital-fueled boom, the Web site was a loser. Now that the dot-bomb dust has settled, Levenger uses the Internet as part of an integrated marketing and communications matrix; the Web site is both a cash generator and image maker for the highbrow firm, which publishes its own line of "uncommon" books, such as Robert Louis Stevenson's The Silverado Squatters.