Editing The Pen Addict 303/transcript (section)

== Shoe Business ==


'''Jim Rouse:''' Well, believe it or not, I worked for a shoe company. And it was called Hess Shoes. And I worked in, I was a district manager. So, I traveled around the Washington area going to these different stores. These were like real high-end fancy shoes, you know, with alligators and all this kind of stuff. Like big buck stuff back then. And I used to go into Bert's store all the time. And I really enjoyed looking at the pens and stuff. And I was kind of into ballpoints back then. There wasn't a stigma against ballpoints back then. So, I would go in and look at them and, you know, play around with them and stuff. And every now and then he'd give me something to try to fix and I'd play around with it. Well, there was this jewelry store upstairs called, I think it was Jay Codwell's. And they had just spent like a million dollars. And I mean, I think that's a reasonable estimate. That's what the manager told me. To redecorate the store. And then three months later, they went out of business. So, here's this store.

'''Ana Reinert:''' Maybe they spent a little bit too much money.

'''Jim Rouse:''' Well, this was a huge chain. This was a huge chain. And we're looking at the store, you know, because we knew they were going to sell off the fixtures. They've got a vault the size of a bedroom in there. They've got a complete phone system. They've got chandeliers. They had Honduras mahogany cabinets with brass trimmed, you know, bulletproof glass. The whole nine yards. Everything you'd want to open your own store. So, Bert and I decided that we would try to buy the interior of the store at auction. And sell this stuff to make some money, you know, because it's some halfway decent investment, right? So, the manager of the store, this is kind of funny, but the manager of the store, they fired. But then they call the guy up and say, hey, you want to come back for a day and sell off the contents of the store? And he's like, sure.

'''Ana Reinert:''' Seems like a great idea.

'''Jim Rouse:''' I'd be happy to. So, they tell him to place an ad in the paper. So, like in Wednesday's Washington Post or whatever, there's like this, I don't know, two-line ad, you know, that says, store fixtures for sale. So, you know, I go, his name is Myke. And I go, hey, Myke, you got any bids on that stuff yet? He goes, nope, not yet. I go, well, I'll give you $1,000. So, this goes on all day. You know, I call the guy up or he'd call me up and he'd tell me what the bids are and then I'd place another bid. So, we end up with this store. And we're up there, Bert and I walking around, you know, this is like, this is a great find. You know, all this stuff's ours now. So, then we realized, what are we going to do with it? We got to do something with this stuff. Well, the mall said they wanted the vault. I mean, this huge steel vault. They wanted the vault. Had to take the ceiling out to get it out of the place. So, they agreed that we could store the stuff there until we could move it. Now, the cases kind of fit together like a jigsaw puzzle. So, we realized that we could reconfigure them to any shape we wanted to reconfigure them to. So, I don't remember who suggested it. I think it was Bert. Said, well, you know, I got a lot of extra merchandise. And we could open a store in Baltimore. And we could have a pen store. Well, to be honest with you, I didn't know very much about pens at all. But that sounded like a great opportunity. Because I was tired of being in the shoe business because of that stupid Al Bundy.

'''Jim Rouse:''' So, I like that show, actually. Married with Children. So, we opened this store in Baltimore. And, I mean, this was like real Mickey Mouse stuff. I mean, I made paper templates of all the cases, which was an open end, which was a closed end. You know, and then we fit the paper templates together until they formed the horseshoe pattern we wanted here and the circle we wanted here and all that stuff. And that was a fairly successful store. We did well with it. But, fortunately, after, I don't know, five or six years, they told us we had to move because they were tearing the building down. So, we moved like one block up the street to the corner of Baltimore and Light Street. And that's where we stayed almost for 17 years until the store closed. Wow. And what year was that? It closed?

'''Myke Hurley:''' God, I don't remember.

'''Jim Rouse:''' Oh, yeah. Sometime in the 2000s.

'''Myke Hurley:''' So, how does that play into what you're doing now? Like, how did you go from that, you know, the store was open, successful, then, oh, well, it closed. And now you're with Franklin Kristoff and you're super famous.

'''Jim Rouse:''' I'm not super famous. We had reps that came in.

'''Myke Hurley:''' I've seen the lines, Jim.

'''Jim Rouse:''' I think you're pretty famous.

'''Ana Reinert:''' Well, thank you.

'''Jim Rouse:''' But we had reps that would come into the store, you know. And, of course, you know, once you get into the business, you kind of want to move up in the business. So, I was always asking them if they had any positions open or stuff like that. Well, after Bertram's closed, one of the reps contacted me and said, we've got a position with Hampton Haddon. And Hampton Haddon, at that time, did Schaefer and they did Waterford and some other lines. And they needed a guy for Schaefer. And what they wanted, they wanted a Schaefer salesman. That's really what I was told they wanted.

'''Ana Reinert:''' So, just so, at Bertram's, were you a salesman there? Was that what you did?

'''Jim Rouse:''' Yeah.

'''Ana Reinert:''' Yeah.

'''Jim Rouse:''' Yeah. Manager, salesman, you know. I mean, we had three or four people in the store. You know, when you're in that kind of environment, you do everything.

'''Ana Reinert:''' You clean the bathroom. You know, you do everything. Like, it's different to kind of what you do now where it's more hands-on. But then you were, like, running the store, selling the stuff. Right, running the store.

'''Jim Rouse:''' Luckily, it was a pretty much nine-to-five store and Saturday hours. You know, you didn't work Sunday. So, it wasn't too bad. Mm-hmm. So, I got the job with Hampton Haddon, working with them. And I started to, it kind of devolved or evolved, however you want to look at it. But they didn't, it turned out they didn't want me to go out on the road because they didn't want the expense. Okay. And this was a thing between the two partners. So, I went with, you know, like, taking care of the warehouse, making sure all the stuff got out of time. There were some huge orders that came through there. Because I guess it's no secret anymore. They used to do the Levenger True Writers, too. Mm-hmm. And there'd be hundreds of these things coming in that had to be QC'd and checked. You had to make sure they got done. You know, that there was quality control issues sometimes. You had to make sure those things got corrected and everything. Back up a step. When I was at Bertram's, I realized early on that if somebody brought a broken pen in that I was going to send back to the factory because that was one of the services we offered, I could try to fix it. And if I couldn't fix it, I sent it back to the factory. So, there was an, and if I did fix it, you know, I didn't charge the customer or anything, just give the customer the pen. So, kind of a win-win situation. So, I had a lot of experience at, like, learning how to take apart pelicans and Mont Blancs and how to straighten out nibs and stuff. But really no formal training. So, at Schaefer, there was a lot of printed material on how to do things. And I read through that stuff. I really ate it up. And I got pretty good at fixing the Schaefer's. Now, fixing pens in that kind of environment basically is a part replacement thing. But every now and then you run into somebody loves this nib. We don't have that nib, you know, from an older pen. So, you learn how to straighten it out. And I was pretty successful at it. Sometime toward the end of that run with, I think that was four or five years with Hampton Head. And I had known Scott, Scott Franklin, for 20 years at that time. He says, I want to expand. I need somebody else. Would you move to Raleigh? I said, no, I don't want to move to Raleigh. So, we went back and forth and we worked out this deal where I didn't have to, you know, spend all week in Raleigh, like four days. And I could go back home to see my grandkids and play. So, you know, he opened a new or he had an office. I went to work at that office and the rest is history. Kind of developed the nibs as we went along. You know, back then he was getting nibs from Myke. The people making our pens were in Texas, which was Dan Simons. He was making them out in Texas. And that evolved to an in-house. We moved to a new facility, bigger facility. We bought in-house machines. Dan came in and trained the staff. And, you know, now we're making pens in-house. And I'm doing the nibs in the back, the SIG. The SIG was just a freak accident. It really was. You know, I was making a nib for myself and I ground it wrong. So, then I tried to correct something and I ground that wrong. And then I started writing with it. And I said, hey, you know, this thing works pretty good.