So whenever a department store tried to muscle me around and say, “You can’t sell me if you also sell Penney’s,” I would ask them where their customer was going to buy her Dittos-at Penney’s or at their store? If she could find Dittos at their store, she’d also buy a belt and a blouse and shoes there, too. I developed brand recognition that was so strong it overcame the customers’ loyalty to the retailers. What I did with Ditto was make it a public franchise. In the apparel industry, quite often, if you’re selling department stores, you can’t sell a chain, or you can’t sell a discounter, because of the snob factor and the reality that department stores mark up their products differently than chain outlets like Wal-Mart or Kmart do. We’ve gotten to a point with certain subs where we’ve become so important to them that we get a kind of “favored-nation” status: They give our jobs priority because they are smart people who recognize that we’ll be there for them, throwing work their way, all year long. And the subcontractors that work with us love it because jobs get dropped in their laps, and many of them don’t have the budget to do a lot of advertising and marketing themselves. Our customers just love it, because with one telephone call we can do as much or as little as they want us to. Now, along with furniture and indoor walls, we can offer carpeting, ceiling and flooring, plumbing, air conditioning-all kinds of products and services. I realized that if we could show these customers that we were competitive in other areas, why would they want to make five or 10 phone calls when we could do all the work for them with one call? I decided that we needed to become a one-stop shop, so we began to develop relationships with good, reliable subcontractors and brought them in under our banner in an informal way on various jobs. But most companies either make the walls or they make the furniture. The clients wanted interior walls, carpeting, furniture, cabinets, everything. We were selling office furniture to our customers, most of whom were in the middle of a remodel or starting from scratch trying to furnish new office space. When I bought this company, it had four employees and was making less than $200,000 a year. Since Day 1, we’ve been pulled into growth. I’ve always felt that there were two ways a company could grow: Push or pull. Klein about how he has learned to expand his company by expanding his product line and services. After working as a consultant and video store owner for about a decade, Leff purchased a small company in 1991 that sold partitions and office furniture. When the company was sold to Jordache in 1980, it was doing more than $30 million in sales and $14 million in licensing annually. In 1970, Richard Leff co-founded Ditto Jeans, helping to create one of the first companies to specialize in bluejeans for women.
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