First light
It was the first night in our first home that Lori and I finally had a chance to sit down and read.
Lori saw it immediately.
“There we were in our new living room, in the house
we’d stretched for, and there wasn’t enough light so both Steve
and I could read,” she later wrote. “We started joking around, fighting for the seat next to
Grandma’s old dinosaur floor lamp. Then it dawned on us.”
We looked around and saw that a revolution of sorts had just begun in lighting
technology. At the time, though, few people—few Americans, at least—were
aware of this new type of bulb called halogen. It would be, we decided,
an excellent source of lighting for serious readers.
And thus in
1987—thanks to a small, cozy, but poorly lit condominium in the Boston
suburb of Belmont—the idea of Levenger saw its first light.
Serious Lighting for Serious Readers
Lori and I pooled our retirement funds, sold our first new
car (a 1985 Mitsubishi Montero) and combined
our surnames of Granger and Leveen to form Levenger.
Like many companies, we first went through the now-archetypal
garage phase.
Our first sale (a floor lamp to our hairdresser) happened if memory serves, in July 1987. And other friends bought a little things
here and there to show support. But to really get our business going we obviously had to sell stuff to people we didn’t know.
We tested a few ads in newspaper home magazines, but we could hardly find them when they ran. Apparently potential customers had the
same issue since we received nary a call or card requiring our first catalog. We were close to panic since those poor–performing
ads ate up a lot of our available funds. Finally we thought we’d try a 1–inch ad in the The New Yorker with the line,
“Serious Lighting for Serious Readers.”
It ran in the October 12th, 1987 issue—the day Levenger was introduced to the public at large— which fittingly had a young couple
on the cover, huddled under an umbrella. That little ad was a lightning bolt for us. Catalog request came raining in and we sent our humble
catalog of lighting out via first class mail. Those blessed New Yorker readers were our first real customers, and they were wonderful.
That ad and others like it ran for years in The New Yorker and other magazines as Levenger began expanding its product offering and
adopted the motto:“Tools for Serious Readers.”
October 12th is Columbus Day (the real one) and also my birthday.
The first Levenger brochure was one sheet of paper folded twice, printed in black and white, and featuring halogen lights. The fulfillment
center started out in our den, then moved to that garage(our neighbor’s). Customers would call to place orders—our call center was
the spare bedroom.
A better word for ‘Accessories’
Marketing scholars of today might congratulate us for finding a niche so quickly—but at the time, that’s not how
we saw it. We simply listened to our customers and adapted. They told us they wanted good chairs and desks and other reading
accessories. Hmm, accessories. What was a better word for that? Products... items... tools. Yes, that was it: Tools for Serious Readers.
By the winter of 1989 we knew we needed to look for a proper business location. We considered Massachusetts, Maine and Maryland, all places
where we had ties. But it was a cold March in the Northeast that year—and my father was living in a quiet slice of sunshine near Delray Beach—and
Florida’s commercial real estate was attractively priced. By that fall, the entire staff of Levenger (by then there were three) had moved to
Delray Beach.
Growing up in the ’90s
Levenger issued our first catalog in 1990. By the following year, we’d brought catalog production
in-house: design, copy, layout and photography. Today, that team, “Levenger Studios,”
continues to be at the heart of our creative process.
Sales doubled in 1992, and our 5,000-square-foot building had been too small for a couple of
years already. In 1993, we broke ground on the site of our current headquarters, and Inc. magazine
ranked us the eighth-fastest-growing privately held company in America.
As Levenger continued to be recognized as one of the most successful companies
of the ’90s, our name and products started appearing in national publications—including House
Beautiful, Forbes FYI, The Wall Street Journal, and House
and Garden. If you look closely at the sets for the motion picture “You’ve Got Mail,”
starring Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan, you’ll see our Better Mouse Pad,
Best & Lloyd Bestlite lamp and Page Points.
More milestones
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The Levenger Webstore in 1996
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November 2, 1995, marked our one-millionth order when Mrs. Kathryn Bricker of Sarasota,
Florida, called to purchase a Slim Shirt Pocket Briefcase.
Two months earlier, we had introduced our first Professional &
Corporate Sales catalog, whose customers now include prestigious universities,
media companies, law firms and laboratories.
On July 31, 1996, we launched our online store (pictured here). The following year we doubled the size
of our first bricks-and-mortar store, which was located on the first floor of our Delray Beach headquarters.
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