Nice piece on Cold Cut. Since you mentioned our free t-shirt promotion I thought I should clarify what we were trying to accomplish with it.

The main goals were 1) see who’s paying attention and reading the emails and mailpieces we have been sending out, That stuff, especially the pieces that we mail, is time-consuming to produce and expensive so if nobody is reading them then I thought perhaps it would be better to refocus our efforts elsewhere.

2) To establish a better dialog with the retailers who DO pay attention. We have our own store locator on our website and I only wanted to put in stores which were paying attention. I don’t want to send potential customers to stores which might serve them poorly as far as SLG is concerned.

Yes, within the context of the emails we did solicit retailers to order direct from us, again I was just trying to see how important this kind of thing was and to gauge a few other things about our reorder numbers. It was more a shot at Diamond than a lack of faith with Cold Cut.

I have my own thoughts on the Cold Cut announcement which I have put on my own blog. I’ll just note that I have seen a lot of distirbutors come and go in 20 years of doing this (hey, there were 18 when I started publishing, including TWO in Canada) and of all of them Mark and his partners at Cold Cut were among the best people I have ever known.

Of course, the best of all possible worlds is that someone does buy out Cold Cut, in which case the whole point is moot anyway. (And we’ve already received a few very intriquing inquiries, so stay tuned!)