The plastic playhouse

Before the babies came, it was just us and the dogs. When the first baby came, it was us, the dogs, the baby and the business we had started.

PETWORLD magazine was a typical home made publication — literally home made. I would have a phone, a computer to write my articles and behind me were the puppies that needed to be fed and in the next room was my baby girl — Aishwarya Niralee, Sanskrit words that meant Prosperity/Godlike qualities and Exceptional woman. I wanted so much for her, much more than I ever had.

My only goal in driving the fledging business at that time was to buy her a big plastic indoor playhouse that I eyed in Toys’r’us. It cost RM1,200 then — and I desperately wanted her to have it for her 2nd birthday. We could not afford it and she was still crawling anyhow, so I focused all my energy into making enough profit from everything we did so we could have the mindset to buy it.

When the first shipment of publications arrived at our doorstep, we realized that we had a problem where no magazine distributor wanted to take it on. It was an era when distributors were king — an era before the internet age. These kings were aghast at a magazine that had a German Shepherd on the cover.

“Who on Earth is going to buy a magazine with a face of a dog on a cover?” they scoffed incredulously. “Give us a magazine with a sexy woman on the cover or even a sexy man” I tried to convince them that there was a target audience for this, but they did not believe me.

I looked at the 6000 copies of our first publication filling up our little rented home and wondered what we were going to do.

When push comes to shove, you find the most innovative solutions. Entrepreneurship is learnt on the back of hardships and challenges. When your back is to the wall, and you are trapped with nowhere to go, you fight with all you’ve got to make it through.

And so I got out the yellow pages, marked all the petshops from the northern most states to the southern most states and I called each and every one of them with the same pitch “Hi there, we have an exciting new magazine on pets that your customers would LOVE. Can I come over and leave them on your table and you sell on a consignment basis. We will come back the next time with a new edition, take back what is unsold and give you the new one?”

It was an offer none of them could refuse, so we became the new distributor in town.

One that only distributed unsexy pictures of dogs and cats on the cover of our publication.

We priced each publication at RM8 and we gave 40 per cent to the pet shops. We packed the old Ford Laser I inherited when my dad died, with all the magazines it could carry and made what would become our bi-monthly trips to the north in one day. And bi-monthly trips to the South the next day.

Stopping by in every petshop just to distribute our publications. We had racks with the name PETWORLD on it and it became a household name amongst the products in every petshop. There were many pet foods, toys and accessories, but only one pet magazine.

Every little bit of cash we collected after a long day trip was so exciting and fulfilling – we did not have much, but we were happy. And I could finally afford to buy my little girl that indoor playhouse. In a strange way, that for me, was success. That RM1,200 plastic playhouse. Because that was my end objective. For two years of slogging.

We were pioneers even then, and we made our mark. There is a generation of kids who grew up on this and meet me as executives in their company who still remember the name PETWORLD. And their eyes still gleam with the happiness that publication gave them.

And after six editions of driving around distributing our own publications, distributors came to us and asked if they could start carrying our publication to bookshops. It was such a sweet moment — in a tiny little corner of our world, we felt we had arrived.

We may have won the battle with the distributors, but the war was far from won. For by that time, we had finished all the money we had gotten from the sale of the house, and we were close to broke. The inflow did not quite match up to the outflow of funds.

Join me in the next Episode of Through The Looking Glass as we cross more hurdles to find that proverbial land of milk and honey.

The views expressed here are those of the columnist and do not necessarily represent the views of New Sarawak Tribune.