Comic Attitudes

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Last September Mullen, who's currently president of the New Jersey chapter of the grass-roots trade group Comic Book Retailers International, co-organized the first retailer-run trade show. (Most in the industry are sponsored by distributors.) The event attracted 100 retailers ("fewer than I wanted," she says), but increased Comic Attitudes' profile in the industry.

On the eve of the opening of the film Batman Returns, Schwindinger arranged for a private preview in one of the Menlo Park Mall cinemas. He bought out the entire theater, 225 tickets at full price, and sold them to favorite customers for face value, handed out Batman buttons and trading cards at the door, and, after the screening, raffled off a few posters. True, the promotion generated more sales of Batman paraphernalia, but like Mullen's trade show, what it really generated was more word of mouth and goodwill for Comic Attitudes. "There was a real sense of community," he recalls.

Schwindinger's and Mullen's determination is expressed on the walls of their office/warehouse. Among the numerous superhero and fantasy-character posters lining the walls are two large sheets of paper with neat capital letters printed in magic marker. The first sheet delineates Comic Attitudes' mission statement in a three-part outline: To be the first and dominant national chain of comic-book specialty stores; to provide customer service that ensures customer satisfaction; to maintain comic books as an entertainment medium. The other sheet enumerates the essential components of "a great company," which Mullen lifted from the forward of Beyond Entrepreneurship: Performance. Impact. Reputation. Longevity. For Mullen and Schwin-dinger, those words define a strategy.

Performance. At Comic Attitudes performance is monitored daily. Cash registers tally sales for the day at closing time, and store associates enter the figures on a calendar that lists that day's sales from the year before, as well as the target sales goal for that day. The numbers are then discussed at weekly senior-staff meetings.

Sales-to-salary ratios, rent, debt, and inventory costs are also discussed openly with Comic Attitudes' staff at the meetings; particularly thorny terms and equations are not only spelled out on a blackboard but typed up on sheets to be added to the associates' policies-and-procedures manual. Mullen is shooting to have $9 in sales for every dollar spent on payroll and thinks sharing that number with associates is key to providing them with a frame of reference. Toward that end, associates are encouraged to spend no more than 10 minutes with a customer; any longer is "just idle chitchat, and you're not likely to make a sale," Mullen says.

Revenues at Kilmer Square are now running 18% ahead of last year's, and Menlo Park's are up 85%. Mullen and Schwindinger are counting on the latter figure to attract more financing. "We want to be able to say, Here's the prototype and it works."

Impact. Comic Attitudes seeks to make an impact through the design, layout, and cleanliness of its stores -- the associates are even supplied with uniforms: custom polo-style shirts with the company insignia -- as well as through customer service. Schwindinger describes the approach as an "attentive" sell as opposed to a hard sell.

Reputation. Like impact, it is hammered home through superior customer service, special promotions and trade shows, and the breadth and depth of Comic Attitudes' merchandise mix. "We don't want to turn anyone away," says Schwindinger. "We want to be viewed as the source." To help employees uphold what he and Mullen believe is Comic Attitudes' growing reputation for quality in merchandise and service, a communications book in the back of each store serves to update sales associates and remind them of areas they need to work on and of upcoming company events.

Longevity. Mullen is "the dreamer and the planner," says Schwindinger; "I'm the doer and the fixer." It's Mullen who has put up several maps of the eastern United States on the walls in a corner of the warehouse and has covered them with different colored pushpins. "Red is the warehouse. Blue are our existing stores. Green ones represent malls we want to get into." There are currently 10 green pins on the map, and three lease negotiations are under way: two for this year and one for 1994. "Soon I'll be putting up my West Coast maps," she says, grinning.

Mullen and Schwindinger's far-flung plans will be radically altered if the couple can't obtain additional financing for expansion. In that case they plan to grow through reinvested earnings, albeit at a much slower pace. Melchior Thompson cautions that the maximum growth rate they could achieve taking that route would be one new location every two years.

By contrast, Comic Attitudes' business plan projects a minimum return of $15.4 million on $40 million in sales by the year 2000 on a 1993 investment of $2 million. That represents a 45% compounded annual return, a figure Mullen arrived at after research among retail venture capitalists indicated they look for compounded annual returns of 30% to 60%. Mullen and Schwindinger anticipate achieving that kind of return through an initial public offering.

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