But Greco had no such reservations. She and Hank Hagquist, an outside contractor who was Playing Mantis's original Web master, were old friends from Riley High in South Bend. Hagquist was running his own site, called Hobbytalk, for fans of radio-controlled car models. He talked to Greco about starting a section devoted to Playing Mantis products. "I thought they could be a good subject," he says. "I thought the people who bought or collected their products were real enthusiasts, people with a passion."
In 1998, Hagquist established a board for Polar Lights, moderated by Greco. Dave Metzner, the company's product-development manager for model kits, helped Greco answer board members' questions. But it was she who ruled the board. Judiciously leaking product news, insisting on cordial relations and polite language, Greco -- signing missives with an enthusiastic "Moi!" -- gathered a loyal cadre of fans to her cyberclubhouse. Yet even after hundreds of members had signed on, she didn't fully understand the potency of the boards until Polar Lights released that model of the Jupiter 2.
The kit, enthusiastically received, had a flaw: a hatch inside the ship was upside down. That detail would escape 99.9% of normal buyers. But this was the Internet, where obsessive behavior hangs its hat. Board members were all over the error, and Metzner, with Lowe's approval, decided to correct the flaw for the second run of the kit.
The online critics felt as if they had spoken and the company had responded. True enough, says Metzner. "If it hadn't been for people telling us about it, it wouldn't have been fixed," he says. It was the kind of action that converts loyal customers into devoted fans.
As the online community jelled, its members got very comfortable with one another. Their exchanges strayed way beyond toys. In the course of a limerick contest initiated by Greco ( There once was a monster named Frankie, in the mood for a little hanky-panky... What say we just don't go there?), one member posted a message revealing that his wife had left him. "Why share it out here like this?" he wrote. "I don't know. Thanks for the support out here, you guys."
Greco responded immediately -- "We're here for you" -- and the board members pitched in. It brought home for Greco just how much this community meant to its members. The board was a sanctuary that connected them to the company and to one another far more deeply than she had realized.
"As I reflect back on my hobby experiences for the year, one of the most satisfying has been the relationship formed by a large number of us with Polar Lights. It is not their products that, I feel, sets them apart from other model companies. It is their devotion to the consumer." --PCModeler.com
Unfortunately, Lowe was not frequenting this board (or boards that were set up later for Johnny Lightning and Captain Action fans), so he saw little of all that. What he did see was that Greco and Metzner were spending an awful lot of time on the Internet. It didn't seem as though their involvement with the boards was adding much to the business. "That's what they were doing with their time?" Lowe remembers asking. "Talking to people about their problems, which have nothing to do with model kits? So we took a very hard look at that."
At the time, in 1998, Playing Mantis was already reexamining its entire customer-service function. By 1999 some customer-service staffers were being asked to do more active selling.
That's how it happened that the boards almost died. It started with Hagquist, who was still hosting the virtual community on his site. "At some point I was saying that here we have this multimillion-dollar company building its name for free," he says. "C'mon, guys, feed a little back." So he gave Greco a deadline: By the end of February, start paying him $50 a month for each of the three boards.
Greco filed all the appropriate paperwork, never imagining there'd be a problem. But Miller wouldn't approve the expense at first. Look at it from his point of view. For one thing, it is often his job, as with any CFO, to be the one who says no when it comes to using company resources. For another, he and Lowe were already wondering what the true cost of the boards was and whether they were worthwhile. "It wasn't really a financial decision as much as a decision regarding use of time," Miller says. "Intangibles like that make for the toughest decisions."
As the deadline approached, Greco grew nervous. If the boards shut down, it would be a disaster -- and not just for the company, which would lose a resource that she felt hadn't even begun to pay off. "This community, and I think most communities, are built on trust," she says. "These boards are a refuge for the guys, a place where they can be themselves. Shut it down, even for a day, and you create an uncertainty from which the community might never recover."
She went to Metzner for advice. Of all people he best knew what was happening on the boards. Together they decided that even if they had to pay the fee themselves, they'd keep at least the model-kit board running. But first Greco wanted to reach out to Lowe directly. It wasn't politically correct, and it would anger her managers, but it wouldn't be the first time she had gone right to the top. (Greco was once a guard in a prison for men, and she prides herself on being pretty tough.) "I felt I owed the fight to the guys out there," she says.
On February 22, Greco posted a new topic on the Polar Lights board. Under the title "Hypothetical Question" she wrote, "Good morning, guys! Everyone have a cup of coffee? Anyone bring the donuts Time for a little sidebar discussion. SUPPOSE, just suppose, this BB would cease to exist. How would you all feel about that?"
That week the boards hummed. Members figured that something was going on in South Bend. Member Steve Iversen, who under the nom-de-Web CultTVMan operates a popular site for builders of science-fiction models, E-mailed his list of 700 subscribers, urging them to register their support. In post after post, members expressed their need for the board:
