Keeping Your Balance in Rapids

Steve Leveen
2024-10-10T07:46:35-04:00

At Levenger, we mark our birthday as October 12th, 1987, because that was the cover date of The New Yorker, where our first ad appeared offering “Serious Lighting for Serious Readers.” On the cover of that fall issue was a young couple huddled under an umbrella as they emerged from a videotape rental store.

The artist, Barbara Westman, gave us a sign of the times: young people weren’t going out to the movies, as their parents did, but were going home to watch movies on their couch. That was the new thing in 1987, notable enough to merit a New Yorker cover.

For me the cover also signifies the shortening life spans of businesses, and of whole industries, due to accelerating technological change.

After playing their part in killing off movie theaters, Blockbuster and all the other video rental stores are now themselves killed off. So, too, are many other brands you likely remember if you were old enough to drive in 1987.

In that seemingly far-off era before online shopping, people drove their Oldsmobiles or Pontiacs to big parking lots in front of Circuit City, Tower Records and Borders Books. They stopped at Howard Johnson’s for lunch, where they remembered they needed some toys, so they swung by Toys"R"Us on their way home.

All of those companies and brands are now in the dustbin. Contemplating this makes me all the more grateful that Levenger is still here; having run the technological rapids for 37 years, we’re still around to provide gifts to our customers in the back-to-the-future year of 2024.

Prophetic advice

“If you’re in business long enough,” my father once told me, “you’ll run into hard times.”

He said that when Levenger was growing like gangbusters, when customers still filled out paper order forms and mailed them in with a check. More hip customers, comfortable with new technology, called our 800 number and read their credit card numbers to our agents. Some of you may remember catalog agents politely asking, “Would you mind reading the codes printed in the pink and blue boxes on the back of your catalog?”

Today, it’s algorithms that keep track of those codes, measuring which online ads and social media posts get the most clicks that result in orders.

Adapting to the new order—screens replacing catalog pages and virtual shopping carts replacing paper order forms—was not the only challenge facing Levenger. Virtually all retail companies had to face that disruption. And our particular branch of the technology river had another set of rapids–the steady decline in the use of paper.

Much of what Levenger sells is nice paper wrapped in leather and other pleasing materials. But as much as we and our customers love this high-quality heritage technology (as we call it), all of us spend more and more time on glass screens, which results, inevitably, in using less paper.

Even I now make my shopping list on my phone, often with the advantage of photos. Hard to do that on 3 x 5 cards, no matter how nice the card stock.

That’s why you’ll find plenty of products at Levenger today that help people be more comfortable with their tablets, laptops and smartphones, while still having a place for paper. For today, magic lies in using both our new and heritage technology in balance. None of us wants to give up our screens, yet behind every piece of paper lies a certain peace that eludes us on our glittering screens.

Many wise people have said that a well-lived life is a life in balance. City and country, excitement and quiet, spring and fall, digital screens and tactile paper.

This fall I wish you your own preferred balance, and thank you deeply for your continued business with thirty-something Levenger.

Steve Leveen
Co-Founder