You can go home again: The founder of rock-and-roll merchandise marketer Old Glory once again owns the catalog and Website. Last month Glenn Morelli, who had sold the direct division of Old Glory to Alloy in December 2002, bought the properties for an undisclosed sum. He’d sold them to Alloy for $9.6 million.
Alloy had shut the Old Glory catalog and Website in early 2004. Morelli, meanwhile, had held on to his three Old Glory stores in Connecticut and added five mall-based stores in Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Georgia.
In buying back the direct business, Morelli did not acquire the house file, which at the time the business was sold consisted of about 300,000 names. So Morelli had to scramble to find names to get a catalog in the mail in time for the holidays.
The company printed about 650,000 copies of a 64-page catalog, says marketing director Doug Kneeland. Copies were mailed to about 7,000 online and in-store requesters. But the majority of catalogs were distributed through the stores and at rock concerts, Morelli says.