My Son Was A Cutup

In the summer between his freshman and sophomore years in college, my son and elder child, answered an employment ad with Vector Marketing. That summer, he was a door-to-door cutlery salesman. The parental wisdom here was that he had a tendency to mumble when speaking with strangers. Even if he sold nary a knife, the sales experience in speaking with strangers over and over during the summer might prove valuable. Did it work? I don't know. I don't think that my son mumbles in conversation with strangers anymore. And he doesn't try to sell them a set of steak knives. If this is (fair & balanced) child rearing, so be it.

[x NYTimes Magazine]
A Seller's Edge: Cutco Knives
By Rob Walker


Copyright © 2005 New York Times
[Click on image to enlarge] 

The advertisements appear on college campuses all over the country, inviting students to earn money by working for something called Vector Marketing. To get the details, you have to show up at an orientation session, where you find that the job is selling Cutco kitchen knives. The Cutco sales force, which might include as many as 40,000 people over the course of a year (there's a lot of turnover) is mostly college students, and has been for decades. It's not surprising that students would want to earn extra cash, but what is surprising is that those students apparently manage to sell a lot of knives (Cutco claims annual revenues of $182 million) through an old-fashioned method: the in-home personal demonstration.

The face-to-face sales call has at best a mixed reputation in the popular mind, calling up thoughts of shady pyramid schemes, or maybe of John Updike's Harry Angstrom, depressed after another failed day trying to peddle the MagiPeel peeler. Contrast these images with the contemporary vision of the information-hungry consumer who comparison-shops everywhere from Wal-Mart to the Web before making a purchase. Indeed, visit a site called BladeForums (''The leading edge of knife discussion''), and you will find cutlery freaks mocking Cutco. Google the brand, and you'll find an array of complaints from former sales reps griping about, among other things, the roughly $150 that recruits have to put up for the demonstration knife set.

Erick Laine, chairman of the holding company that owns Cutco and Vector Marketing, is familiar with the complaints and insists that they represent a thin slice of the massive sales force. (He says that the demonstration-set fee is refundable.) Those young people who do stick with Cutco, he argues, get valuable experience; Purdue and a few other universities have actually encouraged students pursuing sales degrees to sign up.

Cutco's archaic-sounding style may have detractors, but it is not a hindrance to sales -- it is the whole point. Bob Levine, a psychology professor at California State University, Fresno, enrolled in the Cutco sales course while researching his 2003 book, ''The Power of Persuasion.'' What made the Cutco system distinct from, and more successful than, say, the almost mythical Fuller Brush Man, he realized, is the elimination of cold calls.

Reps are strongly encouraged to start out pitching parents or other family members, partly as practice, but really to jump-start the most critical part of the process: referrals. John Ruhlin, 24, has been selling Cutco for four and a half years around Canton, Ohio, and is the firm's top performer. (Recently he hired his father to help out.) ''Everybody that you know,'' Ruhlin observes, ''knows 15 people that you don't know.'' For example: About two and a half years ago he made a sale to an Amish businessman; now half his business comes from Amish contacts.

Ending every demonstration with cleverly phrased requests for a fresh set of contacts, Levine wrote, meant that ''every contact is grounded in a trusted referral.'' Thus, by the time the salesperson is standing in your living room, he has been referred by someone you know, who in turn heard from someone he knows -- a rolling snowball of trust. Of course, as you're sitting there listening, you're hardly in a position to cross-check the seller's claims or comparison-shop, but why bother? ''The salesman becomes accepted through familiarity,'' Levine wrote. ''Social proof begets social proof.'' Or in the words of one of the handouts he received, ''Names are money!''

Levine doesn't have a problem with the knives themselves (he still uses the demonstration set he bought as part of his training). But, he told me, ''they're not selling the trustworthiness of their brand. They're selling the trustworthiness of their friends.'' That, he says, borders on the manipulative. Cutco's point of view is that it is selling quality, made-in-America cutlery through a knowledgeable sales force. According to the company president, Jim Stitt, the way that it goes about this is not exotic or quaint, let alone shady. Even in the modern consumer world, he contends, selling, from industry to financial services, is always about networking, getting referrals, asking to be trusted. ''Relationship building,'' he says, ''is how sales works.''

Rob Walker is a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine and Inc.

Copyright © 2005 The New York Times