Henry Field - "Putting the Person Into Personality"

You know, I can't find a seed packet for the Field Seed Co. when it was in the earlier company version, before the "& Nursery".  Why can't I?  Ebay doesn't turn them up. Doesn't turn up any for any decade actually.  They must have had packets.

I guess I don't care today.  However,  Ebay did toss up this yardstick cane from the Iowa State Fair!  Much better than a seed packet.

Below is an article on his advertising style and strategy.  It is a great puff piece but I can't see why an advertising magazine would puff Field..

This truck was there, too.

And this!!  I love this facet of the Henry Field's interests.

Actually "Putting the Person Into Personality"

As Illustrated by the Success of an Iowa Seedsman

By CHESLA C. SHERLOCK

1918 - Advertising and Selling

We hear a great deal of "personality" in advertising literature these days. The plea is for personality in all copy, for advertisers realize that personality has a greater influence upon the mind of the buying public than any other quality which may be reflected in the printed page.

And when I am reminded of that craze for personality in advertising matter, I instantly recall Henry Field of Shenandoah, Iowa.

Field is a seedsman who started in business at eight years of age. His passion has been for growing things since his earliest recollection. He handled the farm garden as a mere child and was inspired to put up his first seed packets by the catalog of old Henry Vick.

His first real occupation was as a market gardener. He found that people soon formed the habit of coming to him for the kind of seed that "he used him

self" and before long he was spending the winter months selling seed to his neighbors.

His first catalog was a small fourpage price list which he printed himself at night. He has done his own printing ever since.

He started in the seed business in earnest in 1902 by building a five-hundred-dollar frame building. In 1913 his business amounted to $170,973 and in 1918 it reached $1,115,962.14.

His business has grown with leaps and bounds since the first year. This hasn't been accidental or because he did not face keen competition. There are plenty of good seed companies in the field and most of them are thoroughly reliable. Seed men sell seed today that grows. They have to do that, if they are to survive.

Henry Field grows his own seed and he is a particular fellow about it. He wants things right and he sees to it that they are right. But most of his competitors are shrewd enough to insist upon the same quality in their goods.

If you want to know why Henry Field has succeeded in building up a million dollar business in a little country town, you have only to read his advertising literature to know the reason. Henry Field has the knack of getting personality into his copy.

In the first place, he has personality. He is different. He has that unique quality of getting under the hide of the average fellow he deals with and in arousing the latter's confidence. He has the sales magnetism, if you please.

His catalog is nothing but a long distance mirror of himself. He writes every word of it, and even his description of the most uninteresting farm or garden seed is live and palpitating under his homely phrases.

He is not afraid to say his say in plain, unvarnished language and if he thinks a seed is poor or a certain crop a failure, he says so, even when offering the seed for sale.

On the very first page of his catalog, Henry Field wins his customers by taking them into his confidence. He tells them about his business, how it started and how he worked those first few years. It is a story close to the soil, and it has a universal appeal to his trade. He makes the reader feel that he is a plain, hard-working fellow like himself who wants to be honest before anything else, and who lives up to the Golden Rule. In other words,Henry Field is still a farmer, a market-gardener and nothing else. He sells seeds because people want his seed.

In another place, he says: "I hope you'll like the catalog. It's a sort of home-made affair and not specially artistic, but I have tried to make it helpful and honest and entertaining. And we have done all the work on it ourselves from start to finish.