Swatches

At long tables in a Manhattan loft building sat half a hundred girls, their deft fingers flying between stacks of folded rotogravure pages, piles of little fabric squares, and pots of paste. All day long, day after day for a week, they neatly pasted the little squares of cloth onto the printed pages. There were 980,000 cloth samples, called "swatches" by retailers, and cut from 6,000 yd. of material, to be affixed to 469,000 copies of rotogravure with 250 Ib. of paste. When all was finished. 15 trucks carted the 16 tons of paper to the New York Herald Tribune plant.

Last fortnight Herald Tribune readers found in the rotogravure section a half-page advertisement of R. H. Macy & Co. offering men's white broadcloth shirts at $1.69 and linen dish towels at 17-c-. Attached to the picture of the shirt was a two-inch sample of white broadcloth; to the picture of the dishtowel, a square of green-striped linen.

The advertisement cost Macy's $3,000; about $1,000 for the space, $2,000 for the fabric and insertion. Results, according to Macy's, were phenomenal. One skeptical customer laundered the swatch overnight, convinced himself it would not shrink, then ordered a dozen shirts. Shirts and towels sold by the thousand. The Macy advertisement was the first of its kind in Manhattan, the first anywhere in rotogravure. The idea was first introduced into newspaper advertising last spring in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch by Scruggs, Vandervoort & Barney Dry Goods Co. That the Macy advertisement would be the last in the U. S. for a long time seemed likely last week when the Post Office Department invoked an old regulation against attaching any merchandise to copies of a publication using second-class mail rates. Even if samples were carried only in city editions, the Post Office would not relent, since the letter of the law states the entire edition of a second-class publication must be uniform.

Observers wondered if the law would prevent a perfume advertiser from spraying his newspaper copy with scent, as did one enterprising perfumer nearly 20 years ago in Humboldt County, California. Copies of that edition of the Eureka Humboldt Standard reeked for months afterward.

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