How it all began…
I started Great Stuff about 28 years ago, selling antique trunks which I refinished completely. (I still have many of these trunks.) About 12 years ago, I started buying different kinds of merchandise to sell.
One day, a friend asked me if I was interested in helping him purchase a large number of antique wagons that he was to have shipped from Europe. Fortunately, I decided to do it and from there started my current practice of buying large quantities of unique antiques from all over the world.
One of the ways I sold my merchandise was by hitting the road and displaying my wares at antique shows all around the country. My display was noticeably different from the others because I made sure to bring – you guessed it – large quantities. At one of the shows, some folks from Country Living happened by and took notice of my display.
They mentioned that it was interesting enough to mention in an upcoming issue of the magazine, and took a number of photographs. When the photographs were shown to the Editor, she found them so intriguing that she decided to run a large, multi-page write-up of Great Stuff by Paul in the March 1999 issue. The rest is history.
The phone rang off the hook, sometimes ringing a couple of hundred times a day. If I didn’t really have Great Stuff, the story would have ended there. But as all those people who called and checked us out found, we DO have Great Stuff, and lots of it! Great Stuff by Paul was featured in many other magazines, and continued to grow.