Since mailing its first catalog in April 1993, Beau Ties Ltd. has grown from a retirement-years diversion into a $2 million-a-year business.
The Middlebury, VT-based company produces about 1,100 bow ties per week in a 6,000-square-foot facility, at which scarves, cravats, pocket squares, cummerbunds and vests also are manufactured. Silk is imported from Great Britain, Italy and the Orient.
Creative is handled in-house, and the catalog mails nine times a year.
The Web accounts for about 40% of sales, said co-owners Bill Kenerson and Deb Venman, the married couple who founded the business. In a presentation to the New England Mail Order Association’s spring conference in Cambridge, MA last month, the duo entertained attendees with the story of how the company began.
Bow-tie wearers are a minority, said Kenerson. He wears them because his grandfather did, and has noticed many men have similar reasons for donning the neckwear.
Venman, an attorney, joked that her husband
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