Vermont Country Store

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The Vermont Country Store Catalog and the company that publishes it has a facinating story and their dedication to providing their customers has it's seeds deep in the traditions of how American business began and thrived on good old fashioned customer service, a great inventory of products and the best prices to keep the customer loyal and coming back year after year. We recommend you shop them during the holidays and year round.

The Vermont Country Store History
by Owner Lyman Orton

The Vermont Country Store was founded in North Calais Vermont in 1945. The store opened in the spring of 1946 and to everyone's amazement people found their way along dirt roads to the small village of Weston, population 475 at that time. Weston has now grown to almost 600 people

The business was greatly aided by a full-length article in the 1952 Saturday Evening Post, entitled "The Happy Storekeeper of the Green Mountains". There was hardly a soul in America who did not read the Post in those days. What we learned in the store, face to face with our customers, we put to practice in our catalogue. In the 1950's and '60's there was a certain amount of distrust against mail ordering, given the suspect offers on matchbooks so we had to overcome that.

My father told the story of going to visit Mr. Bean for advice that was brief and to the point: "Don't oversell your products. It's better for customers to open the package and have the item be better than you said it was." Using that advice along with our ironclad guarantee, we built trust with our mail order customers. After I graduated from Middlebury College in 1963, I drove down to Weston, put on my apron, and went into the business full time. In the early 1970's we experienced the two-edged sword of the energy crisis; it was bad for our store tourist business but great for our catalogue.

It was then that we learned how to control the pace at which we grew with a simple equation; expand our capacity in the stockroom and shipping department and then send out enough extra catalogues to increase the orders, but not so many that we could not ship "today's orders tomorrow". We continued to apply that formula during the heady days of mail order in the 1980's, never growing faster than our capacity to hire people, warehouse the goods, and ship the orders that came in. It costs a lot of money to get a new customer and makes no sense at all to lose a customer because of poor service or inferior products.