The Vermont Country Store was founded by my parents, Vrest and Ellen Orton. My Dad had clear memories of growing up in the general store owned by my Grandfather, Gardner Lyman Orton, in North Calais, Vermont, which was started the year my Dad was born in 1897. Those memories resulted in our first catalogue consisting of 12 pages and 36 items, printed in our garage print shop and mailed to my parents' Christmas card list in late 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.
I grew up learning the art of storekeeping that was based on my Grandfather's principles of finding useful, functional products that the farm families of northern Vermont could not easily find elsewhere, or make themselves. It was from these principles that our motto, "We sell products that don't come back, to people who do," was born.
What we learned in the store, face to face with our customers, we put to practice in our catalogue. In the 1950s and '60s 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 1980s, 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.
Our motto continues to serve us well today even over the Internet. We may have "dot COM" in our web address but our practice of doing business is rooted in over a hundred years of Orton Family storekeepers.
We plan to keep this a family business and my three sons, Cabot, Gardner, and Eliot, serve on our Board of Directors and are learning the responsibilities of their roles as "Props." As a family business we make a serious commitment to the practice of giving back to our communities and to this special place called Vermont. All the terrific folks who work here serve as ambassadors of The Vermont Country Store to their local community organizations and it's through them that much of our contributions are made.
In addition, we created The Orton Family Foundation, which is doing serious work in Vermont and other rural places across America to help citizens and their local governments better define and shape the futures of their towns.
If you have any suggestions for products or comments on how we do business just let me know by emailing me at LymanOrton@VermontCountryStore.com.
Thank you so much for your business and I hope we serve you well enough to keep you coming back.
Lyman Orton, Prop
