Brick by brick, click by click, a supply catalog firm grows

Near State Street in Santa Barbara is a bricks-and-mortar structure that is the physical heart of an Internet travel site success story.

The building houses the offices of Magellan’s travel supplies catalog, which was started in 1989 by John and Gloria McManus, a husband-and-wife team who once worked for Pan Am.

“We were working with travel agencies and would hear stories that people had with travel problems,” said John McManus, president of the company. Because of their extensive travels, the couple often knew of products that offered solutions to those problems.

“We realized that these products had not been gathered together in one spot,” he said. Thus was born the idea for Magellan’s.

Sixteen years later, the company has 100 employees. There are 447 items in the catalog and more than 1,500 items listed on the company’s website, www.magellans.com.

That structure off State Street houses the call center, corporate offices and the first Magellan’s retail store. The building was originally the carriage house for the Arlington Hotel, which was built in 1875 and burned to the ground in 1909. The carriage house survived and held several other tenants before 1995, when Magellan’s moved in.

It was also in 1995 that McManus thought it might be a good idea to register the Magellan’s web address. It would be 1998 before the site was fully operational. At the end of the first year, it generated 5% of sales.

Today, the website has as many as 15,000 visitors a week (it’s busiest during the holiday season) and accounts for 38% of Magellan’s sales. Each year, 200 to 250 new items are added to the catalog.

Discontinued, unprofitable or sale items are sold on a “web specials” page. On offer right now is a “classic driving cap” modeled by McManus himself.

It is that hands-on, personal touch that distinguishes Magellan’s from many other online businesses. The McManuses continue to be involved in product selection, though only in the final approval process. Still, if a new product doesn’t appear to be travel-related or is too gimmicky, John or Gloria can exercise veto power.

Some of Magellan’s competitors, such as general-purpose travel supplier TravelSmith (www.travelsmith.com) and EBags (www.ebags.com), which sells primarily luggage, have an online and print catalog presence like Magellan’s. Others such as Christine Columbus (www.christinecolumbus.com), which is devoted to women travelers, are solely on the Web.

“The first day we went online we had orders,” said Rob Brost, who, with his wife, Annette Zientek, founded Christine Columbus. All advertising for the site is done online and though it maintains a phone order line, more than 90% of all orders come through the Web, he said.

Other than driving sales, the Web is also useful for Magellan’s customers who simply want general travel information, as well as tips on things such as local electrical voltage. Or if customers misplace or lose instructions or product manuals, they can find them posted online.

Magellan’s has a pull-down “shop by destination” menu at the top of its home page. Click on a destination and there is a brief description with buttons along the side for information and destination-specific products. For example, when shopping for a trip to Britain, click on weather and there are recommendations for several products, such as raincoats, to deal with the notoriously dreary skies; for the U.S. Virgin Islands, clicking the “health risks” button gets recommendations for several types of bug repellent.

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Contact James Gilden at www.theinternettraveler.com.