Calendar Publisher Profits by Turning the Porsche Into a Pinup

In the beginning, a car was nothing more to Paul Oxman than a way to get around.

Then, in mid-1968, he bought a used Porsche.

And his world changed.

It is 20 years later, and Oxman lives and breathes autos and auto sports.

With his wife, Pat, he owns a small but influential magazine, On Track, that covers the spectrum of auto racing, from the Formula I Grand Prix circuit to off-road racing.

The couple also own Paul Oxman Publishing, one of the largest publishers of high-quality motor sports calendars and posters in the world.

Both businesses are headquartered in a small industrial-commercial complex in Fountain Valley where the 48-year-old Oxman presides over a profitable and growing publishing empire with nine full-time employees that will gross slightly more than $2 million this year.

The magazine, which began publishing in 1981, has a steady circulation of about 30,000, Oxman said, with a hard-core audience of 20,000 racing professionals and fans who renew at an annual rate of 91%.

But while On Track brings him respectability in the motor sports world, it is Paul Oxman Publishing that brings in the profits with Oxman’s ever-expanding line of posters, calendars, note pads, videos and, for the first time last year, Christmas cards.

The calendars--a line of 10 for 1989 themed to a particular make of car or motorcycle or type of racing--are the biggest seller. And sales are increasing steadily.

Calendars of all types, it seems, have become big hits in recent years. Hallmark Cards, which publishes dozens of different types of wall and desk calendars, estimates that sales of all types of calendars in the United States will surpass $1.3 billion this year.

Wall calendars, such as Oxman’s, are the most popular, and publishers are gearing their products toward very specific audiences--body builders, flower lovers, ski buffs, quilters and fans of such cartoon strips as Garfield and Cathy.

Oxman learned about niche marketing early as he tapped into the dreams and fantasies of motor sports fans.

“An example is our Porsche calendar,” he said. “We’ve tried target marketing and found out that people who own Porsches aren’t good buyers. They already have a real one. People who want Porsches buy the calendar.”

His sales approach is almost entirely direct mail, although he does specialized printing for about 250 companies that order calendars with their names imprinted to hand out to customers.

Each July, Oxman mails a calendar catalogue to an ever-growing mailing list that last year had about 620,000 names on it, up from 30,000 in 1974.

It costs about $220,000 to print and mail the catalogues, he said, “but it brings in about $500,000 in retail sales.”

Combined with orders from wholesalers and businesses, Oxman figures he moved almost 100,000 1989 calendars by the end of the business year Friday.

This year business should be even better, he said, because he has just signed a deal with a distributor in Virginia to place the calendars in retail bookstores for the first time.

At 17 inches wide and 22 inches deep when unfolded, they will be among the biggest calendars on the shelves. And at $14.95--up from $12.95 for the 1989 models--they will be among the most expensive.

“And the calendars are just the start,” Oxman said with a grin. “We start with that and then give them more of what they want.”

That is why he has added to his mail order line an October catalogue--a mailing of about 200,000--offering note pads with line drawings of race cars and motorcycles, videotapes of the previous season’s Formula I races and Christmas cards with color renderings of various sports and racing cars and motorcycles.

“The Christmas cards really took off,” he said. He had 12 different designs done for the first run and printed 2,000 of each. “We had to go back to the presses two times to fill the orders. Next (Christmas) I’m going to have 36 different designs.” He also plans to introduce a line of stationery to go with the note pads.

And it all began with that $3,000 Porsche and a $1,200 loan from his wife.

Oxman, born and raised in Phoenix, graduated from Arizona State University with a degree in business administration. He was working for TRW Systems in Redondo Beach as a manpower and budgeting analyst when he bought a 1966 Porsche 912. It was the first sports car he ever owned.

“And that was the end for me,” he recalled. “I simply fell in love with it.”

Oxman started entering amateur road rallies and reading about the auto racing world.

“Then one day I came back from the library, where I’d been reading about the major race tracks, and I told (my wife) I needed to borrow $1,200 to put out a poster that had all the courses on it,” he said. “My wife took the money out of her savings account, and I had 2,000 posters printed.”

He advertised in several racing magazines in late 1968 and, while the response wasn’t overwhelming, the $3.50 posters did begin to sell. Oxman expanded his part-time mail order business by importing and marketing racing posters from England.

By the tail end of 1970, almost all of the racing circuit posters were gone and orders were coming in for more.

That proved fortunate, because in October, 1970, Oxman was laid off, a victim of a slump in the aerospace industry.

“So I had no real choice but to begin going at it full time,” Oxman said. He began publishing more posters of his own, and in 1973 Oxman decided to add calendars to his product line.

He bought a German-made racing car calendar, added it to his mail order catalogue “and saw the business really pick up. By the middle of the year it was clear that I was going to run out of calendars, so I called the distributor to get some more and was told that they were out and couldn’t order anymore.”

When he and his wife had to sit down and write out $8,000 worth of refund checks to about 900 customers, “I decided that was never going to happen again, that I’d do my own.”

He did--producing his flagship World Racing calendar in 1974 for 1975.

In 1978 he added a second calendar featuring racing Porsches and in 1980 he added two more. For the 1991 season, he said, he intends to add calendars for the sail and power boating enthusiasts, increasing the line to an even dozen.

“It just keeps getting bigger,” he said.

Best of all, this year Oxman will pay off the loan for the metallic blue Ferrari 328 GTS that is his official company car.