TELEVISION : A Day in the Life of QVC : At the home-shopping giant, the real action has little to dowith stock deals, takeovers or the future of interactive TV. Let’s start behind the scenes with the Drop Test and some Tweety Bird figurines . . .

Troy Enders sits at his workstation in his white lab coat concentrating on his mission. As supervisor of hard goods in the Quality Assurance Laboratory, he is an important first line of defense against improprieties, impurities and other pitfalls for his employer, the QVC Network.

On Enders’ desk is a pewter figurine of Tweety Bird. It is about half a foot high and is clad in prospector garb, his binoculars quite outsized.

Enders has pushed, prodded and cuddled his pewter prospecting Tweety and has found no discernible flaws. Best of all, Tweety has passed the most crucial of all QVC Quality Assurance Lab hurdles, the fabled Drop Test. Over and over again, Enders has placed this very Tweety and several of his mass-produced bird brethren in their black velvet pouch carrying cases and dropped them from his waist. Over and over, the Tweetys emerged uncracked, unpimpled, unscathed--products worthy of sale on and shipment from QVC.

It was not the same for the Warner Bros. wooden bobble-head dolls on an adjacent table. Many of the heads bobbled off in their crucial Drop Tests, either their glue or their headsprings inadequate. Enders put his thumb down. They would not appear on QVC until their packing or their head glue were shored up.

“We can’t send out items that will fall apart in normal shipping,” said QVC spokeswoman Amy Jackson. “The Drop Test weeds that out, and we just send items back to the manufacturers so they can get it right. Quality--that’s the reputation QVC has developed. The Quality Assurance Lab may be our most important link to our customers.”

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Folks have been watching a lot of QVC (the initials stand for “Quality, Value, Convenience”) lately. Some of those folks have been business types, especially after former Fox Inc. Chairman Barry Diller bought into QVC and became its chairman in January, 1993. Gossip-mongers and stock analysts sent and received tremors about what Diller would do: He’d be the Father of Home Shopping, the Honcho of Interactive TV, the Grand Vizier of All New Media.

Then there was the whole hoo-hah around the bidding war between QVC and Viacom (the parent of the Nickelodeon and MTV networks) over Paramount. Diller lost, but issued a brief statement: “Next.”

But most of those who watch QVC have no concern about Diller or Paramount or stock prices or the future of interactive TV. What they want is their Diamonique silver earrings or their Joyce Chen wok sets or their JVC camcorders. They’ve seen them on their TV and they want them. Now!

Enough of those folks have watched QVC that the network has gone from a shoestring start-up to a $1.2-billion company in just seven years. QVC has carved out a niche as the upscale TV shopping service, as opposed to its competitor, Home Shopping Network, which has generally thrived on selling cheaper merchandise with less creative programming.

Indeed, QVC has become the salesway to the stars. Diller pal Diane Von Furstenberg sells her fashion lines on QVC. So, too, do fashion nameplates Elizabeth Arden, Kenneth Jay Lane and Criscione. Regis Philbin has sold heart-rehabilitation exercise videos on QVC. Sporting MVPs Cal Ripken of the Baltimore Orioles and Troy Aikman of the Dallas Cowboys have watched hundreds of their limited-edition memorabilia be snapped up on the network. Willie Nelson, Tova Borgnine, Cindy Williams, Morgan Fairchild, Leslie Nielsen, William Shatner and Paul Prudhomme all appeared on QVC in a three-week period this winter selling merrily away.

All of these celebs and all of these products don’t go to a lavish studio in Hollywood or a historic theater in Manhattan but to a run-of-the-mill brown brick three-story office complex in the Goshen Corporate Center, an industrial park 30 miles west of Philadelphia--a place so exurban there is still a working farm complete with a 19th-Century farmhouse, barn and silo on the property next to the parking lot.

What brings the stars and the marketers to the Salesplace of Dreams is this: More and more people are spending more and more money buying things on television, and QVC, they believe, has found the way to do it best.

Victoria Principal faces many obstacles this February morning. Rural Pennsylvania has been socked in by one of the 15 ice- and snowstorms that have hit this winter, making her trip to the QVC studios a dicey affair. A few days before, she sliced her right hand with a knife while doing some home electrical repairs. And now her advisers have asked her to jazz up her latest appearance on QVC to sell her personalized skin-care product line by having her take live phone calls from buyer-viewers despite the injured hand.

But there the former “Dallas” star is, looking peppy and beautiful as ever, up on the “living room” set--part of a huge Lazy Susan of four sets that rotate to match the emphasis of the particular QVC selling hour. She is here to sell her skin care line, the Principal Secret.

The first product up for the hour is Intensive Serum With AHA, which costs $45 retail, according to the large bar with the gray background that almost constantly runs up the left side of TV screens tuned to QVC. That price has a vivid slash through it. Underneath, the skin-softening serum, product A19005 in the QVC catalogue, is being offered for the “introductory price” of $34.14.

“If you start using this on Monday, you will see the results Monday night and everyone will see a difference by Wednesday,” Principal tells the audience at home confidently. “A lot of us have beautiful skin, but we have to learn to bring it out.”

Jane Rudolph Treacy, an immaculately dressed sprite of a woman, is the hour’s QVC hostess. Treacy describes herself as a “motor mouth,” but she gets a rest from her explaining and soft-selling duties with Principal around. Principal has been coming to sell on QVC four to six weekends a year since 1991, before Diller and his cache of stars started venturing into the strange world of TV selling.

“When I first started doing this, I was told by everyone that it could destroy my career, and my friends were genuinely and deeply concerned,” Principal said in an interview after her appearance. “Now I think their attitudes and opinions have radically changed.”

Perhaps it is Principal’s bottom line that has convinced them. In less than the usual six minutes QVC allots for a product on the air, more than 5,000 bottles of Intensive Serum With AHA were sold. Neither QVC nor Principal would divulge the actress’s percentage of the take, but even at a conservative 5%, that’s a cool $8,500 for six minutes’ work. Principal’s spokesman said that during that February Saturday hour, QVC sold $750,000 worth of Principal Secret items.

Still, Principal said she loves the spontaneity of it all even more. She ambled up to the bank of phone order-takers, just in front of the set where a studio audience might be in other studios, and answered the phone herself live on the air. There was Sandy from Georgia.

“I had seborrhea for several years and was able to throw away my medication soon after using (the AHA serum) with the blessing of my dermatologist,” gushed Sandy. And, by the way, said Sandy, the dermatologist said he went to high school with Principal. “Did he tell you I got A’s in biology?” the actress said with a giggle.

“What I love about this is that it’s live. There’s an element of danger and the unexpected about live television that I absolutely love,” Principal said. “I really thrive on it because this really is my product. I really know it inside out and I’m not scared; you can ask me anything. By the way, I wouldn’t envy anybody who is up there faking it. . . . That’s when selling on TV doesn’t work.”

There was a time not all that long ago when it wasn’t certain that selling on TV, at least the QVC way, would work at all. In April, 1986, Home Shopping Network became the first national all-shopping channel. That summer, no fewer than 17 entities, from department stores to auction services to now-defunct gonzo consumer-electronics marketer Crazy Eddie, announced they had plans for a shopping channel. One of those folks was Joseph Segel, the founder of the Franklin Mint, the suburban Philadelphia-based makers of mail-order collectibles.

“Joe was thinking about some kind of direct-marketing business and he saw Home Shopping Network and said, ‘Well, this looks like a good business. We’ll do this too,’ ” said Douglas Briggs, who worked for Segel at the Franklin Mint and is now QVC’s president, answering only to Diller (Segel is chairman emeritus). “It was so hot at the time, Joe was able to raise over $20 million to start it.”

QVC needed every bit of that money. Segel demanded state-of-the-art broadcasting equipment and hired several TV types to teach his Franklin Mint marketers how to do the tube.

“We almost went bankrupt six months into it,” said Briggs, whose office is rather restrained for a man running a $1.2-billion business. You can actually walk across it in a few easy steps, with the only significant adornments being TVs tuned to QVC and rival Home Shopping Network. “Running out of cash creates a certain kind of culture.

“In the beginning, we used to go, all of us, to pack product in the warehouse after working all day. We took inventories. We answered phones. If we had a product that was getting lots of calls on the air, these yellow lights would come on, and all of us, secretaries and vice presidents, would go to the phones. It’s amazing how far we’ve come so quickly.”

Indeed, of the 17 would-be challengers to the Home Shopping Network, only QVC made it past the first year. Now it has 5,300 lines branching out from the toll-free ordering number that runs across the bottom of the TV screen 24 hours a day, answered by those operators in front of the Lazy Susan set (and others in Chesapeake, Va., and San Antonio) and automated leave-your-credit-card-number messages as well.

You can order what is on the air at the moment or ask the operators about any of the 1,000 or so items that have appeared on the air during the last month, the usual length QVC keeps its products in warehouses at the home office in West Chester, in Lancaster, Pa., and in Suffolk, Va. A no-questions-asked, money-back guarantee is standard. (QVC says the return rate is 19%.)

A few months ago, on Diller’s orders, QVC instituted a goal of shipping a product to a customer within 24 hours of the phone order. With 70,000 orders a day, that’s no minuscule task. Still, QVC claims that 99.98% of its orders have been sent out accurately. Of its 125 full-time packing employees in West Chester, 80% made no mistakes all of last year.

And while the folks at QVC are happy with all these lovely statistics, they are quite aware of the footsteps tromping heavily behind them. Lots of people with big names and apparently deep pockets, from Time Warner to the Spiegel Catalogue people to Nordstrom, the department store chain, have announced plans to have their own shopping channels.

“Still, this is a very difficult thing to do,” said Steve Tomlin, QVC’s vice president and general manager of interactive technology, internally known as “vice president of what’s next.”

“We are all busy people and you have to put something there,” said Tomlin, pointing to a TV set in his small, windowless office, cramped with computer-program boxes, “to make me put down my magazine or stop interacting with my kids. There are only a few people in TV and Hollywood who can do it well.

“Secondly, you have to fulfill--the basic blocking and tackling of retail. You are out there in cyberspace at the virtual mall shopping for your virtual shirt. Does that virtual shirt become a real shirt? Is it the right size? Is it the right color? If you have a problem with it, is there an easy way to get it resolved? Those two things, programming and fulfillment, are both separately hard to do. Not many companies have done them well just individually. Bringing them together in the televised shopping arena has been very difficult. Exactly two--QVC and HSN--have stood the test of time.”

Tomlin draws charts on his blackboard to show that there is about $1 trillion in retail sales every year. A little lumpy line shows QVC’s $1.2-billion share of that. A big glob Tomlin draws above that indicates the huge segment QVC can still shoot for.

But how to get it? On-line services have not been able to break significantly into the market, for they are inherently short on programming. Interactive television is still in its dreaming state.

“It is unsure what the winning technology model is there, not to mention whether the winning business model is there,” Tomlin said. “And if you build it, will they come? And at what price? But it is the Holy Grail. It is what everyone is shooting for.”

Until then, QVC is looking to expand its base further and further. QVC itself will launch another cable channel this summer. During weekdays, OnQ will target the 18-to-35 age group, which has so far shunned TV shopping, with younger-oriented clothing and merchandise. On weekends, the channel will transform itself to Q2 and feature up-market leisure products--trips, exercise equipment and the like--to the other hard-to-reach group, upper-income shoppers.

In the meantime, QVC is creating its own proprietary brands and continuing to forge partnerships, like those with Von Furstenberg, for exclusive products for QVC. QVC has entered partnerships with museums and movie studios to sell their souvenirs and such. And even as it tries to be more global, QVC is looking to be more parochial as well, looking into local TV shopping shows.

“It’s real hard to present the right product for the whole nation,” said QVC President Briggs. “I believe that the person outside of Atlanta and the person in Texas and the person in Wyoming perceive us in different ways: accents, what is talked about. So we try to take that out of the show as much as we can. But by taking it out, you create vanilla.

“What if some hours of each day, you go local?” Briggs said excitedly. “They go on, let’s say it’s springtime, and a guy says, ‘This is the weekend you should be planting your azaleas and Jake’s Nursery from here in town will deliver to your home on Saturday morning a dozen azalea plants and all the things you need to plant them for $40. Just call now!’

“If you get people to use the TV to buy locally, they will start to use the rest of the service,” Briggs talks even more excitedly as more and more new ideas for televised shopping flow. “What if you could get your groceries by it with no significant extra charge? What if. . . . Well, there is so much more for us to shoot for.”

Jane Rudolph Treacy was back living with her mother in suburban Philadelphia. She had wanted to be a ballet dancer and a sports announcer. Neither was particularly happening at the moment. In fact, nothing was particularly happening. She had been at one or another local TV news department for the last several years and was between jobs. She was wavering about answering a classified ad in the Philadelphia Inquirer from a new company looking for a TV host. She’d never sold anything. She was a journalist, for gosh sakes.

“My mother said, ‘Of course you can do it. Here, sell me this pencil,’ ” Treacy said. “So I took the pencil and I told her you can draw with it. And you can write with it. You can write love letters with it. I really sold that pencil in every way I could.

“So I walked into the building a few hours later and a gentleman said to me, ‘It’s actually very simple. We just want to see how impromptu you can be in front of the camera. Please present this pencil,’ ” said Treacy, grinning as she no doubt did that day seven years ago. “My fate was sealed.”

Most of the original QVC hosts had limited television experience. A few were from sales. Others just hit the right note with the interviewers. Kathy Levine, another original host still with the network, was a hotel clerk when she was hired. All have now become celebrities of a sort.

When QVC began, founder Segel decided that each hour had to have only one kind of product, which was quite different from the willy-nilly approaches of early home shopping. He also insisted that the hosts be able to chat knowledgeably not only about the product at hand but also about history, art and life in general. To that end, QVC hosts still attend myriad seminars and read reams about each product they handle.

Treacy and the other hosts are often on the stage alone speaking only to disembodied robot cameras in front of them. Behind the cameras are the banks of phone operators, Segel’s idea for that being that at least the operators simulate some kind of audience for the hosts to talk to.

All the while, off to one side are tables on which production assistants place the items to be sold for the day. Hosts gather around their particular table, reading index cards chock-full of every conceivable detail about each product.

“We believe we have elevated the knowledge of our viewers, but they are very savvy shoppers and listeners,” Treacy said. “That’s why you don’t go on the air unless you know something inside out and backward. They can tell when you don’t do your homework.”

Meantime, back in the three Quality Assurance Labs (Hard Goods, Jewelry and Clothing), the QVC nit-picking team is weeding through seemingly zillions of items. Dress samples are stomped on, pulled violently at every seam, dry-cleaned to death. Every shipment of jewelry is scanned both electronically and by QVC staff gemologists. In the old days, a lot of stuff was rejected. These days, with the competition to get on QVC, vendors are tending to get things right the first time.

But even with all this success, there is a bit of defensiveness at QVC about its TV shopping mission. There are still a few hokey things on the air: a Ping-Pong ball lucky number drawing each hour with the winner getting a $10 shopping credit on QVC and a chance at one of five daily $1,000 “shopping sprees.”

“Let’s face it, 900 phone numbers or whatever, the early pioneers are not the ones who popularize new (retailing schemes) or bring it to its highest level,” said Tomlin, the vice president of interactive technology. “In fact, sometimes you have to overcome some credibility problems established by the early pioneers, which is what I hope we’ve done.”

Said QVC President Briggs: “Look, the hardest point of direct marketing, when you come down to it, is trust. All direct marketers face that. What makes our show successful is that we establish that trust level by not exaggerating the benefits of a product, or the easy return privileges, or the friendly host or the lack of a hard sell.

“But you can never be satisfied,” Briggs said with the sigh of a man whose legs are always revving toward the future. “If you start to think you have it, you wake up a couple of weeks later and you realize things are going the other way.”