My Best Promotion
"I began to study that telephone shoulder rest," he said. "I held it up, looked at it upside down, looked at shadows of it on the wall. I just stared at it and dreamed about it until one day it occurred to me that this telephone shoulder rest looked a whole like the tail wing of an airplane."
Roberts settled on the tail wing premise as his idea. He modified the design of the direct-mail brochure, replacing it with a die-cut piece of plane-shaped cardboard, the phone rest to be attached at the back as the tail wing. "We graphically made one side look like the fuselage and the wings of the airplane, and we put all the information they wanted to say on the other side," he explained. "It required a strange, bulky envelope, you know everything that's right for effective direct mail." Roberts had a prototype made, and took it to his sales pitch meeting.