This past weekend QVC’s founder, Joseph Segel, died at age 88. Media in the Philly-NYC area widely ran obits about his demise.
From what The Philadelphia Inquirer reported, Segel was a born entrepreneur. He started printing and sell business cards to local companies when he was just 12.
Before starting the dominant home shopping network, Segel launched Franklin Mint. And he never stopped. Segel debuted HairRx, a hair care system, in 2018.
There is a detailed biography of Segel online: https://www.josephsegel.info/
Here is part of what it has to say about Segel’s “Master Achievement,” QVC:
In 1986, Segel noted the success of the pioneering home shopping program, Home Shopping Network. After watching the primitive nature of its programming at that time, he immediately recognized that televised home shopping could be made significantly more appealing in a number of ways. So he then started QVC Network (standing for Quality-Value-Convenience).
Within three months after starting the company, Segel raised over $20 million in an IPO. With a novel plan to sign up cable companies by awarding them convertible preferred stock in proportion to the number of homes to which they would carry the QVC program, Segel initially lined up over 7 million TV homes for the network’s launch. The first broadcast, five months after the company was started, was carried by 58 cable systems in 20 states.
Segel introduced numerous innovations to televised home shopping, such as accurately describing products rather than hyping them, full disclosure of shipping and handling charges, and imbuing all employees with the mission to “give customers more than they expect.”
In its first year, QVC registered sales of $112 million — a record for first-year sales of a new public company that had not taken over an existing business.
In 1989, Segel decided that the next important step in expanding QVC’s sales would be to acquire Cable Value Network (CVN). Supported by Telecommunications, Inc.(TCI), the nation’s largest cable operator at the time, CVN had become the second largest televised shopping network, not quite as large as HSN but twice the size of QVC. Subsequently, CVN was acquired by QVC for $380 million, primarily with financing provided by banks and cable operators.
The purchase of CVN was described as a python swallowing an elephant, resulting in an initial quarterly loss of $17 million. However, the calculated gamble to establish QVC’s market leadership eventually paid off. In 1986 there were 17 other new shopping channels trying to improve on the HSN model. Only one – QVC– would survive into the 90’s.
In 1995, Comcast Corporation and TCI acquired QVC. TCI’s interest was subsequently acquired by Liberty Media, and Liberty Media eventually bought out Comcast’s 57% interest for nearly $8 billion.
Homeshoppingista's Blog By Linda Moss 