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Armed with only a "business plan and a good idea," David Berggrun dropped out of Boston University in 1986 to sell cartoon character products out of a pushcart. Now, four years after the opening of his first Cartoon Corner store in Nashua, New Hampshire, the company has grown to seven stores in six states, with annualized sales base of more than $5 million. In June 1990, with a strong management team and a sophisticated computer system in place, President and CEO Berggrun, along with Chairman Michael Barach, announced expansion plans for 141 franchised and company-owned Cartoon Corner stores by the end of 1994.
One key to the company's success lies in its use of a quarter-million-dollar management information system to track the sales and inventory of each product by cartoon character and family, in addition to traditional sales tracking by product categories such as figurines or posters. Using this system, which is unique to the retail industry, Cartoon Corner can analyze The Jetsons, for example, as a percentage of Hanna-Barbera sales, by product type, by region and by price point. That way, it...