Prior to the Farrah Fawcett poster, Pro Arts had enjoyed success by creating designs that the consumer wanted either in a graphic blacklight poster or a personality poster that was timely and an "after market" inspiration.
Farrah's poster was a marketing concept that was prior to her great success as an actress and television personality.
Pro Arts was ahead of its marketing and with the distribution Pro Arts had achieved through its velvet posters and blacklight designs, the filling of that distribution was easier than going out and breaking new ground without a hot seller to spearhead the effort.
As Farrah had obtained a mass following through her advertisements of Wella Balsam Shampoo and Ford Cougar exposure, the appearance of her on "Charlie's Angels" was the catalyst that ignited the mass hysteria that followed her exposure.
Pro Arts had to sell posters to its competition in order to fulfill the demand in its distribution.
Every major poster company had to purchase the posters from Pro Arts in order to satisfy their customers or they would allow Pro Arts to get their "foot in the door" to their buyer. Ultimately they would be threatened with the chance that Pro Arts might become their customer's permanent supplier of posters
Pro Arts was "generous" in its offers to its distributors and to its competition because it sold the posters flat without return privileges for $0.40 each.
This allowed the distributor to roll and label the poster and sell it to its larger customers for $0.80 each in order to compete with Pro Arts' Chain Discount Prices. The Retailer had the option to sell the poster for $2.00 or less and enjoy a 100% mark-up on the poster.
The poster became so much in demand that it required Pro Arts to seek outside printers to supply posters to the company.
Western Publishing in Racine, Wisconsin printed nearly two and one half million copies of the Farrah Poster delivering the posters on skids of 25,000 posters per skid.
This required over 100 skids to be shipped to Pro Arts from Racine and no sooner did the skids appear in the warehouse and Pro Arts labeled over the Racine label and shipped the skids out within hours of their arrival!
During the months of February and March of l977, Pro Arts shipped over 3,000,000 Farrah posters alone!
That was 50,000 posters per day counting Saturday and Sunday for sixty straight days! By May of 1977, Pro Arts had sold over 5,000,000 Red Bathing Suit Farrah Posters after returns of nearly 500,000 posters by its Chain Accounts with Exchange privileges!
During this time, Pro Arts continued to sell all of its other posters and at Pro Arts' Fiscal Year End, Pro Arts' Sales were nearly Six Million Dollars NET!
Pro Arts had done nearly two million dollars earlier in its previous fiscal year. We had turned Pro Arts' inventory near 24 times in the past twelve months in order to achieve the $6,000,000.oo NET SALES! This was not only unheard of in our industry, but to date no other company has had the opportunity of coming close to these sales figures!
Along with the success of Farrah came the problems that would eventually bring the company to its knees and then drive it out of business.