Fuller Brush Salesman Still Knocking

When the front door opens, he introduces himself: “I’m your Fuller Brush man.” Then: “Do you know what that is?” More than a century after Alfred Fuller founded the Fuller Brush Co. in 1906, fewer and fewer people do.

These days, Count Fuller – he legally changed his name from Jeff Pergoli – can’t assume homeowners will recognize the brand he calls the “Cadillac of cleaning products.”

On a quiet summer afternoon in Whitefish Bay, Fuller trudges across lawns carrying in hand a Wooly Bully Fan Duster like a prophet’s staff.

Although he has sold company merchandise door-to-door for the last 30 years, he bears little resemblance to the Fuller Brush salesmen in their 1950s heyday. Fuller, who is “sixty-something,” wears short-sleeved shirts and shorts rather than suits; he hangs around his neck, in place of the iconic tie, a chain bearing a comb brush, a pair of collapsible scissors and a lucky rabbit’s foot; and he carries his goods in a gym bag, not a suitcase, outfitted with cardboard dividers. For a brief time in the ’80s, Fuller made his rounds in far more outlandish outfits.

“When I was young, I wore a costume,” he said. “But that didn’t go over well.”

Fuller has tempered his marketing strategies since. Still, the world around Fuller has changed more than he has.

The legion of Fuller Brush men in the greater Milwaukee area has dwindled to ranks in the single digits. Contractors are building fewer single-family homes in the suburbs and more downtown condos and apartment buildings, in which traveling salesmen are unwelcome. Women, whose mothers may have spent their days polish- ing the linoleum, are winning the bread with their husbands and leaving nannies to care for their children. Consumers, more concerned with price than substance, are browsing discount store aisles or the Internet to find the household items they need. And the Fuller Brush Co., whose overall yearly sales had reached nearly $100 million by the 1960s, is still reeling from filing for bankruptcy in February. The company’s troubles haven’t much perturbed Fuller, who makes 300 to 500 retail sales in an average week of part-time work. He doesn’t mind knocking on as many as 20 doors to find one buyer, but the task of delivering orders the company backlogged while restructuring itself – now that was a waste of gas.

Fuller believes firmly in the quality of his merchandise. When he makes a sale, he’s often replacing items that customers bought decades ago from his Fuller Brush predecessors, “so they must last,” he says.

Fuller isn’t a pushy salesman. When he demonstrates a glass gel cleaner on a retired pathologist’s front door window, he doesn’t tell the man the gel smells nice. He asks him whether it does.

Fuller lives with the drudgery of his job – of lugging his bag from door to door, of leaving fliers when no one answers his knock or the doorbell, of listening to the same excuses the uninterested give, of biting his tongue when a resentful homeowner chews him out – because he finds most human interaction entertaining.

“Being a door-to-door salesman, you learn how to deal with people, all ages, all types,” including Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett, he said. Fuller met the mayor when his wife bought a Fuller Brush kitchen broom and the company’s bestselling dryer lint brush. Fuller’s opinion: “He’s a nice guy.”

After canvassing two blocks of houses on a recent afternoon, Fuller is keeping in shape but making no connections. At the first door on another street, a Michigan woman visiting family recognizes her old broom in Fuller’s catalog.

He runs to his Jeep and fetches a bubble gum pink “Sweep It Away Broom.”

“It’ll last you your whole life,” he promises. “Go sweep with it in the kitchen. Test it.”

She does and, when she agrees to buy it, Fuller notices her son peering out from behind her left leg.

“What’s your favorite color?” Fuller asks the boy.

“Blue.”

Fuller pulls one blue comb from his pocket, then more for the other children in the house. While the woman runs inside to find her checkbook, he tabulates her total in a receipt book, the old-fashioned way.

“I can’t believe this,” the woman said, new broom in hand, “‘cuz it was not that long ago that I was looking at my broom, going, ‘It’s looking a little rough. I could use a new one, but I don’t know who sells this.’ “She’ll never forget who the Fuller Brush man is.

Copyright 2012, Journal Sentinel Inc. All rights reserved. (Note: This notice does not apply to those news items already copyrighted and received through wire services or other media.)

Copyright, 2012, Journal Sentinel, All Rights Reserved.