Peterman Reboots

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s losses mounted, Peterman's backers pulled out and his bank cut off credit. The company was finished. He didn't even have his name to himself: Paul Harris Stores, a women's retailer in Indianapolis, purchased the J. Peterman assets in a court-ordered sale. "I came out of the bankruptcy with zero," Peterman recalls, "and not only zero in equity, but with hundreds of thousands of dollars in losses. I was in no financial condition to do anything."

Then he had a reversal of fortune. Paul Harris Stores declared Chapter 11 bankruptcy last year and sold what was left of the catalog company to a liquidator last August. Peterman initially raised $600,000 to start his new company, which included buying back the J. Peterman brand name. He relaunched the catalog in June. So far, orders have poured in at more than twice the expected rate.

The current book is a slim 26 pages and targets Peterman's best customers from the good old days. It boasts the same quirky prose (now written by creative director Bill McCullam) and a mixture of old and new merchandise that ranges from an Ecuadorian mountain shirt ($30) to a sidecar motorcycle with "BMW bloodlines" ($8,395).

Meanwhile, Peterman can't help being an entrepreneur--he's been dreaming up future licensing ventures that include "a company that supplies safaris and other adventure travel in the Peterman style" and a TV shopping show. "Not a shopping channel," he says, "but a show done in a Peterman way, like 'shopping the world with J. Peterman.'" The key to such plans, he adds, "is that I remain in control and focused on the Peterman brand."

Whether or not such grand schemes materialize, Peterman has turned the failure of his previous company into a lucrative career move. He has written a book about his rise and fall, Peterman Rides Again (Prentice Hall Press; $25), and lectured M.B.A. students at N.Y.U.'s Stern School of Business, and he continues to speak to business groups and university students. "I tell them that failure is part of the learning process," Peterman says. "If you're afraid to take a risk and make a mistake, you'll never create anything. It was only F. Scott Fitzgerald who said there were no second acts in American lives."