Market research is not ordinarily a life-changing endeavor.
Nevertheless, given what happened after, Marnie sometimes lay in bed at night wondering whether it was the biggest mistake of her adult life or the best thing that had ever happened to her.
Then she would reach a sizzling, terrifyingly intense orgasm on the other woman's face and decide on the latter.
* * *
It had all started with Management's bright idea to pull all the product ordering information from the database, and to sift through it in various different statistical cuts. Arkady took care of the database portion, and it was left to Marnie to conjure up the ghosts of sophomore stats class and actually turn piles of meaningless financial trivia about skimpy wisps of silk and satin into
information
. In pursuit of the almighty dollar, of course. LingerieGlance was an up-and-coming web shrine specializing in distributing the fancier sort of ladies' undergarments, and Tyler Rhaspid was its high priest. Or owner, if you insisted; Marnie supposed that made her an acolyte or an altar girl as well as an employee. Marnie was a buyer whose primary supplier had just gone out of business, so she was in between assignments right now, and her supervisor had decided she had the time for this kind of activity.
Of course it made sense to concentrate on your repeat business, if only to determine what you did
right
so you could apply it to your not-so-repeat business. So that's how Marnie found ClassyLady.
ClassyLady was a "loner" enterprise: a single product was all they sold through LG. That product, however, happened to be the most-reordered item on the site and Marnie wondered what the hell was so special about their Special Blend Full-Fashioned Stockings.
The summary numbers were encouraging, but a look at the raw data was truly illustrative: every single item sold had generated a repeat sale of the same item. Typically seven or eight pairs at a time. She looked deeper.
Only thirteen returns, all unopened, for "size"-- and once exchanged for the proper fit, never another peep of complaint. Just more orders. In some cases LG had sent the wrong size by mistake to a long-standing customer, and the customer hadn't even bothered to return it and had just ordered more.
Marnie shook her head. Anomalous numbers like this needed a further look. She contacted Charlotte in customer service and requested feedback from customers who'd ordered ClassyLady. Charlotte had laughed aloud over the phone, and when Marnie'd asked what was so funny, had replied knowingly with, "You'll see." Then the email attachment with the collected ramblings of over a thousand customers showed up, and Marnie did see. Not so much in the "rate our products/services 1 to 5" results, but in the comments section:
Simply electric!
I don't ordinarily send in these silly little surveys, but you have something really special with ClassyLady stockings. The way they feel on my legs is simply electric. My husband likes them as much as any stockings, of course, but I find myself wearing them as often as I can outside the bedroom. I'm buying enough for every day of the week. Does the manufacturer have a website? An address? Anything? I'd like to thank them personally.
More, please
Do you have any other nylons like this? I've tried others and these are amazing. I've recommended them to all my girlfriends, and they look and feel sexy too. Do you think I can get a finders fee? ha ha!
Full-body Classy-ld?
Does ClassyLady make this in bodystockings? They feel so good I want to feel them all over thanks. Sometimes I wear them on my arms, too, so make them in bodystockings so I won't feel so stupid, okay? Gloves would be okay, too.
Wonderful!
I've never felt sexier than when I'm wearing ClassyLady hose. It's like a thousand tiny dancers in my skin, a massage parlor visit, and an orgasm all in one. Thank you for offering this product. I'm recommending them to all of my friends.
And more of the same, sometimes with an explicit tone she didn't exactly welcome in customer feedback. ClassyLady hosiery evidently looked sexy and felt even better, to the point where women were switching to it pretty much exclusively. Only one negative comment existed, and it was thoroughly bizarre:
Filthy whores!
You all ought to be ashamed of yourselves, you and your filthy underwear. My wife ordered your stuff and she spent all her time with herself in that bedroom with her fingers doing horrible things and if that wasn't enough she does stuff with her best girl friend now, too. I should sue you. Expect to hear from my lawyer.
Ahem. The contrast with the overwhelmingly positive comments elsewhere made her think it was a prank, but Marnie checked the ID against the customer list, and Mr. Francis Tennyson of Dayton, Ohio, a long-term customer of four years and about $600, stopped purchasing after that message. Further, a cross-check of the name revealed that a Ms. Eloise Tennyson, also of Dayton, began purchasing a week later, and was up to $1,900 already though her last name had since shifted to "Rafalski". All ClassyLady Special Blend. In two different sizes, now.
On a whim, she checked with Legal, and apparently no lawsuit had ever materialized, so at least that part wasn't true. Or possibly Mr. Tennyson had a hard time convincing a lawyer that an online lingerie distributor contributed to the lesbianism of his wife and the ensuing divorce. Given what she knew of lawyers, that itself was hard to believe.
At any rate, she mentally labeled that feedback "statistical outlier" and went back to her explorations. Sylvia, the buyer in charge of the account, was on vacation, so Marnie looked on the web for other ClassyLady distributors to see if she could find out whether they had similar experience with this or other product lines... and couldn't find a damned one. Every commercial search for ClassyLady landed her right back in LG's webspace, and other searches just gave her press releases for the company's opening in 2003 by Darlene Feinstein and Felicia Major. In... ah, that was it. The company was local, so they were probably not big enough to go with larger distributors. Interesting.
She'd been at this awhile, and needed some relief, so she kicked back her chair and strolled over to the warehouse. Might as well find out what all the hubbub was about.
* * *
It was six-thirty by the time she'd braved traffic and gotten back to her apartment, and seven by the time dinner had been microwaved and consumed. She hadn't always lived alone, and had once actively sought a roommate to help pay the rent, but the town was small and outside of the summertime months nearly deserted. There were plenty of vacationing fly-by-nights who would have been happy to room with her, but the first couple of attempts didn't go well and Marnie didn't suffer too much from the rent. She grumbled a lot about the place she worked, but really LingerieGlance did pay a decent salary.
After sampling her answering machine messages (her mother, her brother, and a hang-up she felt certain was probably her immature ex-boyfriend, Abram), she fumbled through her purse and found the hosiery from work. With a smirk she headed to her bedroom and its closet.
The company did encourage employees to sample the wares, and backed this policy up with 75% off the sticker price. Marnie knew the Old Man was still making money off his wage-slaves even at those rates, but it was hard to argue with the economy of it all. She had more lacy and satiny things now as a single gal than she'd ever had when she was dating someone simply due to the fact that even the most extravagant undies were now too cheap to pass up. This, and not any inherent preference, was why she now had four garter belts to choose from when trying on the ClassyLady offering. She fastened the white one around her waist because it was heretofore unworn and because she thought it would make her feel pretty.
She sat down on the bed and opened the wrapper. The packaging was plain and uninteresting, containing a cardboard slide around which the coffee-tone hose were wrapped. Removal and unwinding revealed that the fabric was gossamer-thin. Ten denier yarn, she estimated, though it might be as low as seven. The seam was real, an extension of the heel taper, indicating they'd used one of the old-style shaping frames and hadn't gone cheap and fake with a sewn-in seam. It went all the way up to the full-fashioned loop at the top. A classic look, if a bit old-fashioned and probably too fancy for her tastes. She held the garment in her palm, surprised and impressed at how light and soft it felt. Surprised, too, at the way it seemed to stimulate her skin when she touched it... Nice.
Marnie bunched the stocking up around her fingers and slid it over her foot and ankle before she realized that the tingles weren't illusory.
Simply electric