Tim DeFord has one wife, nine children, and a bed he occasionally sleeps in.

Dressed to the nines in his pressed suit, crisp dress shirt, impeccably-dimpled tie, and perfectly-polished shoes, DeFord drives 1000 miles a week through a ten-state swath of the Midwest. Following in the footsteps of famous drummers (think James Cash Penny not Ringo Starr), he’s an anachronism, a man blazing a trail into history as he sells quality men’s clothing from the back of his minivan.

DeFord is a professional sales person, a man for whom selling face to face is a privilege, not an interim stop on the way to a college degree or acting career.

“I’ve not contemplated that much,” DeFord said about the death of the professional sales person. “I just know there are very, very few people now who’ve been in sales for the long term.”

There’s little incentive to become a sales professional in our IKEA-encrusted, do-it-yourself-from-sales-to-assembly world. Try asking for an odd-sized sport shirt in a department store, or for a strange-looking washing machine part in your local home improvement big-box and see what I mean.

DeFord has been watching his contemporaries disappear into the digital abyss since 1992 when he hit the road to supplement the income from his retail clothing business.

“My store was in Perry, Iowa*, and its business was falling off. I’d already closed my other store in Grinnell, but I thought I’d drive over and call on a few people to see if they were interested in looking at clothes.”

DeFord has been on the go ever since.

“After I drove to Grinnell and sold some clothes I thought I ought to work at this a bit,” he said.

DeFord made lists of friends, former customers, and prospects living near Perry and began making regular visits. His door-to-door business grew while his retail shop took a battering.

“It used to be that every county seat town in Iowa would have two or three men’s clothing stores,” he said, acknowledging that the big box stores and online shopping sites took care of that.

Realizing there was no way he could compete by playing their game, DeFord closed his Perry store about ten years ago and made traveling sales his full-time job.

Sitting down with customers in their homes or offices, DeFord is the model of what the well-dressed gentleman looks like when not corrupted by casual Fridays, Thursdays, Wednesdays, Tuesdays, or Mondays. But when he pulls out his samples, he’s selling more than clothes and convenience.

DeFord is selling selling, itself.

He’s the antithesis of the kid in Macy’s who’s been on the job three weeks and is still struggling with the spelling of worsted, let alone your last name.

“I have customers who…I remember talking to them about the birth of their children and now those kids are out of college. I like that kind of relationship. And I enjoy my customers appreciating what I do for them,” he said.

What, exactly is it that he does?

“It’s my job to keep them properly dressed and happy,” he said, which to DeFord means being more than a well-dressed Amazon.com delivery driver. “My customers know I’ll be calling on them every three or four months. I can’t sidestep doing a good job for them. And, I enjoy that.”

It’s a feeling no computer can duplicate, let alone appreciate.

What I find sad is that future generations will put less weight on the importance of face-to-face business relationships because their mentors are disappearing.

Who else but the local shopkeeper taught us the pleasures of being recognized and respected?

For me, it was Max, who owned Max’s Grocery across the street. He knew my family so well he wouldn’t let me buy Hershey’s chocolate syrup.

“Your mother buys Bosco,” he told me when I was shopping on my own one day. Yes, she did. Because that’s what I liked to drink. But now, I wanted to try Hershey’s. It wasn’t going to happen without a note from home.

“I wish I could bring it back,” DeFord said, referencing just such behavior, the kind that combined service, product knowledge and relationship building.

We both scratched our heads.

Why did today’s shoppers prefer buying online, where the objective seemed to be getting the wrong merchandise on demand?

Despite the occasional musing, DeFord prefers the future to the past. “I’m planning to retire when I’m 95,” DeFord, who is 59, told me.

I can see it happening. He seems so well suited to the job.

A tip of the hat to charter subscriber Jay Mitchell for suggesting this story.

Courtesy of Tim DeFord