Salesman Samples

[Bravosin99]

Does anyone have any salesman samples? I have always found them pretty cool and tend to buy them as they come along...We have three D&M 1" webs....Please post pics if you have some I would love to see them....Josh

[mittmutt]

Josh, Are salesmen samples listed as such or are they simply smaller versions of the gloves they represent? I'm not sure I've ever seen one.

[Bravosin99]

Mittmutt-
All three we own have the D&M lucky dog logo on the center of the palm and in small lettering say "greetings".....I have heard these were given away during tours of the glove factories...As you can see someone wrote their name and the date of 1925 on one of them(maybe the day they toured the factory???)....This is just something I have heard was done...

I have also seen some in catalog auctions and a few on ebay that have an actual model number on them which would correlate them with a larger glove.

I just always thought they were really neat....Never knew much about them or how much they were used.
-Josh

[BretMan]

I often see gloves being sold described as "salesman samples" that are nothing more than cataloged "kid-sized" gloves.

In a similar vein, have you ever seen a glove described as having "the laces replaced with a shoe string"? These are almost always inexpensive children's gloves that were originally sold that way as a cheap alternative to using real leather laces.

[mittmutt]

I have a few pretty small gloves that I've wondered about. There aren't any markings that would tell me that they were samples but they are pretty small. Maybe at some point someone on the forum can fill us in. And yes, I have some of those shoelace models as well.

[Bravosin99]

All of ours measure 3 1/2 inches tall.....A baby wouldn't even be able to fit a hand in them lol...I will take a better picture tomorrow and set them up next to a regular sized baseball so you can tell how small they actually are....

I have also seen many people trying to sell kids gloves as salesman samples....To me I believe its easy to tell for example ours only measure 3 1/2 inches and there is no way to put even a finger into the back of them where as kids gloves can be very small but can usually still fit a small hand.

[ebbets55]

Great gloves Josh. Those look like salesmans samples to me and not youth or toy gloves. Youth or toy gloves were often sold in dime stores or Woolworth type stores. They were usually made of plastic and sometimes contained a ball. I have a few of those small fry type gloves in the box. They are tiny but considerably larger than salesmans samples.

Salesmans samples on the other hand were smaller examples or samples of what the larger gloves looked like. When traveling salesman or sales reps would sell their goods to teams, department stores, hardware stores or sporting goods stores, they carried these in their brief cases or bags and took orders based on them. They couldn't carry the full line of gloves with them as there were a lot of different models and they were big so they used these small salesmans samples to take orders from as they were easier to travel with and they looked like the real models.

Joe could probably shed more light on the subject. Does this sound right to you Joe? This is how I always knew it to be. Hope this helps.

JD

[BretMan]

Didn't mean to imply that Bravos gloves were not true sample gloves. He obviously knows what's what when it comes to leather!