User:USView/Christopher Theodore

Christopher Theodore (born April 6, 1967), is the chairman and publisher of The Reader Magazine (www.readermagazine.net), used by hundreds of Southern California businesses to reach 300,000 people in Southern California, a readership which earns $8 billion annually.

Beginnings
Theodore was born in Santa Monica California, the youngest of three sons, whose father, Lee Theodore, worked as a teacher in the Beverly Hills School district and mother, June Theodore, was a homemaker.

Young Entrepreneur
At 9, Theodore organized carnivals on the front lawn of his parent's small Mar Vista home. Carnival tickets, at 3¢ a piece, were paint sample cards he got for free at Standard Brands paint and prizes were sticks of gum, baseball cards and other doodads he bought at Pic N' Save. As for games, his older brothers helped create and run them. The carnival cleared $14 which Chris' father divided equally amongst the boys.

A formative experience was working as a volunteer at the White Elephant booth at the San Luis Rey Mission Fiesta in Oceanside at age 11. It was a booth full of donated items to the church. While he was standing there not much was selling. Someone asked him the price of something and he gave them a price, they handed the money to him and he handed it to the person manning the booth. The people at the booth asked if he wanted to help and so he did. He would mix giving away things with selling things so that people saw other people buying and getting things and being happy. So he was invited to help with the booth for the next three years.

Education
Theodore attended the Linfield School a private prepschool in Temecula, California, and later Claremont McKenna College, where he received degrees in Fine Arts (painting) and Economics.

For his art and after a series of interviews, Theodore received The Rotary International Scholarship, a $22,000 award with which he traveled to the south pacific and where he lived in Tahiti, Figi, Raratonga and New Zealand. In New Zealand, Theodore attended the University of Canterbury in Christchurch.

Europe
In 1992, Theodore left the US to see the great museums of Europe and took with him $800 worth of travellers checks and six small tins filled with some jewelry he had made in the Summer. He landed first in Finland where his host sold $250 worth of the jewelry his first night in Europe from her dining room table. Later, Theodore showed the jewelry to the Director of one of the large department stores chains in Europe, "Placette" and two weeks later the store was selling the jewelry called "American Fondue" on their main floor.

When other stores expressed interest, Chris called his brother Peter in California and asked him to come to Europe where he would organize large scale jewelry production. Peter established a factory in East Europe to manufacture the brothers' designs at a scale that would enable them to supply the largest western European department stores.

By the time Theodore left Europe, the jewelery had sold through more than 400 stores in four countries.

The Reader Magazine
After five years in Europe, Theodore returned to the US in late 1997. He moved to Redlands, where started Noble Media Corporation and The Reader Magazine.

Theodore started The Reader in response to what he labeled as a major flaw in how advertising companies were trying to reach consumers: a high frequency, low-quality approach. The original intention of The Reader Magazine according to Company literature is to create something that will help foster what John F. Kennedy called a "morally and intellectually intelligent" California. Theodore stated in 2002, "I believed doing this would give businesses a better way to reach people because people would want, if we did our job, what we sent them."

It has become one of the largest direct mail publications in California, with a circulation larger than the paid circulation of nearly every newspaper in California. The Company produces about 35 million advertisements every year in Southern California.