When Jerry Whitlock began peddling seals and gaskets, he chased smokestacks, making cold calls at every factory he could find. "You guys use seals?" he would ask.

Twenty years later, Mr. Whitlock is still selling seals and gaskets. But today he's doing business via e-mail, fax and the World Wide Web, mostly from his home, often while watching daytime television on his office computer. "I'm the envy of everyone I know in this business," he says.

Have high-tech selling tools really become that powerful? The answer is yes, but with an important limitation. For in the Information Age, as even Jerry Whitlock will tell you, some information remains accessible only by shoe leather.

The son of a truck driver, Mr. Whitlock, now 43 years old, never made it to college. "I did it the hard way, man," he says. "No mentor, no financial support, no nothing." Working as a freelance sales rep there was no order he wouldn't take -- metric o-rings and other seriously obscure gewgaws. A compulsive pack rat, he accumulated a mountain of catalogs and bulletins, organizing and cross-referencing them in huge, black binders.

Later he joined an investor to launch a seal-manufacturing business, which grew to 300 employees. But he tired of the headaches of inventory, finance, personnel and having a partner, and quit in 1993 with enough money to get by for a few years. When he returned to distributing other people's seals in 1995, he vowed to do it without warehouses, employees or partners. His new company, called EPM Inc., consisted of an office in his home, the help of his wife, Rita, and his precious binder collection.

As a gadgeteer and computer hobbyist, Mr. Whitlock was already facile with the new tools of selling and distribution. He bought two cell phones, lashed a beeper to his belt and urged factories to phone his 24-hour emergency number should a seal fail on the second shift. He notified scores of Internet searching services of his Web address to make sure that anyone seeking "seals" or "gaskets" would find his home page. Before long 10% of his sales leads were coming in cold over the Web, the percentage growing monthly.

In addition, each night he set up his PC to dispatch 150 marketing faxes boasting of his experience with "rush jobs" and "hard-to-find parts." ("They aren't really hard to find," he says. "But if a guy is tearing apart a machine, he has no idea where to get this stuff.") He dubbed himself "the seal man," adding a likeness of himself to give his customers a feeling for the person at the other end of the order. (He was careful to use a sketch; photos take longer to fax.)

Though it cost next to nothing, Mr. Whitlock's system has tremendous reach. When a purchase order arrives by fax or e-mail, he tracks down the product in one of his big notebooks. Then he orders it for next-day delivery to his home. When the shipment arrives his wife switches the product into EPM's packaging, drops in an EPM refrigerator magnet and ships it out again via UPS or Federal Express.

"Location doesn't matter," he says. When he and Mrs. Whitlock vacation along the Gulf Coast with their two daughters, the business goes with them on a laptop.

But no middleman can prosper for long merely by ordering and repackaging product. Which is why, for all of his easy-street boasting, Jerry Whitlock still does some selling the old-fashioned way. When a shipment is ready for a nearby customer, he climbs into his truck to make the delivery personally. This not only nurtures personal relationships but also helps him snoop for industry gossip. (Think about it: How often do people gossip by fax?)

And when special situations arise, Mr. Whitlock resorts to that venerable old sales tool known as the jet airplane.

Consider, for instance, his recent call from Kirby "Casey" Gurley, a maintenance mechanic at a Carolina Power & Light plant in Goldsboro, NC. For his 34 years at the plant, Mr. Gurley had watched oil leak between the shaft and the sleeve of a huge air blower. Sometimes the leak caused a fire, but no seal or vendor had solved the problem.

When Mr. Gurley came across some literature boasting of EPM's "hard-to-find" supplies, he phoned Mr. Whitlock. The two men exchanged drawings, but the seal man wanted to investigate the nuances of the massive, leaky contraption, which spins 1,700 times a minute. So he flew to Goldsboro at his own expense, wearing a yellow hard hat emblazoned with the EPM logo and his EPM "visitor ID badge" clipped to his shirt. "When I go in, I look official," he says.

Mr. Whitlock took a few measurements, made a few calculations involving the number pi and announced that a solution was possible. Arriving back home, he reached a contact in Houston who made custom Teflon seals and another in Salt Lake City who made custom nylon housings. Then he had all of it shipped with installation instructions to Carolina Power. The blower hasn't leaked since. "He amazed a lot of people in this plant," says Mr. Gurley.

The infrastructure of the new economy -- fax, Web, overnight delivery, e-mail -- is open to everyone. All you need is a place to plug in and a bit of style to stand out. But take it from Mr. Whitlock: A middleman must also add value, and no one has discovered a way to automate that.