Case Study: United Stationers Has Versioning Down

United Stationers, a distributor of office supplies and other merchandise, has been producing various levels of versioned print catalogs for the past 10 years. Its clients, which include about 5,000 resellers ranging from mom-and-pop neighborhood stores to national chains such as Staples, use the catalogs to sell products to end-users.

For this Des Plaines, IL-based wholesaler, versioning is need-driven. “We have so many resellers with different marketing needs that we must satisfy,” explains Jeff Kressman, director of marketing communications and research.

United Stationers produces the following types of print catalog versions:

1. A standardized catalog with customized covers denoting the contact information for each dealer.

2. Catalogs with different prices. United Stationers prints its catalogs web offset, so this second type of versioning requires just one plate change on press.

“Any dealer can price any product in the catalog in any way they want,” explains Kressman. “Prices for our products will be different in Boston than they are in Tulsa, Oklahoma. So we have a standard catalog template, but then in a plate change on press, we swap out prices for different resellers.”

3. Catalogs with both customized prices and product selection. In this type of versioning, dealers can select not just the prices they want to charge their own end-users, but also which products to feature in their customized catalogs.

Following is a brief overview of how United Stationers and its print partner, Quebecor World, manage the challenge of producing literally thousands of versioned and customized catalogs every year.

Riding Herd on the Process

For versioning level No. 2 (price changes), United Stationers electronically sends to a reseller a merchandise pricing model based on its own research of product sales in that particular reseller’s region. The reseller can modify the pricing schedule by telling the cataloger what prices he or she wants to charge end-users for United Stationers’ products.

Armed with that data, United Stationers’ staff builds customized catalog pages in QuarkXPress with Extensions. They then ship the pages to Quebecor World, and route page proofs to the reseller. The reseller marks up and sends back the page proofs. Versioned catalogs are then printed and shipped to the reseller.

With so many customers and so much customization going on, this is undoubtedly a complicated process. But over the years, the catalog staff developed organizational tactics to manage the workflow. For example, to better track page versions, United Stationers prints a reseller’s name in the trim area of page proofs. Why?

“The danger is that we’ll print someone’s pricing structure in another reseller’s catalog,” explains Bob Smetana, vice president of advertising at United Stationers. “Fortunately, we’ve got this down to a science, so that doesn’t happen that often anymore. But versioning scares many printers and catalogers for just these types of reasons.”

Getting so many dealers to respond with their price preferences in a timely fashion is an ongoing challenge, Kressman says. That’s why United Stationers reserves two press times for each catalog campaign: one each for early- and late-responders. For those dealers who don’t respond at all, United Stationers uses default pricing.

The cataloger also has begun migrating work to the Internet. For example, United Stationers sends to resellers PDFs of its smaller direct mail pieces (e.g., four- or eight-page flyers). “Resellers can approve the PDFs and route them back to us for printing,” Smetana says. Reserving PDFs for smaller pieces makes sense because dealers will print out of their own office computers a four-page flyer, but not a 200-page catalog, he says. For larger jobs, United Stationers prints and overnights page proofs for dealer approval.

The cataloger uses a centralized database of copy and imagery for its entire product line. Resellers access the database to select their products and pricing for specialized marketing pieces. United Stationers then prints the accompanying copy and pictures, laying out the pages in the same order as its general catalog. Says Kressman, “We can do this for one-page flyers to 100-page catalogs.”

ROI

Kressman says that given the cataloger’s press runs, number of variations and tight work schedule, it’s simply cheaper to print web offset than digital, especially for smaller catalogs and direct mail pieces. “Remember, versioning for us usually entails only one plate change for prices,” he notes.

Calculating return on investment for a complicated versioning program such as this cataloger’s is difficult because of its two-step process of dealers selling to end-users. Kressman does, however, have a better handle on costs: Printing versioned catalogs generally costs 20 to 25 percent more than non-versioned catalogs. United Stationers averages out those extra costs among all dealers, depending on quantity and demand. Kressman says the initiative is profitable in the aggregate.

And customers love it, he notes. “Dealers continue to want these versioned catalogs. The number of our versioned catalogs has been increasing every year. So we know from that statistic that versioning is working.”