Catalog Success and Marketing INFORMATION Network® present the Fifth Annual Ranking of the Year’s Leading Catalogers as Measured by Housefile Growth Rates

A cataloger’s lifeblood is its housefile. One can gauge most companies’ well-being by their sales, profit figures or EBITDA (earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization). But in the catalog business, most people want to know how viable their housefile growth is; or, in simple terms, how many new customers other catalogers are adding.

That’s where the Catalog Success 200 comes in. Here follows our fifth-annual exclusive ranking of U.S.-based catalogers with the speediest recent housefile growth rates. This is your guide to which companies lined their pockets with the most new customers in 2006 vs. 2005. And ranking catalogers by this metric provides a key bellwether in determining how catalogers/multichannel merchants fared in 2006.

On these pages, you’ll find 54 catalogs that sell apparel, shoes or accessories. That’s up considerably from the 38 that charted last year. Food and gift catalogs came in strong, topping off at more than 40.

And perhaps not surprisingly, there were just north of 10 business-to-business catalogers making the chart, reflecting the B-to-B business model that relies on finding fewer, but larger, customers compared to B-to-C.

The Methodology

The Catalog Success 200 contains only those catalogers that have rented out their housefiles during the past two years. Among those, it includes just those mailers that record their 12-month housefile numbers on both their most recent and prior datacards. There certainly could be others out there; but without the numbers for the market to view, they can’t be charted.

Another key component to keep in mind is that our chart doesn’t account for seasonality. That’s because our data partner, Marketing INFORMATION Network®, independently verifies with list owners (the catalogers themselves) this data on a rotating basis throughout the year. So it’s important that you note the dates in the columns marked “Recent 12-mth. housefile and month confirmed” and “Previous 12-mth. housefile and month confirmed.”

The “confirmed by” dates vary from cataloger to cataloger, which is an important distinction to bear in mind when comparing the catalogs in the chart.

—Paul Miller, editor in chief, Catalog Success

* To view the chart as a PDF, click here or on The Catalog Success 200 under Related Content in the upper-right of this page.