Creative Cut - Draper's & Damon's (1,589 words)

Brings Its Pages to Life

By Alicia Orr

Draper's & Damon's is one catalog where there's more than meets the eye when it comes to production savvy. The apparel catalog is targeted to mature women—a market that's usually more high touch than high tech—but Draper's & Damon's is itself on the cutting edge with many of its creative and production processes.

Says Nic Romano, creative director at the Irvine, CA-based company, "We're one step away from leading edge when it comes to implementing catalog production technology. We don't want to necessarily be first. But [being] second is nice."

Founded in 1927 as a women's fine clothing retailer, Draper's & Damon's launched its first catalog only six years ago. Brent Bostwick, one of the company's co-presidents and a nephew of one of the founders, started the catalog as a test project when he opened up a box and took out his first Apple computer in 1993. Bostwick is whom Romano credits with giving the company the drive to incorporate new technologies early on. "He's a true hands-on technical expert with excellent style taste," Romano explains.

Today, the company mails 10 regular-priced catalogs and six sale books each year, for a total volume of over 20 million. Mokrynski & Associates is list broker and manager for its customer file of close to 600,000.

Since the days of its first catalogs, Draper's & Damon's has made some creative and production adjustments that have paid off in higher sales. By learning more about its core customers—who Romano kindly calls the "bigger type set"—Draper's & Damon's was able to justify moving to a lower density of products per book.

"We've added more lifestyle shots and improved the presentation of merchandise," he says.

Another creative change the company made thanks to improved customer knowledge was when it enlarged its type size one-half point a year and a half ago.

"We have a substantial amount of information per item and thought that maybe it was hard to read, especially when we had it reversed out," recalls Romano. "So we tested the larger point size, and though it looked a little odd and took some getting used to in terms of not having as much space for art, our customers liked it and it resulted in higher sales."

On-model and Off-model Photography

Though they're certainly not unique among catalogers in using this creative technique, Draper's & Damon's employs an interesting combination of on-model and off-model photography as well as some straight product photos throughout the book. Why? The company has found this to be the best way of showcasing the merchandise to its target audience, comprised of upscale female shoppers age 55 and older. "We've found this out through testing," Romano says.

The off-model shots really show off the texture and features of the apparel while the on-model shots give the book its flavor and appeal.

It takes careful planning and a lot of work and expertise for the cataloger to ensure it gets high-quality shots of both kinds. For the off-model shots, which look like clothing on an invisible model, this is accomplished "with string, fishing line and tape in the hands of a stylist who specializes in that technique," says Romano. "He [who Romano prefers to leave anonymous] comes in for a week and a half, and it's his own unique style. He's the one who sets up all those shots, which are very time consuming."

In each catalog, the split is about 50-50 between on-model and off-model shots. "We added the off-figure images and swatches to better address the needs of our older customers," Romano says, noting that these allow customers to get a better feel of the texture and pattern of the garment.

The on-model shots "sell the fantasy of the clothes," Romano notes. "That's why we do the location shoots. Even though we often crop out much of the background to show off the product larger, the subliminal message is still there—that this person is relaxing on a beach or on vacation someplace wonderful."

A crew of about 10 is sent 10 times a year to some resort location—St. Thomas, Hawaii, Jamaica, Arizona and California. The group includes a freelance photography team, photo stylist, senior art director, catalog producer and four models.

"When we shoot, we always follow the sun. What that means is everyone is getting up at 5 a.m. and on the set from 7:30 to 10. We take a break and resume shooting at 3 until sundown," Romano says, explaining, "the mid-afternoon sun gives models raccoon eyes."

He points out, "Our photo shoots happen 10 times a year to keep the book looking fresh and to keep adding new products to the produce cart, so to speak." But photography is just one part of the production cycle Draper's & Damon's must run through 10 times a year.

Production Processes Times 10

The creative process begins with what's called a buyers' turnover meeting, where the senior art director and creative director sit down with the buyers to check a roughed-out paginated catalog in terms of product flow. "This takes about four hours of going spread by spread," says Romano.

Then the concepts, with any revisions, go to production boards. As he explains it, the boards include Polaroids as well as cut-and-paste figures from past catalogs of items being picked up.

Next, designers quickly "stick-figure-design the shots for us to take to the shoot. Basically this shows how, ideally, they'd like to see each shot posed," says Romano. Then the shoot takes place, and at the same time, the off-figure shots are being photographed in an in-house studio back at the corporate office. "We also do accessory shots in-house at that time. And we're very close to going fully digital with those," Romano notes. The next step is to sort through the film from the various shoots.

"I work, along with the senior art director, to cull the shots down to six for each item and pose. Then the buyers and owners pick the one we'll use from those," he explains. "Finally, we send the film to Laserscan, our prepress house in Phoenix, along with a swatch of the garment and any special instructions on what is needed. Usually it's just to match the color to the swatch, but occasionally we'll have special instructions, for instance if we had trouble with lighting on the model or something that has to be adjusted," he says.

Laserscan also does the transparency scanning and delivers to Draper's & Damon's a final matched color proof as well as the high-res file. This process takes two to four days.

"We take over the process from there," says Romano proudly. "We have our own four-person photo shop in-house where we do shape-edits, such as taking out wrinkles from fabric, switching heads and hands of models and editing background images. This saves us both time and money."

One year ago, Draper's & Damon's leased its own Kodak color approval machine—a substantial investment for the in-house shop, says Romano, "so we can tweak every file for flesh tones and product color once we take over." At this stage, Romano says, "We design pages with low-resolution FPOs."

Concurrently, a freelance copywriter who works with the company on a regular basis is writing the product copy. The copy goes to galleys and is sent to the buyers for proofing.

Actual pages are then created and printed using an Epson printer that prints high-res proofs showing high-res original scans and revised copy. Each buyer and staff gets three days to go over these. Then a final Kodak color proof is run (these cost $22 a page, says Romano, "so we wait 'til the end to run these; but they are 99-percent accurate for final color match."). Final files are transmitted via File Transfer Protocol (FTP) to the printer, Menomonee Falls, WI-based Arandell-Schmidt.

A full-time color monitor marks up all the color proofs and goes to the press OK. Romano adds, "She has a mock dummy of the book so that if anything is questionable, she can make any in-line calls." Total turnaround is seven weeks, so they always have two books overlapping.

Just Getting to the 'Net

Considering its market segment, the Internet wasn't a number-one priority for Draper's & Damon's. Recently, it launched a new Internet site with 60 items "just to test it."

Based on early sales, Romano says, "we do expect the 'Net business to be substantial going forward. This is somewhat surprising given our market," he admits. "But we were getting e-mails from catalog shoppers saying they want the ability to order online, so now we'll be putting up every catalog in its entirety," he adds.

Arandell Printing's Executive Vice President, Jim Treis, recently called Draper's & Damon's "one of the most production-savvy catalogers around." And the catalog isn't resting on its laurels with what it has accomplished so far.

"We're pretty close to going digital with the off-figure photography," Romano says, noting that "even the on-model's not too far off." Another new development is the addition of its own Mediabank digital image library. "We expect to add 1,800 to 2,000 per year to it," notes Romano.

With overlapping production cycles and more in-house technology and production to manage, Draper's & Damon's has a greater need than ever for efficient workflow management. The cataloger is presently gearing up to use the same system its retail business uses—the Noosh system—for its catalog for scheduling and tracking its internal jobs.