Garden.com and other online retailers are changing direct marketing—including the look and function of the mail order catalog

By Melissa Sepos

There is no formula for creating a catalog to drive traffic.

“We took what we had learned from direct mail and magazines, to be honest. The Christmas catalog was an experiment. We just tried it. We used a lot of gut instinct. They’ll tell you a lot of things won’t work, but there are some that worked really well. A lot of us came from channel marketing. We used it to do these things,” says Sharples.