How catalogers merchandise a once-in-a-lifetime product

Dom Perignon, on tasting the first glass of champagne ever poured, is said to have proclaimed, “I’m drinking stars.”

Ever since that moment, bubbly has been on hand for most celebrations, and heaven knows it needs to be served in the proper vessel: a champagne flute.

While glassware is often marked with brand names or other messages, this New Year a special opportunity presented itself. What better, and rarer, occasion than a millennium-flip to toast with champagne? Put the two together and you get Year 2000 flutes.

This spotlight shows a representative sampling of the positioning strategies for flutes featuring the year 2000 in their design.

To give an indication of what the new millennium means for retail in general, online auction house eBay had a whopping 168 pages of millennium merchandise at one point this December. In stores, online and in catalogs, everything from sweaters and tiaras to Fiesta Ware and candles were emblazoned with those four big numerals.

The category—houseware, gift or collectible—to which such a glass belongs depends largely on the flute itself. They run the gamut from low-priced “functional” glasses sold in larger sets to expensive, custom-designed “high-end-collectible” type flutes.

If the flutes turn up in time capsules, they will help future cultural anthropologists assess “turn-of-the-millennium” tastes and styles. Some are crystal, some glass, some metal, some painted, some with numerals arranged vertically as the stem, some with the year molded into the base. One has the 2000 arranged in rhinestones on the bowl. All held the promise of festivity and good spirits for a day many feared would be ... the end of the world.

Inventory Dilemma: Sell Out or Planned Overage?

Experts agree that for catalogers, buying and merchandising an item like this is a tough call.

Merchandising consultant Carol Fraser of Fraser Associates in Sausalito, CA, says there were three main vendors of 2000 flutes at the early-year product shows: one French, one German, one domestic; then there were the international custom suppliers.

Maxwell Sroge, president of Maxwell Sroge Co. Inc., a catalog consultancy in Evanston, IL, says, “Everybody’s nervous about an item like this. If it were a handkerchief or a regular piece of glass, you could keep selling it [after Jan. 1].”

Thus, he says, both the glass maker and the cataloger are cautious about inventory. “Most people would rather run out of stock than be stuck with inventory, so they buy close to the bone,” Sroge points out. “If you know everyone’s got to have it, you want to be in there at a price that looks good in comparison. You know it’s short-lived, you can’t run it after the end of December. So it’s a case of get while the getting’s good.”

As of early December, these types of glasses were not selling out in retail. But with catalogs, the products were selling well enough to cause quite a dire back-order situation at that same time.

“’Out when out’ seems to be happening with some of these products, and I suspect that was intentional,” Fraser surmises.

“[Merchandise] buyers worry about product and supply early in the year. Many of us thought they might be out by Dec. 10 if not earlier,” she says.

As Fraser explains, “The tight schedule of buying hard goods doesn’t allow for early commitments.” Though technically a “hard good,” she suggests the product be approached in a similar way to fashion apparel. Some fashion houses test the strength of an item early: “They use early exposure to project [demand]. In this case, you had to be in partnership with a vendor to be able to act later upon early success,” explains Fraser.

For this product, vendor relations would be paramount, according to Fraser. “The CEO or president of the catalog should be massaging relations with a few key vendors” of 2000 flutes, she says. As for minimum orders and deadlines, “It would have paid off for buyers to take literally the demands of vendors when they specified them,” says Fraser.

Would an inventory specialist recommend planned overage in this case? “It is unknown what value the inventory will have after New Year’s Eve,” Fraser says. “It’s not necessarily worthless.”

At Lillian Vernon Corp., says David Hochberg, the company’s VP of public affairs, “They were bought to sell out, since it’s a timely product to celebrate New Year’s Eve and the Millennium.

“What we don’t sell out from the catalog by Jan. 1, we will put on phone special, which means our TSRs will mention it as a discounted item at the end of calls,” Hochberg says.

The Lillian Vernon flutes, featured on the inside front spread of the holiday catalog, came in a set of four, each with one of the numerals in 2000 on the stem. “Perfect at home and out on the town, great keepsake gift for the century!” reads the copy.

Why the unusual one-number-per-flute approach? “Our niche is exclusive products not easily found elsewhere, so when we do a commodity like a glass, we do something different with it to make it special,” Hochberg says.

Sroge, too, has ideas on maximizing the selling of year-2000 flutes. “I would offer the glasses in larger multiples, but offer them with matching napkins, to try to create a little difference, again,” he says. “I’d create a little package. Create a little event out of it, where you get napkins, matches, party favors, etc.”

The quantities offered, along with competitive prices, make a significant difference in marketing these items. Says Sroge, “To make it unique, I would offer them in sets of six, eight, 16. All it costs you is a line in the catalog. You can up your sale if someone is having a party,” and fancies these one-time flutes.

Savvy presentation is a clear way to up sales. The two creative “no-no’s” when it comes to showing glassware, says Fraser, are: “Selling it on a light background or selling it as a silhouette.”

Taking the long view of 2000-flute merchandising, Fraser says, “I sense that there are two fundamental ways of presenting this product: One is in the context of celebration; one is to show them as a gift product.

“My preferred way is to show them in the celebration context. Gift sales come parenthetically,” she says. Sroge agrees that only as the exception would these champagne flutes be bought as gifts.

In short, the creative decisions made by catalogers directly impact the consumer’s mindset and their decisions. Creative that implies a party suggests batch buying. And that kind of bulk buying by consumers led to the “blow-outs” that occurred in early December, Fraser says.

A Symphony of 2000 Flutes

On page 36 we see, at top left, Potpourri’s holiday cover star, which is also shown in a hot spot in the upper right corner of a page near the back spread. It is a hand-painted flute priced at $36.95 for two.

Continuing clockwise from there is Catalog Ventures Favorites’ offering: 18k gold accents on what appears to be the same flute. Featured on the inside front cover, the gift-boxed set of two costs $24.95. Notice the page proximity of 2000-shaped corkscrews.

Finally we see, underneath these two, an example of the gamut that these flutes run. Wine and All That Jazz features the same (though undecorated) flute priced at $39.95 for a set of six with two or more sets allowing a $5 discount off that price. At right, among three other flutes offered by the wine cataloger, is a fabulous Art Deco flute with rhinestones: $39.95 each.

Upscale specialty catalogs offered “collectable” versions of the millennial flute. Gumps by Mail, in two different editions of their fall book, featured a variety of flutes: $115-per-pair Waterford Crystal “Peace” flutes with no 2000 iconography (also offered by cataloger Harry & David on its high-visibility inside back cover, albeit in the “gutter” area); a silver-plated bottle-holder ($80) plus flutes at $40 for two; and a “Bottoms Up!” flute with saucer for $95.

Bloomingdales by Mail offered wine goblets or flutes with the same 2000-stem design, “a great example of going for add-on sales,” says Fraser.

The other flute that kept popping up in numerous catalogs is slightly taller than the one shown thrice on page 36, has a different design of the same vertical 2000 on the stem, a triangular bowl and a ridged base. It made the cover of The Paragon’s Holiday book and appeared in the inside front spread.

Panache, a catalog “For Those Who Love to Entertain”, featured this triangular flute (two for $25) in a millennial-product spread, solo in large format and as a “guest star” with other products. Both companies offered two for $25, with The Paragon offering a discount on more than two sets. Betty Henley’s The Lighter Side catalog also chose this model for its Holiday 1999 front cover, and Sugarbush Gourmet Gift Baskets featured it as a prop in another product shot—but didn’t sell it.

A “mystery shopper” phone survey found that most of the catalogers offering one or both of the two most common flute designs had “blown out” their inventory by late November or early December, with no restock plans. That’s good from the standpoint of inventory liquidation, but it might have left a lot of consumers pouting over their plain old toasting flutes.

The moral of the story? Planning ahead pays off for everyone.

Tips for Selling Time-Specific Products

Merchandising consultant Carol Fraser offers six professional recommendations for merchandising a “mass-market” item with time-limited appeal—such as champagne flutes with the year 2001 on them!

1. Make a classic seasonal choice. Go for volume rather than the high-end commemorative approach. Keep it inexpensive, because that’s where you get volume in the fourth quarter. Price it to promote batch buying.

2. Romance the vendor.

3. Buy early. If my inventory specialist recommended it, I’d try to plan on a small percentage of overage, rather than early sell out.

4. Show the item contextually, in this case as a celebration product, and if the product were bought with a gift box, show that as an insert.

5. Place it first, chronologically, in a late-July catalog to get an early reading.

6. Place it on the back cover in early November and in the final mailing.