How to Devise a Merchandise Concept

During my years in the catalog industry, I’ve met several merchants who didn’t clearly focus their catalog concept. In those cases, the catalog simply became a collection of stuff. And with no clear focus for that stuff—no thread holding the products together—it became hard to present a cohesive story to customers. This hurt the catalogers’ ability to get repeat purchases from customers. It also hurt their prospecting efforts. I’m sure many customers finished perusing their catalogs (or perhaps they didn’t even get that far) and said: “What was that? I can’t figure out what they stand for.”