Profile: All in the Family

BIGGEST MISTAKE AND SUBSEQUENT RECOVERY: When catalog sales started to decline about three years ago, “We reacted late because we blamed external factors,” he says. “In truth, the catalog had become dated and stale.” They recovered by rebranding. The result: “a fresh, newly designed catalog and a new companion Web site that wound up winning a Webby award. Our customers responded quite favorably to the change. The catalog took on more structure; the product groups were more thematically oriented or departmentalized. So there was a more logical feel as one went through the book.”