Cataloger Spotlight: Lillian Vernon

2. Ship orders quicker. In the past, multiple operational inefficiencies drove product ship times to 10 to 11 days. Today, most orders ship either same day or the next day.

3. Cut back SKUs by 25 percent. Excessive SKUs didn’t produce incremental sales and contributed to the company’s slow shipping problem, in addition to driving down demand from each book. “The lesson learned was that we needed to figure out the cost of acquisition and managing a SKU,” Muoio says. “We learned we could go across the assortment and focus on the items that did perform vs. the ones that didn’t.”