Measuring Profitability Through Square-Inch Analysis: An Updated Approach

For catalogers, square-inch analysis serves as your scorecard. It’s a tool that tells you how much profit each item and page delivers. Some square-inch analysis is meticulously tabulated with the exact number of catalog pages each item occupied over the span of several catalogs. Other analyses are more casual, with less attention to the exact space allocation and total cost of the page space devoted to each item. But whether the format’s rigorous or relaxed, the data’s precise or just directional, the underlying purpose of square-inch analysis is simply to tell us whether an item is profitable. After all, why sell items that aren’t profitable?