How a Niche Title Grows
In 12 years of running his own catalog, Jarek Zaremba says he’s learned the importance of prioritization. “You cannot grow if you’re trying to do it all. We’ve had to take one step at a time and do each one right,” says Zaremba, president of the catalog Polart, Poland by Mail.
Born in Poland, Zaremba founded the catalog with his wife in 1990. In the beginning, the catalog was a simple brochure photocopied in the couple’s basement and mailed in a #10 envelope. Today, the four-color catalog averages 32 pages and is mailed to 750,000 customers and prospects each year. How the niche catalog got its footing is a story full of lessons for any growing cataloger.
Find a Niche ... Then Grow
“The beauty of the business is it has a niche,” Zaremba says of his catalog of Poland-sourced products. There are 9.5 million Americans who claim to be of Polish ancestry as of the last U.S. Census: a built-in pool of prospects, he says.
The challenge for a niche cataloger is reaching those prospects. “Finding good lists was tough several years ago,” recalls Zaremba. “We’d rent lists with very mixed results.” So he started doing his own list research. “We work out a formula of what we’re looking for, and then we go to the broker and say, ‘This is what we want.’” To further refine the prospect pool, Zaremba has the lists enhanced with additional data from the I-Behavior co-op.
Today, Polart has more than 250,000 customers on its housefile, and the most important demographic is that they’re Polish-American, says Zaremba. He adds that customer retention is high. “Many don’t have access to these products anywhere else—unless they live in New York or another large city.” The catalog also has successfully reached Polish-American prospects through ads in The New York Times and USA Today.
Polart’s prospecting efforts also now extend beyond purely Polish lists. At present, about half of its merchandise is universal in its appeal. Among the product lines that aren’t exclusively aimed at Polish consumers: pottery and crystal—as well as military products such as swords and helmets. Alternate media, such as ads in military-oriented magazines, are effective in reaching this group.
Don’t Fall in Love with a Product
Polart originally had its start as an offshoot of Zaremba’s earlier venture: video stores that carried Polish titles. Customer demand led him to explore beyond the video market.
Today, Zaremba says, “Product sourcing is my domain.” He travels to Poland twice a year to buy merchandise, and says being bilingual enables him to develop highly unusual product-sourcing agents. Zaremba cites, “the Polish guy who works for a government agency, and on the side, makes these wonderful hats [military helmets] that are immensely popular with our customers.”
An associate in Poland coordinates shipping of the merchandise back to the U.S., where the company maintains its own warehouse, currently housing 4,000 SKUs—a quantity that Zaremba says has gotten too large. “We’re dealing with hundreds of suppliers. We need to focus on the products that are most popular.” He’s learned that the bottom line must dictate which products stay and which ones go. “We’re like everyone else in that we can’t fall in love with a product.”
Plan for Growth
The main obstacle for a start-from-scratch cataloger, is financing, says Zaremba. Specifically, he’d like to have access to capital to mail more catalogs.
Several solutions wait in the wings. “We’re a privately owned corporation, and so now we’re looking to investors,” says Zaremba. Another possibility is a “roll-up” of ethnic niche catalogs. “A banker has an idea of putting together a group of catalogs. ... This way we could enjoy the economies of scale that larger catalogs have. Business is good, but it could be so much better if we had more capacity to grow.”
Alicia Orr Suman is executive editor of Catalog Success magazine.
