Polish Your Merchandising Skills

Spending time improving your best items or lists will pay off. Take a simple example of two catalog items: One is a top-20 item (in sales dollars), and the other is in the bottom one-third of your offerings.

The catalog cost per-square-inch is $250, and each item takes the same amount of a 20-square-inch page. The margin for each is 55 percent, and the price point is $39.95. The top-20 item is selling 2,500 units, has about $100,000 in net sales and is therefore making a contribution to overhead of $50,000 (50 percent) after product and square-inch costs.