A Chat With April’s Profile, Tim Burns, brand manager of Edmund Scientific
CS: What’s the percentage breakdown of sales by channel?
TB: We’re about 70 percent Web, 25 percent phone and 5 percent mail.
CS: What challenges do you foresee for Edmund Scientific, and the catalog industry as a whole, this year and future years?
TB: I think you have to maintain your niche. So as I said before, we’re still very much a niche business. And it’s science-themed, science-related, innovative, interesting products. We can’t get too far outside of that. There are opportunities to become more of a gadget catalog, there are opportunities to become more focused on things that relate to computer science and the natural sciences, and I try really hard not to get too far away from our brand proposition … which isn’t all that different than it was 50 years ago. It’s about helping people connect science with the world around. Giving them things that make it fun and interesting and allow them to show science isn’t just something they like, but it’s also their hobby.
