A Chat With April’s Profile, Tim Burns, brand manager of Edmund Scientific

CS: What has Edmund Scientific done to combat the rising costs (postage, paper, printing) of running a catalog business today? For example, cut circulation or made changes to the catalog’s trim size?
TB: We do all that stuff. One of the things we have working for us is we’re part of a very large catalog company. VWR and its science education division are always in the top 10 of the Catalog 100. So we try to leverage all of those titles when we’re buying paper and we’re negotiating print contracts. And then we’re also looking at co-mailing opportunities. But the thing about Edmund is it’s a small, consumer catalog within a corporate B-to-B culture. So everybody understands cataloging, but we’re not a small, privately owned company. There are budgets that you have to adhere to. So when catalog costs go up like that, I really have to scramble to achieve my growth targets while maintaining the bottom line.