A Chat With July’s Profile, Doug Mockett, founder/owner of Doug Mockett & Co.

CS: What’s your overall SKU count?
DM: I’d say at around 2,500. It’s actually 2,422, but 2,500 will do.

CS: Are all of those products offered in the catalog?
DM: Oh sure. Everything is in there and everything is on our Web site online as well.

CS: How many times is the catalog mailed per year?
DM: That’s an interesting question because we have a major catalog, it’s almost 300 pages, and we try to update it once every two years. And we’ve fallen behind … badly. We’re getting our new 2009 catalog, which will go out the day after Labor Day. The last catalog, full-line, we did was in 2004. We put in new software and it didn’t work; not catalog, but B-to-B, accounting and order-taking and all that. That didn’t work. It put us a year out, and we didn’t see any point in sending in a catalog with a huge influx of inquiries we get and have this crappy software. What we’ve done, though, is issue about every six months a 30- to 40-page what we call “Innovations,” which is all of the new products we’ve added in the prior six months.