A Chat with June’s Profile, Justus Bauschinger, president/owner of Lilliput Motor Co. & Deutsche Optik

CS: Has there been a concerted effort on your part to reduce costs in light of the rising costs (postage and paper) to mail a catalog?
JB: We worked with two presses and now we work only with one. We run our stuff only on a Heidelberg Sunday [web press], we use a gloss No. 3 [paper]. Short of printing it on junk paper, I don’t know how I could get it any lower. We make sure that it’s always under the 3.2 [weight for automation rates on flats size], and up until now we didn’t even tab because we formatted in such a way. We don’t do enough catalogs, first of all, to have it make sense to go to the different centers for consolidation. I’ve done that in the past and I’d look at the results, and hell, they cost as much in the end as anything else I did.
I come from the trenches and we’ve always worked it absolutely as inexpensively as we could possibly do it and still put out a catalog that looks like something. I think I was one of the first people to use the covers for product, only because I never thought doing an atmosphere cover made any sense in light of the product we were selling. That a good image of what we sold was its own atmosphere. And the covers are typically my best page.