A Chat With September’s Profile, Scott Drayer, director of marketing, Paul Fredrick MenStyle

CS: How has Paul Fredrick MenStyle dealt with the rising costs associated with mailing catalogs?
SD: The first thing that we did was recognize that even years ago the cost and available pool of customers that we were going to be able to acquire through the mail was dwindling and becoming pricey. So the first thing was developing other ways to acquire customers.
More recently, with some of the postage increases that we’ve seen, it’s really kind of evaluating what we can do in terms of a piece to save costs — whether it’s trim size testing or moving our clearance books to slim-jim format, which doesn’t appear that that’s going to be the answer moving forward. Those are some kind of short-term things that we’ve done. But I think it really kind of plays into what I was trying to say with the last point, “What can we do to be more effective?”
It’s not all necessarily about controlling costs. If you can increase response, it does the same thing. And it’s actually going to end up better for you in the long term … just being a more effective mailer. If somebody doesn’t want to get the catalog or this isn’t the right time to send them the catalog, recognize the fact that they’ve been priced out and don’t mail the piece and spend the money somewhere else. Kind of looking at it on a line-item basis is the most effective way to allocate a dollar. I think we’ve done a fairly good job with that, especially on the acquisition side.