Front-Runner

“We looked at the cost of doing the book the old way vs. the new way and printing both, and I just decided that was something we couldn’t afford to absorb,” he says, regarding the production costs associated with printing the books in such a small quantity in each format.

So Hodges went against conventional catalog wisdom and ruled out conducting a test because it doesn’t mail enough books to bear the expense. Plus, the data wouldn’t yield a convincing enough response. “Think about what the production cost is to do all that work twice and only run 25,000 books,” he says.