So You Want to Start a Catalog

After the tour, we met in his office. “We feel we have many parallels to Stash Tea,” he said. “Like them, we want to build a catalog-based program to help us leverage retail distribution through guerrilla marketing.”

Excellent! I thought. Stash Tea had a great leveraging success story, and I would’ve been lucky to be on board during its glory years. Starting as a tea supplier to restaurants, Stash Tea built a consumer database via catalog requests advertised on its tea bag wrappers, and thus gradually built a successful consumer book. Later, when Stash expanded into retail grocery stores, it used the catalog to showcase dealers and do new-dealer notices. And it mailed store announcements and coupons to local-area names from the catalog database. That model could work for others, I thought.