Case Study: Sundance Catalog

Nestled at the base of Utah’s Mount Timpanogos, among the giant pine trees lies a small 6,000-acre village. Established in 1969 by Robert Redford, the area has become an educational resource for artists and a place of recreation that fosters social and environmental responsibility. The resort area was purchased by Redford with his earnings from the 1967 film “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid,” from which the village gets its name.

In the past 30 years, Sundance has become more than a tiny village of beauty. It is now home to a host of non-profit organizations founded by Redford, including The Sundance Film Festival, one of the largest and most prestigious film festivals in the world; The Sundance Institute, which operates educational programs on every creative aspect of the film-making process; and summer theatres. The Sundance Resort, a recreational lodge featuring skiing and equestrian sports, as well as an organic farm, are also located in the village and serve as primary funding sources for the non-profit ventures.

But a place so wonderful could not be expected to stay within its natural confines.

The Catalogs

Today, the spirit and brand of Sundance are carried around the world through the Sundance Channel, a cable station that shows award-winning independent films, and the mail order catalogs, Sundance Catalog, Jewelry and Rural Route 3.

Sundance Catalog’s spirit is largely embodied in Redford, who founded the catalog in 1989. It is a direct outgrowth of the Sundance Village general store, which resort guests visit during their stays. The catalog was created to respond to hundreds of letters the general store received every year requesting its products. A percentage of its sales now support the film festival and The Sundance Institute. But what began as simple customer fulfillment has grown into a multiple catalog, 16-million-circulation mail order business.

Sundance

Sundance Catalog’s design, creative, merchandise and approach all reflect the mission of Sundance Village and its events. Full of American Western home furnishings, hand-crafted arts and crafts, apparel and jewelry, the book offers works created by artists in Sundance and around the world. The lifestyle catalog serves as a touch point for patrons and supporters, who enjoy knowing that it funds the non-profit entities.

What separates Sundance Catalog from other lifestyle catalogs is that it is actually modeled after a real place. The lifestyle Sundance Catalog portrays is the one residents, guests, students and artists live out every day in the mountainous community. The products that fill the catalog are selected because they are a function of the relaxed, casual, Western livelihood experienced at Sundance.

“We have a real place that is pristine and beautiful. It helps us anchor our values in honesty,” says Sundance Catalog President Patricia Warren. “And there is a real guy who wants to celebrate it. We have an opportunity to stay centered.”

Maintaining brand integrity and reflecting the lifestyle of Sundance, UT, in the catalog are important components of its success and of the non-profits it funds. But like most things in life, the catalog is subject to change. From customer taste to the evolution of the mail order business to the growth of The Sundance Institute, the catalog has had to adapt to many influences without compromising its image, brand and message.

Based on sales it was apparent early on that certain merchandise would soon begin eclipsing other product lines, such as apparel, if the catalog did not increase pages to accommodate customers’ growing interests. In particular, jewelry and home furnishings emerged. But in the early 1990s, shipping large home furnishings was not widely done in the catalog industry. So what has since become one of the strongest selling lines for Sundance was suppressed until it became feasible within the mail order industry. The response to the core book has been favorable since, with sharp increases in initial response that caused Sundance to move three times in its first four years of business to larger facilities. In 11 years of business the staff has increased 200 percent to 230 employees, created three new titles and pushed circulation of the core book to 16 million annually.

“The growth has been really amazing,” says Brent Beck, vice president of merchandising. “We had to pinch ourselves many times in the process.”

But Sundance’s success hasn’t been an easy thing to deal with. Beck says that after the third move during Sundance Catalog’s infancy, the company decided to control growth by limiting circulation, largely because it just couldn’t find the right employees to keep up the accelerated pace.

Years later, faced with double-digit response growth in its core book, Sundance knew it had to do something. After adding pages to its core book, Sundance decided to create a new catalog, which seemed logical in light of 1994 and 1995 sales reports that identified jewelry as a market that could stand on its own, and that Sundance’s jewelry buyers were less likely to make significant purchases from the other merchandise. In 1996, it created a catalog simply entitled Jewelry.

“The life was well beyond what we were giving it,” Warren says of the jewelry line. “The timing was based on growth and our own awareness to give [the merchandise] the space it needed and to not jeopardize the other categories.” Jewelry mails four times a year and was spun off to meet the demand of the core book’s jewelry buyers.

Jewelry

Just as it had experienced brand and imaging issues in its core book, Sundance had to face them with the Jewelry book.

“We work very hard to reflect [the mission of Sundance],” says Warren of Jewelry. “We make that effort on the other books, but there we focus more on the individual expression. Sundance is very much about supporting individual expressions.”

While Jewelry needed to have brand consistency with Sundance and a similar merchandise line as the core book, it also required a new look that appealed to its specific customer base. The product mix is heavy on jewelry, but has accessories and shoes to balance it out. Jewelry developed a very light, airy, ethereal feel with the only identifying mark tying it to Sundance Catalog being a small reference in the Jewelry masthead on the cover. Unlike the core book, Jewelry doesn’t contain editorial by Redford, and its product presentations are drastically different on cross-marketed items.

Since Jewelry had a segment of the Sundance Catalog house file as a starting customer base, finding buyers was not much of an issue at the start. Thus Jewelry was able to focus on merchandising and creative development.

Sundance relies on a core team to conceptualize, develop, create and operate all of its catalogs, says Warren. So with each new phase of the core book and the spin off, the staff has developed some practical experience used to to create its new catalogs.

“We have a small core nucleus of highly talented people that define what Sundance is about,” says Warren. “We have a basic foundation of knowledge that we can take from. With each other, we can do a great devil’s advocate in a safe environment and challenge each other to make sure we are doing the best in each book.”

Sundance’s Director of Marketing Matey Erdos, who handles the company’s mailing list testing and use, gained specialized knowledge in prospecting. While Sundance had used rented lists to prospect in the past, the Jewelry book launch required Erdos to work closely with its list broker, AZ Marketing of Cos Cob, CT. Together, they targeted new prospects using apparel lists that were segmented to just accessory buyers. Also, prospect names were gathered through ads in fashion magazines and with bind-ins in Sundance Catalog.

Rural Route 3

Sundance’s next spinoff was Rural Route 3 catalog, which mailed its first 48-page book in August 1999 and two more times in 1999, each with a circulation of 700,000. It offers apparel, accessories and jewelry that appeal to the 25- to 45-year-old female demographic.

The Rural Route 3 spinoff represents a new audience for Sundance that reflects the changes in the independent film industry, which now draws from a 20-something, hipper generation that flocks to film festivals and avidly watches the Sundance Movie Channel. The book’s demographic is young and affluent. Sometimes the new customers are even the children of the original target audience of Sundance, specifically the daughter of Robert Redford. Shauna Redford is the idea-woman behind Rural Route 3.

“Rural Route 3 was led by the understanding that there was a younger demographic. [We needed a new catalog] so that we weren’t sending mixed messages,” says Beck. “The consumers we are mailing to, they come to the festival, live the lifestyle that [goes with it]. We are trying to provide the clothing that they are after. This book is the way we want to do it.”

Despite 10 years difference between Sundance Catalog and Rural Route 3, the books were developed in a remarkably similar fashion.

Sundance’s core book was started by four workers from the Sundance Ski Resort at the behest of Redford. Beck, who is now Sundance’s vice president of merchandising, has been with the catalog from its inception. He recalls a tenuous beginning during which experts told the foursome the catalog’s merchandise would never sell. The first mailing of Sundance Catalog yielded a higher-than-average response rate. The second mailing landed them $400,000 in debt.

“A big part of why we were successful was how naive we were,” says Beck. “We were a little daring. We pushed the envelope not knowing we were pushing it as far as we were.”

Rural Route 3 has also been done from the gut, much like the core book. The creative and merchandise for the book are done the “Sundance” way, rather than how the designers and experts suggested. And similar to the way Sundance Catalog was named after the village, Rural Route 3 was named after the road that runs through the Sundance Resort.

The Rural Route 3 concept was developed over a two-year period. The merchandise was never tested in the Sundance Catalog, but a cross-prospecting test of the house file was done showing that the products didn’t sit well with the core book’s demographic. But the merchandise was well received by the target 25- to 45-year-old audience.

“We could see it wasn’t the strength of the product, it wasn’t age-group appropriate in our core book,” says Warren of the merchandise.

Rural Route 3 catalog is a whole new animal for Sundance in terms of merchandise mix. That aside, the catalog wanted to reflect the Sundance lifestyle to preserve brand identity. A challenging point was the design and creative of Rural Route 3, which couldn’t resemble the core book because it didn’t appeal to the new audience.

“It was a separate market segment,” says Warren. “They needed to experience something more in touch with their value system. They wanted a different connection than their mother.”

Rural Route 3 looks nothing like Sundance. The clothing has a rural/Western feel, but it is more chic and cutting edge. Beck describes it as representing fun.

“It isn’t something the career woman would put on 8 to 5,” he says. “What we represent is a lifestyle of honesty, creativity, fun and relaxation.”

In addition, the photography is splashier, and is not as concerned with capturing the natural beauty of Sundance, but more about capturing how people look and feel when they are in Sundance. It is less product focused, says Beck, in that each photograph sells multiple products in one shot. He says the book is very dense and has an unusual size, 7 1⁄2˝ x 10˝.

“Rural Route 3 has a different sensibility,” says Beck. “It is still true to the Sundance feeling, but it is somewhat of an organic connection. There is a connection more to the natural environment to natural fibers, a holistic approach.”

Finding an Audience

Since the 25- to 45-year-old group was not an existing customer demographic of Sundance. Erdos relied on her experience with Jewelry to target the market. Sundance began its audience search by building an Abacus model of its ideal customer using similar buyer profiles from other catalogs, such as Anthropologie, Banana Republic, Monteray Bay and Kenneth Cole.

“The biggest challenge was trying to target the affluent buyer in that age range, with that income. It is a very small universe,” says Erdos.

Rural Route 3 tested prospect lists it had used for the core book, but was now looking for customers with disposable income and a lower age. It also targeted out-of-category lists of accessory buyers, jewelry buyers and shoe buyers.

Erdos says response has been very strong, but declined to release numbers. But data cards show that the Rural Route buyer has an average age of 35, more than 65 percent of buyers are female, average income is $75,000 and their average order is $150.

Warren and Beck say the book is still finding its own way, and that no specific goals have been set.

“Rural Route 3 is still very much a test,” says Erdos. “We are still learning as we go along. Trying to bring in quality buyers and learn from that file. We are still playing with page count and time of year and customer. It is a work in progress.”

But if successful, the 25- to 45-year-old female demographic represents an excellent platform for future growth, says Beck. Not only is it possible that these customers could stay with the catalog for 30 years, but it is the first demographic that has children, which could be a whole new area for Sundance.

Attempting a Special Edition Catalog

The Special Edition catalog mailed just once, in October 1999. Offering many hand-crafted gifts, home decor, furniture, artwork, jewelry and accessories, the book was targeted to capture the holiday buying market.

“We learned there is a definite market there for it, but that we need to do that periodically and keep it unique,” says Warren.

There are no current plans to role out another issue. Of key concern was compromising the “uniqueness” of the merchandise with frequent editions.

“We looked at it as an annual,” says Warren. “Perhaps it should be looked at it in the holiday period. I loved the idea, but with as much as we have to stay focused on, we are afraid we will get sidetracked. We are looking into special editions from time to time.”