Three Years and $3 Million to Break Even

And that represents a pretty typical picture of a cataloger who has just achieved the second kind of breakeven. How many years and dollars did this cataloger have to invest to get there? The total cost is easy to calculate: We saw above that we were losing $22.50 on each order from a prospect, and we saw that this loss could be viewed as our cost to add a new buyer to our housefile. So adding 15,000 new buyers to your housefile will cost you $22.50 x 15,000 = $337,500. And to get those 15,000 prospect orders, you’ll need to have mailed a grand total of approximately 1.5 million total catalogs (at a 1-percent response rate).