Top Catalogers

The U.S. gross domestic product clocked a 4.4 percent gain in 2004, its strongest showing since 1999 when the economy gained 4.5 percent, according to the Commerce Department. And economists called the 3.1 percent gain in the fourth quarter “respectable.”

Good news, right? Well, sort of.

Our third-annual ranking of the Top 200 catalogers (as measured by housefile-growth rates) shows there still is some softness in the market. Of the 1,067 catalogs whose housefile numbers we checked, only 406, or 38 percent, recorded any growth at all. (For those readers who are new to cataloging, housefiles are customer lists.)