Thinking Outside the Box

An established brand name. Most of today’s successful catalogers have jumpstarted their Web business by leveraging a strong existing brand name, either from a print catalog (Land’s End (www.landsend.com), Omaha Steaks (www.omahasteaks.com) or retail store (Gap(www.gap.com), Barnes & Noble (www.barnesandnoble.com). While it’s possible to build a Web-only brand name, the required cross-media promotions (such as those undertaken by Amazon.com and CDnow) are so expensive that profitability is still a distant goal for most Web-only retailers.