Management

An “October surprise” in political terms means unveiling an unflattering allegation against your rival just before the November election. Although that didn’t happen this year, catalogers, along with the rest of the world, experienced quite an October surprise with the world financial crisis. So a mergers and acquisitions market that was extremely volatile to begin with is shaken to the core. It’s almost impossible for all but the most well-capitalized of marketers to get deals done. The sobering reality is that many will be forced to sell at bargain basement prices or, worse, close their doors. Amid this bleak backdrop, Lee Helman, a partner

For those readers who believe that I’m way off base in my assertion that downsizing is for weak management, let me say this: Nine out of 10 companies that lay off employees do so for the absolute wrong reasons. From what I’ve seen, most companies downsize before all other cost-reduction measures have been exhausted.
Two weeks ago, I discussed the two largest areas of revenue bleeding for most companies: call centers and Web sites. (To read that article, click here.) I’m willing to bet that if you just fix the gaping holes in those two areas, you can recoup enough revenue to get you

Catalog Success: Where’s your company headquartered? Mark Desrochers: St. Johnsbury, Vermont. CS: When was the company established? Was this also the same time it began mailing catalogs? MD: We don’t look back too much, so we’re actually pretty weak at recalling some of these dates. Matt [Burak] was a furniture maker, and he had a long and successful run as a furniture maker. We incubated this table leg business for a few years inside of his furniture business. We split it out in December of 1999. It’s more realistic to say the idea was … we wrote the business plan in ’95. December

I’ve always believed you put dollars in the bank, not percentages. For example, it’s not the percent of net income that’s important, but the total dollars of profit achieved. To maximize dollars, manage the income statement by the ratios as a percentage of net sales — the dollars will take care of themselves. This month, I’ll review the key ratios of a typical profit and loss (P&L) statement for a B-to-B and a B-to-C catalog company and discuss how these ratios are different today than just a few short years ago. If your company’s experience has been similar to others, sales are

With the markets in turmoil, the economy slumping and our customers spending “nervously,” now is the time to remember the value of being flexible. Here are some ideas to help make your businesses as flexible as possible:
* Continue mailing, no matter how bad the economy gets. Maybe you don’t need to mail a full-line catalog to everyone, but continue mailing. If you have customer segments that have clearly shown they order online and only order one or two product categories, maybe there’s a less expensive way to “mail motivate” those shoppers. I’ve recently seen several creative examples of mail pieces that stimulate online

Catalog Success: Where’s your company headquartered? Peter Cobb: Denver, Colorado. Greenwood Village, technically. CS: What are your catalog/company customer demographics? PC: We sell 520 brands of products, everything from luggage to backpacks to handbags to laptop cases. Five hundred and twenty brands, 36,000 bags. So, there’s such a wide variety. And in a day we’ll have 100,000 visitors to our site. I’m saying all this because it’s hard to pinpoint. It’s about 70 percent women; moderate to upper income — household income around $82,000; average age, and I hate using averages because we have retirees buying luggage for retirement and kids buying backpacks

Quarterly Catalog Success Latest Trends Report on Mailing and Marketing Practices (November 2008)

On the face of it, there’s never been a better opportunity for buyers of multichannel merchants. The blood’s in the water. While this past summer’s multiples have held steady for most marketers with sales of less than $75 million, the multiples have come down for the best-run companies, according to Stuart Rose, managing director of Wellesley, Mass.-based investment banking firm Tully & Holland. The fact that multiples have shrunk to eight times earnings, down from 10 times earnings, only bolsters the case for buyers. But the sharks aren’t biting — at least not yet. As with the real estate market, prices for dream houses

The old Banana Republic catalogs from the 1980s used to feature several vignettes about the adventures of co-founders Mel and Patricia Ziegler, where they talked about how they found this neat, safari-esque stuff on recent journeys. These were classics. They’re bound for some yet-to-be-founded catalog Hall of Fame. Personally, I looked forward to getting those catalogs and always spent at least an hour with each. Around that same time, PaperDirect also was mailing catalogs. They had vignettes in them, too, but they were from PaperDirect product users — people who were employing the products you were looking at in the catalog. If your vignette

In the upcoming September issue of Catalog Success, our cover story spotlights Hodges Badge Co., a Portsmouth, R.I.-based B-to-B cataloger of ribbons, rosettes, medals and more. As a sneak preview to that article, here’s a portion of Senior Associate Editor Joe Keenan’s interview with Rick Hodges, president of Hodges Badge, on myriad topics that aren’t addressed in the print edition. Be sure to see the full article coming out next week, which contains a fresh look at how Hodges Badge has used a catalog format change, a new creative approach and some experienced talent to spur growth in its 89th year of business. Catalog