Management

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

Catalog Success: Where’s the company headquartered? Chris Harris: It’s in Baltimore, Maryland. CS: What’s your customer demographic? CH: It’s a B-to-B client, which is primarily indoor malls, interior designers, the hospitality industry and retail chains. CS: What’s the primary merchandise offered in the catalog? CH: We sell commercial-grade holiday and theme décor. If you’re decorating an indoor mall or storefront, you’re going to want to buy around Christmas time or Easter or any holiday … you’re going to want to buy our theme décor products. CS: Do you strictly sell to businesses? CH: No, we do sell B-to-C. But

JoAnna Brandi, president of JoAnna Brandi & Co., has spent the past 18 years consulting companies on customer and employee relations. So at the July 9-11 MeritDirect Business Mailer’s Co-op in White Plains, N.Y., she tackled the subject of keeping employees happy on the job — a timely topic considering this trying year. She offered seven tips for not only keeping employees happy on the job, but also productive. 1. Give people the opportunity to use their strengths and skills. Noting a recent survey which revealed that 84 percent of employees in the U.S. are unhappy with their work, and less than one-third of

A quick note: Our June issue was already at the printer while the 25th Annual Conference for Catalog and Multichannel Merchants (ACCM) was taking place on May 19-22 in Kissimmee, Fla. So belatedly, here’s my postconference recap. This was my 22nd consecutive tour of duty at what was once known as the National Catalog Conference, and the Annual Catalog Conference after that. But rest assured, I’m not going to give you one of these old-fogey reflections on how “it ain’t like it used to be.” Instead, let’s track back just a few years to Boston, June 2001. That was probably the most apprehensive

Catalog Success: Where’s the company headquartered? Doug Mockett: It’s physically located in Torrance, California. CS: When was the company established? DM: In early 1981. CS: When were the first catalogs mailed? DM: We got into the mailing of the catalog, it had to be about two years later. It wasn’t so much a catalog as it was a single-sheet flyer; mainly because I only had one product at the time and had no money. CS: What was the one product that you were selling at the time? DM: Grommets, wire access grommets. We just had basically two different sizes and two