Plow & Hearth

Plow & Hearth engages its customers and prospects via a multitude of marketing vehicles — catalogs, email, direct mail, affiliate marketing, search engine marketing, TV and radio ads. With that mix comes the challenge of determining the best way of contacting consumers. Does a customer who received a catalog yet purchased via the web still need to be mailed an expensive catalog?

Merchandise is still king. That was only one of a handful of themes taken from a wide-ranging and spirited session at last week’s NEMOA Spring 2008 Conference in Cambridge, Mass. This particular session included Derrick Egbert, president of New Perspectives; Allen Abbott, EVP/COO of Paul Frederick MenStyle; Jonathan Fleischmann, president/ CEO of the Potpourri Group; and Dana Pappas, COO/CFO of Plow & Hearth. It focused on the pressures of managing a catalog business in today’s uncertain economic times. Below are some of the tips/observations taken from the panelists and audience members. * Merchandise: “It’s the starting point,” Fleischmann said. The need for collaboration

The key to keeping response rates ahead of the game for the Plow& Hearth catalog has been in revisiting the makeup of the book, said Jean Giesmann, vice president of creative services for the home furnishings catalog, when she spoke at the Hudson Valley Direct Marketing Association’s “Meet the Catalogers” luncheon held in Greenwich, Conn., in early April. “We revisited our brand a few years ago when we saw our response rates not doing so well,” she noted.”What were we doing wrong?” Following are a few strategies officials at Plow& Hearth used to get back on track. * They started to get a little tougher on

While catalogs are worth more than the paper they’re printed on, there remains a continuous drive among catalogers, especially in this day of rising postal rates, to decrease paper costs. Indeed, reducing the basis weight is an easy way to shave hundreds of thousands of dollars off a catalog’s bottom line, says Jean O. Giesmann, vice president of creative services at Plow & Hearth. But as with any change in the look and feel of your catalog, changing paper is not something to be undertaken lightly. Following are some of the factors and their possible consequences to consider. Why Change? Two independent

At the turn of the 17th century, Italian inventor Galileo Galilei discovered that a change in temperature affects the buoyancy of liquid, giving rise to the invention of a crude thermometer. Fast forward about 400 years, and Galileo's "thermoscope" is now available to the masses, sold as a work of art and science to grace our homes and offices. Today's version consists of a clear glass cylinder, filled with a clear, temperature-sensitive liquid and glass globes filled with colored liquids, each with a numbered tag to display the temperature. Galileo's thermometer is difficult to describe, let alone image, in a catalog. Following,