Quebecor World Direct

With the latest postal rate increase weighing heavily on catalogers’ bottom lines, you’ll be needing advice on how to mail more efficiently. While list brokers can offer considerable guidance on which lists to rent, printers are another key source for money-saving tips. Naturally, the issue du jour is the May postal rate hike. Printing company officials say that the postal situation has given them a chance to collaborate more with their catalog clients. Now more than ever, printers are giving catalogers input on co-mailing, customization, paper selection, trim size, and even list hygiene and database management. “I’ve never seen so much conversation and reaction,” Rick Dethloff,

There’s a bit of irony as to how the mood among catalogers, printers, industry groups and the like shifted so radically from the assorted kudos to the PRC last Monday after it released its recommendations to the desperate situation mailers find themselves in right now. Word started spreading late last week during a retirement party for outgoing PRC chairman George Omas. “We all first saw drop-ship discounts increase, which was good,” says Joe Schick, director of postal affairs for printer Quad/Graphics, who was at the reception. “But then it seemed as though every analysis we ran on catalog rates, it got worse and worse. Maybe

Quebecor to Shutter Two Catalog Printing Plants Catalog printer Quebecor World announced in November it would close two catalog printing facilities in 2007. The closures are part of an overall restructuring plan and will eliminate about 400 jobs next year. The company will shut down a printing facility in Elk Grove Village, Ill., and a bindery facility in Bensenville, Ill., during the first quarter. Quebecor expects to create 75 positions at its other facilities to accommodate additional volume. As part of the restructuring, the printer will invest in new press and bindery equipment. People on the Move The Sharper Image: Jerry Levin

Dollars & Sense: Catalog Co-mailings For catalogers, the past decade has been explosive with innovation. For example, desktop publishing led to computer-to-plate manufacturing and digital prepress. Files replaced film, and the process of print production became more streamlined and efficient. So much so, in fact, that catalogers now must look to operations outside the prepress and pressroom realms for cost savings, to what some consider a hard-numbers-based necessary evil: postage. “As postal costs continue to be an ever-increasing part of a cataloger’s total budget — and in order to stay competitive — they have to seek out new efficiencies in the process,”

United Stationers, a distributor of office supplies and other merchandise, has been producing various levels of versioned print catalogs for the past 10 years. Its clients, which include about 5,000 resellers ranging from mom-and-pop neighborhood stores to national chains such as Staples, use the catalogs to sell products to end-users. For this Des Plaines, IL-based wholesaler, versioning is need-driven. “We have so many resellers with different marketing needs that we must satisfy,” explains Jeff Kressman, director of marketing communications and research. United Stationers produces the following types of print catalog versions: 1. A standardized catalog with customized covers denoting the contact information

Modern printing technologies have made the promise of one-to-one — or more appropriately, one-to-some — marketing a reality. Indeed, today’s catalogers can select from a wide range of personalization printing techniques, such as inkjetting customers’ names on catalog covers or inserts, crafting special offers for small customer segments, or even printing four-color customized catalogs with products, imagery and copy hand-selected for each recipient. It’s a dizzying array of new catalog production and marketing possibilities. And catalogers are taking advantage of them. Just in the past few years, for example, catalog printer Quebecor World recorded a 15-percent annual growth rate in personalized catalogs among

The last 20 months at L.L. Bean have confirmed one over-arching principle: Progress can be painful. Faced with stagnant sales, too much inventory and stale creative, Chris McCormick, CEO of L.L. Bean, had to make some difficult and unpopular decisions if he wanted to whip the company into fighting shape for the 21st century. He instituted numerous reorganizational initiatives that included eliminating 32 catalogs from the mail plan and 2,300 unproductive catalog pages. The staff cut 25 percent of its SKUs. Its vendor list was chopped in half after the company renegotiated nearly all major contracts, including printing, paper, e-mail fulfillment and data

Focus On: Merchandising & Creative The year was 1943. World War II was raging across Europe. Norway was occupied by Germany. The Nazis needed access to open ocean and the deep-water fjords to shelter their great ships. Next door, Sweden remained neutral and relatively untouched by the conflict. In the town of Elmtaryd, Sweden, in the parish of Agunnaryd, an ambitious 17-year-old boy named Ingvar Kamprad traveled from farm to farm selling seeds from a box on the back of his bicycle. He had other items to sell—fountain pens, pencils and matches—but couldn’t inventory them all on a bicycle. So he hit on