Red Envelope

According to a survey conducted for Shop.org by BIGresearch, 96.5 million Americans plan to shop on Cyber Monday this year, up from 85 million in 2008.

Catalogers’ Updates • Gander Mountain: Twelve years since it last mailed a catalog, this hunting, fishing, outdoor apparel, and lifestyle products and services marketer has returned to the catalog industry. In late April, Gander mailed a 324-page catalog from its Overton’s subsidiary containing products from Overton’s, Gander Mountain and others to more than 2 million customers. Plans call for catalogs carrying exclusively Gander Mountain products to be mailed later this year. The company also expects to convert its informational Web site into a transactional one later this year. • Dell: The personal computer marketer continued its recent cost-cutting initiative by laying off 250 workers

The fish are the last to discover the sea, so says the Chinese proverb. This analogy may stretch to Godiva, whose staffers had been working so closely with its site they weren’t sure what was needed to make it even better. According to Beth Brown, Godiva’s senior manager of interactive, prior to an October 2001 makeover the company’s interactive group tweaked its site based only on competitive benchmarking and intuition. “Before, I literally had mock-ups [of page designs] and would ask [my staff] what they thought,” she says. This time, Brown sought advice directly from customers with usability testing. Brown and

It’s become painful to pick up the business section of the newspaper these days. My once-beloved morning routine now is preceded by trepidation. I find myself asking: What company and/or executive is in the hot seat today? WorldCom, Enron, Martha Stewart, Tyco, Arthur Andersen—once stalwarts in their respective industries—have become poster children for the post-boom era. The result is that fingerpointing has become a new national pastime. Some Democrats are saying the Bush administration hasn’t been hard enough on wayward business executives. Robert Samuelson, who covers the economy for Newsweek, recently wrote that the media is partly to blame. He argues that journalists who