subject: A Starter Catalog For A Start Up Retailer [print this page] Stella's Place was a home furnishings store which had been in business for three years and she was just now getting to the point where she felt she could look forward to success. Her budget had been excruciatingly tight, but she had more and more inquiries from people from different parts of the state. She wanted to find a better way to market to people rather than constantly communicating with individual customers and trying to find them
She decided to call on someone they knew who might be in a position to advise them: a salesman at a full service printing company which happened to be located a block from their new location. She called him and invited him over to discuss matters. He looked at her situation and came to the conclusion that the best way for them to move forward would be a start up catalog.
The keys to making it a success would be to make sure that she understood that her catalog had to be managed - every item, every page, every price point. A well managed catalog brings in more money than a poorly managed one.
What are the various ways in which a catalog can be managed? One of the most important ways that this is done is by the intelligent management of data. Your sales data tells you amazing amounts of information about what your customers are doing, what their interests are, and what their buying habits are.
A catalog doesn't have to be five hundred pages in size. It can be fifty pages, or even twenty. The point is that you have to have some place to start, and you build on it.
For creating your own catalog, you are going to have to do a lot of the work yourself, and you are also going to need the services of a professional printing company. You are going to have to arrange for photography of the items that go into the catalog. You are going to keep a file of each digital photo, and these will be sent to the printer for layout of the pages.
Obviously, all of the decisions about pricing will be made by you the marketer, and once again you are going to have to work closely with your full service printer in order to make sure that they have the correct and updated information at all times. One problem which has to be anticipated is that files can often be pulled and used mistakenly, and so a system has to be put into place which keeps this from happening. More than almost any other document, a catalog has to have clear protocols in place which ensure that the appropriate parties sign off on anything before it goes to the printing phase. That's because once it goes into the plant for printing it is going straight into mailing and out the door.
The worse thing that could possibly happen is for thousands of catalogs to go out the door and the pricing on many of the items to be wrong. This destroys credibility and additional could put the retailer on the hook for monies that were not intended to be spent n honoring prices that were too low, or for dealing with low sales caused by pricing that is too high.
by: Johann Williamson
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