Mar 25 2008
New Catalogue, new thinking
One of the pitfalls of being involved in any sort of publishing is that you often forget what the time of year is. The relentless need for monthly magazines to produce next month’s issue (often with the following month shown on the cover) by the end of this month means that to writers and publishers, summer starts in March, Christmas occurs around early October and Easter can be as early as the New Year! When speaking to our friends at magazines like Your Horse, I often feel like I’m entering a strange world where the next six weeks have ceased to exist, kind of like amnesia but in the other direction.
When you think about it, the same must be true of anyone working in the soaps. Every so often, you’ll see a giveaway, like evidence of snow in an episode aired in May – look out for that this year! One of the more interesting ‘work’ days out I am fortunate to have is to a venue which just happens to be an occasional location for Emmerdale. I’m told that the continuity people who are there during the shoots are permanently worried about making everything look like it’s a month and a half in the future.
In the case of the humble catalogue production department, our timing can be even longer into the future. With Spring/Summer and Autumn/Winter campaigns, the deadlines may be less frequent, but the thinking is even further ahead. With that in mind, I was almost going to tell you how we’re very happy with the way our Autumn/Winter ’08 catalogue is shaping up and then I remember that you’ll only recently have received our Spring/Summer catalogue. Do you see what I mean? Time and again, time plays this trick on me.
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Maybe I can put it this way: I hope you like our new selection and indeed our new catalogue. We’re very proud of it and we hope it’ll be very popular, but I expect it to be the last of its kind, a throwback to a simpler age. In the evolution of mailorderus catalogi, we’re at the point in time where the species has to adapt to a changing environment. If we don’t develop the equivalent of warm blood or opposable thumbs, we risk becoming a dinosaur and nobody wants to look forward to being a rather famous skeleton. |
So what are we going to do next time to make this new catalogue seem like a quaint, old-fashioned relic? Well, I’m sure you can agree that I can’t possibly discuss that here (yet), but I’m also sure you can probably guess the direction we’ll be heading. And here comes the other curse of the publisher: the fact that you hardly ever get the chance to be proud of the thing you worked so hard to create - because you already know that in the pipeline is something that promises to be much, much better. I can’t wait until we can share it with you…
Merry Christmas!
Paul.
New catalogue is good but limited
Why do you make it smaller everytime you re-issue, we get to know where things are then you change ?
But as usual your mail order service cannot be faulted.
Living in Aberdeen it is always good to have a reliable source
Kind regards,
Janice
Janice,
Thanks for your comments. I’m pleased to see you’re so happy with our service.
You may be surprised to read that this year’s Spring/Summer catalogue is in fact the biggest spring season catalogue we’ve ever produced - at 164 pages long. Last year and in 2006, our Spring catalogues were 148 pages long. Before that, our Spring catalogues were never any bigger than about 80 pages.
I’m sure by “smaller”, your comparison is with our previous Autumn/Winter catalogues, which are usually in the region of 250 pages. I am mindful that using this comparison, it may perhaps make our spring catalogues look smaller and less significant, although I would say that with different seasons to cater for, they’re not really the same thing. There is far more scope for winter items than summer items in the horse world (clippers, heavy turnouts etc.) and of course, Christmas comes in winter.
So the short answer is “it isn’t smaller” but that’s almost beside the point if enough people feel that our catalogues are shrinking.
That’s sort of the point I was getting at in the blog about evolution. With more than half of all our mail orders coming over the web now, it is quite tempting to print less paper and move the emphasis to our website. There is a lot to be said for the web over paper. We can write more, add more pictures, add video and downloads and give real-time stock information. It’s free to send out, more environmentally friendly and it can be easily amended if we make a mistake.
The one thing a fantastic website can’t easily do that any catalogue can do is say “look at all this”. A nice big catalogue reassures us all that there’s loads of choice in there and that we should take it (and the company who produces it) more seriously. It literally becomes a question of “never mind the quality, feel the width”. In the years to come, our mission is to use the strengths of the web as much as we can without losing any of the credibility that our catalaogues have always given us.
Do you perceive us to have reduced our selection? This is precisely the perception we’re trying to avoid although you’re perfectly entitled to hold it. For us to ensure that we do avoid that perception will require just the kind of “New Thinking” I was talking about.