August Catalogue Log

Last year, the fact that we received just 71 catalogues in August seemed unusual to us. But this year, receiving just 61 catalogues in August came as no surprise. We have been tracking a steady decline in catalogue volume during the last few months—the only anomaly being July, when sale activity boosted the number of catalogues to land on the Catalogue Log desk.

Comparing the catalogues received in August 2009 with those logged in August 2010, some titles that appear in both columns, such as Books Direct, House of Bruar and Scotts of Stow. There also seemed to be an almost equal number of new names this year to compensate for lists we have been dropped from. This further cements the theory that cataloguers are mailing smarter, removing unprofitable names from their files.

Cataloguers are also becoming smarter with their covers. We have been tracking how many catalogues highlight a sale or discount, free shipping, or a free gift on their covers since January 2009 and have noted an increasing trend of using the cover to promote some sort of offer. A staggering 65.6 percent of all the catalogues we received in August featured some sort of offer on the front cover—in July that figure was 64 percent and in June it was 60 percent. Among the minority of catalogues without a special offer were Brora, the Dolls House Emporium, and Lakeland.


The most popular offer in August was a sale or discount, promoted on 41 percent of the catalogue covers we logged. This is appreciably lower than July’s record high of 49.5 percent. Gaining favour with cataloguers in August was free delivery—the number of catalogues touting free shipping almost doubled from 12.1 percent in July to 23 percent in August. Catalogues offering free delivery included Bon Prix, Joules and Boden, which repeated its Sunday Times offer of last year—a 15 percent discount, free delivery, and free returns. We thought it made Boden look needy last year, but it obviously works or Boden wouldn’t have used it again.

The number of catalogues offering a free gift with purchase was 11.5 percent, down from 12.1 percent in July and from 14.1 percent in August 2009. Free gifts were mainly promoted by the b-to-b catalogues in the pack including Viking Direct and Neat Ideas.

Our favourite offer of the month is from gardening catalogue Sarah Raven’s Kitchen & Garden. Among the messages on the cover was this: “Offers What’s yours? See page 49”. I thought it was a fun way to encourage customers to flick through the catalogue. It also had a sense of personalisation—did my catalogue have a different offer to my friend or neighbour’s? I’d like to think there was some sort of segmentation that went into deciding which offer to send to which tranche of the database. Let's put it to the test, I got 15 percent off. What did you get?--MT

The August Catalogue Log

The dog days of summer made their presence felt in the Catalogue Log inbox. In August we logged in just 71 catalogues, less than half the number (149) tallied in July. How much of the decline in volume was due to general seasonality and how much to the Royal Mail strikes scattered across the month is impossible to say.

While the overall volume of catalogues was low, the percentage offering sales and discounts was the highest it’s been so far in 2009: 43.7 percent. That’s not surprising, given that many retailers, particularly apparel merchants, make every effort to shift excess inventory by the end of summer to make room for autumn and Christmas merchandise. Cataloguers as diverse as Furniture@work.co.uk, footwear merchant Hotter Comfort Concept, retail fittings supplier Morplan, womenswear title Simply Be, and Wickedelic Lingerie posted special sale catalogues in August.

In fact, the percentage of catalogues that promised no special offers fell sharply. In June, 46.5 percent of the books logged in carried no free P&P offers, gift-with-purchase deals, prize draws, discounts, or other special offers. In July the percentage slipped slightly, to 43.6 percent. But in August fewer than one in three of the catalogues received—31 percent, to be precise—were free of sales or other promotions. For the most part, those were autumn/winter/Christmas editions, such as the Arthritis Research Campaign’s Christmas issue, the autumn editions of childrenwear merchant Frugi, gardening title Sarah Raven’s Kitchen & Garden, and womenswear brand Spirit of the Andes , upscale knitwear mailer House of Bruar’s 2009-2010 catalogue, and the autumn/winter editions from fair-trade fashion brand People Tree and apparel brand Weird Fish.

Peeks, which sells party and fundraising supplies, did include a special offer in its Christmas catalogue: a discount on early-bird orders. It didn’t call out the promotion on its cover, though, opting to feature it on the opening spread instead—a bit of a missed opportunity.--SC