It's in the Mail : Catalogues Cull Their Lists for Narrow but Profitable Niches

By CARLA LAZZARESCHI

March 21, 1992 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

In the beginning, there was just Lands’ End.

For more than a decade, this catalogue arrived in the mail packed with its own unique assortment of canvas luggage, flannel sheets and preppie-style sportswear for the entire family.

Now, the second generation of Lands’ End specialty catalogues is showing up: Lands’ End Kids, offering more of the same rugged casual clothing for the playground set, and Coming Home, a collection of linens and towels for the bed and bath.

Prompted by rising production and mailing costs and a slowdown in consumer spending, Lands’ End and a host of other specialty catalogue operators are issuing a rash of new and even more specialized books to take advantage of the hot new markets for children’s clothing, home furnishings, gardening equipment and other tightly edited merchandise collections. But these new catalogues are going only to a highly selective audience: potential customers most likely to want, need or buy the merchandise.

Fueling these moves is an exploding amount of computerized information about Americans’ demographics and shopping preferences that allows this growing number of catalogue operators--a group that also includes Talbots, Lillian Vernon, Horchow and Eddie Bauer--to pinpoint by name and address the most likely targets for their highly specialized new merchandise collections.

“Direct marketers can’t afford to print their books and just throw them out there, hoping that they get to the right people,” says Laura Christiana, editor of Catalog Age, a trade publication. “Mass mailings are becoming a thing of the past. What’s important now is offering more focused merchandise to a more targeted audience.”

The payoffs for the catalogue operators are already beginning to show up. According to the Direct Marketing Assn., last year American households and businesses received an estimated 13.4 billion catalogues, 200 million fewer than the year before. Although mailings declined for the first time in recent history, catalogue sales rose to an estimated $30 billion.

Among the 70 million catalogues mailed last year by Talbots, maker of traditional and conservative women’s and children’s clothing, were books containing its newer collections of dress-up togs for children and career outfits for women.

Earlier, Talbots had given both new collections trial runs in its mainstream catalogue, a book primarily aimed at middle-age women with traditional dressing styles. When the collections proved popular, they were given their own catalogues.

And those catalogues were sent first to the customers who had bought the merchandise when it first appeared, lists of names which have become among the most precious assets of mail-order companies.

“It’s very profitable if you can be precise enough,” says Ronald Ramseyer, Talbots’ senior vice president of marketing.

Lands’ End followed the same sequence with its children’s wear and home furnishings collections. “We want to leverage our lists of names to capture more of a consumer’s purchases,” says Michale Smith, vice president of the company’s Coming Home catalogue. “We’ve got these lists, so why not use them?”

But not all spinoffs have been successful. A few years ago, Lillian Vernon, who has operated a general gift catalogue for the past 40 years, launched At Home, a selection of home furnishings considerably more expensive than her moderately priced main collection. But the collection failed to find a home with her customers.

Vernon has been far more successful with Lillie’s Kids, a collection of toys and gifts for infants and children. The main reason for the success of one and the failure of the other: customer names. “We have a huge database on customers who have bought items for kids from our main book, and we can capitalize on it,” Vernon says. “We didn’t have that with At Home.”

Spiegel, the nation’s third-largest catalogue operator behind only Sears, Roebuck & Co. and J. C. Penney, is moving in the same direction. Earlier this month, the company published its new Shops catalogue, a compilation of 13 separate merchandise collections ranging from sportswear plastered with professional team logos to inexpensive, assemble-it-yourself Scandinavian-style furniture.

“This is an intermediate step to let us get more information about our shoppers,” acknowledges a company spokesman. “At the end of the experiment, we’ll know whether we have merchandise that should be spun off into a separate catalogue, kept in the main book or just plain dropped.”

CATALOGUE SHOPPING INCREASES

In the past decade, the nation’s catalogue retailers have increased their push at Americans’ shopping dollars:

CATALOGUES MAILED

Estimated, in billions

1983: 8.7

1984: 10.3

1985: 11.1

1986: 11.8

1987: 12.8

1988: 13.3

1989: 13.4

1990: 13.6