FREEPORT, Maine – L.L. Bean projects that its online sales will overtake its catalog business within two years. But don’t expect any trees to be spared in the process.
The company has no plans to scale back its mailings of 200 million catalogs a year. Nor do many other mail-order companies that are flooding mailboxes this holiday season. The number of catalogs shipped to homes and businesses has held steady despite online competition, and actually grew in 2003.
“People who were caught up in Web mania thought it would supplant the catalog,” said Madison Riley of Kurt Salmon Associates, a retail consulting firm. “That has not come true, and I don’t think it will ever come true.”
In what’s known as a multichannel retailing world, catalogs are an important marketing tool for driving shoppers to other channels. Big retailers like L.L. Bean are active in at least three channels: stores, e-commerce and catalogs.
Just five or six years ago, analysts were predicting the Internet would render catalogs obsolete. But catalogs survived even as Internet sales have grown at a faster pace.
Internet sales are projected to rise 27 percent to $52 billion this year, while catalog sales are projected to grow 6.7 percent to $143 billion, said Amy Blankenship of the Direct Marketing Association, a New York-based trade group.
L.L. Bean once believed online sales would lessen its reliance on printed catalogs. But the company found that the two were intertwined, with catalogs giving a significant boost to Web site traffic and shoppers freely switching between the channels, said Steve Fuller, Bean’s marketing chief.
“One of the mistakes people made was in thinking of the channels as discrete, but it’s the same households. Some days they call, some days they order from the Web site, some days they drive to the store,” he said.
Sales dropped when Lands’ End cut back on the catalogs it sent out in 1999, so the company decided to boost mailings the following year, according to the Print E-business Report published by the Printing Industries of America.
A Lands’ End spokesman declined to release catalog numbers. The E-Business Report says Lands’ End distributed 270 million catalogs last year.
Associated Press
Major retailers continue to produce catalogs even though more purchases are being made online.
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