Being a Catalog CEO is Hazardous Duty
With catalog postage costs ranging from 4 percent to 20 percent of revenues, rapid adjustments to postal rates can have a punishing impact on catalog marketers. Eventually the catalog industry will realize it’s the only major player in the postal rate-making game without a horse in the race. Every other major mailer group has a focused advocate lobbying for its interests. As a major trade journal recently remarked, it’s now “every mailing class for itself” in a post-reform environment. Who’s watching out for the estimated 20,000 catalogers who mail nearly 20 billion pieces of mail?
If you’re a top 500 cataloger — more than $50 million in sales — you have a responsibility to work collaboratively with your catalog brethren to address the environmental factors that’ll determine your business’s, and your own, future.
Hamilton Davison is executive director of the American Catalog Mailers Association. He has spent nearly 20 years in postal policy. You can reach him at (401) 529-8183 or hdavison@catalogmailers.org.
Hamilton Davison has been the President & Executive Director of the American Catalog Mailers Association (ACMA) since its founding in April 2007. Prior to this, he consulted for an educational services start-up, created a specialty card and gift retail chain and grew it to more than 150 stores, was CEO of the oldest and third-largest greeting card publisher and manufacturer, and started an oil and gas exploration business. Mr. Davison’s involvement in postal affairs started in 1992 with his service on the Greeting Card Association’s postal affairs committee. He became chair and directed the litigation and witness team charged with protecting the GCA subclass against virtually every other mailer, helping bring his association from its nadir (losing a rate case appeal at the Supreme Court) to an established force in postal policy that was routinely consulted on all important postal policy issues. He championed and sold the Forever Stamp to many including proposing it to the Chairman of the Board of Governors.
