VWR International: Synergy in Action

We are the largest store in the world doing an exclusive mail order business. We occupy 25 acres of floor space, employ 2,000 clerks and have 2,000,000 customers who buy from us by mail. From 15,000 to 35,000 orders and letters come to us daily. Our average daily shipments are: 2,500 packages by freight, 4,000 by express and 6,500 by mail—a total of 13,000 packages daily. ... We have just issued a new catalogue—No. 68—the largest, finest and most complete book of its kind ever published. It contains 1,200 pages, 17,000 pictures. It gives wholesale prices and truthful descriptions of 70,000 things.

—Montgomery Ward Catalog, November 1900

At the end of the 19th century, Sears and Montgomery Ward were locked in fierce competition to put an entire department store on the kitchen shelf of every consumer in America.

No matter where in this vast country you were, you could hand an order to your local letter carrier and expect to receive anything from a pair of socks to a horse-drawn buggy by return post.

Plumbers, farmers, building contractors, carpenters—all could get the needed tools of their trade from Sears or Ward’s. These behemoths in print were treasured by consumers and businesspeople as gateways to a better life. Indeed, in rural settings they were windows on the modern world.

Today the idea of a permanent catalog—something that is kept, referred to and discarded only after the new edition arrives—has gone the way of the buggy whip and pinch-waist corset.

Or has it? While Sears and Ward’s catered to consumers, farmers and tradespeople, VWR International offers one-stop shopping for scientific research laboratories. Prowl through its North American 2,600-page, hardcover catalog, and you can find cabinetry and shelving, microscopes, incubators, chemicals, recorders, wipers, centrifuge tubes, pipet tips, and safety equipment. Price points range from $6.60 for a pack of 100 stoppers to $25,000 for a freeze dryer. In fact, buyers can equip an entire facility with products from VWR.

With 250,000 customers worldwide and 5,000 suppliers, VWR breaks all the rules of current catalog marketing and harks back to the 19th-century model devised by Sears and Montgomery Ward—with a lot of help from a large sales force, more than 400 customer contact reps, space advertising, the Web and a sanity-saving content management system from Pindar Systems.

An Extraordinary Marketing Communications Team

VWR Marketing Communications is a hard-working team of talented writers, designers and project coordinators. VWR’s business goal is to be the most successful distributor of products for people engaged in science.

VWR processes more than 50,000 order lines daily. The marketing communications team creates and distributes a mountain of promotional material, including vertical catalogs for specific scientific disciplines and a quarterly newsletter that has a section proclaiming “WHAT’S HOT!” and offering premiums, such as coffee mugs. Every 24 to 30 months the large General Catalog is revised and published—a task you could liken to painting the Golden Gate Bridge. The painters start at one end and two years later, finish at the other end, whereupon they go back and do it all over again.

Lynn Homann, the marketing communications team leader, came to VWR more than 10 years ago as writer/editor. When the catalog morphed from pure print to database publishing, Homann was part of the transition team. Today she is the director of marketing communications and master juggler of what may be one of the most complex business models in all of direct marketing.

At Homann’s side is Publications Manager Liz Sipera, who is responsible for all product literature including the quarterly tabloid, vertical catalogs and the general catalog, with the Web site product content thrown in.

Robin Filiaggi, advertising and promotion specialist, is in charge of the multichannel promotion and advertising strategy, including press releases, promoting the launch of new products and working with the advertising agency to create and monitor space ads. Filiaggi works with product managers to ensure their messages are correctly positioned and reach the right audiences. She focuses on developing effective promotions, and generates the occasional fun and filigree so rare in the buttoned-up world of science.

Ellen Gualtieri, marketing communications services manager, oversees programs that provide support and service to the sales organization, including an online ordering service for customized sales literature, an internal online company store for branded promotional products, and distribution of marketing materials using the corporate mailing list and sales lead program.

For the team, tasks often overlap. As a result, each is completely aware of what the others are doing, making sure the skids are greased, deadlines met and material out on time and in the right hands. This unique team is like the four cylinders of a finely tuned automobile engine firing in precise sequence. The overall challenge is to tie together all the marketing communications elements—customers, reps, catalogs and the Web.

The General Catalog: The Whopper

As noted, VWR produces a hardcover book bigger than a one-volume, unabridged dictionary. On the inside front cover is a headline, “Ordering from VWR couldn’t be easier,” followed by the 800 phone number, URL and four large color logos of Visa, MasterCard, American Express and Discover. An old rule states that using credit card logos rather than spelling them out in writing can increase response 5 percent or more.

On the right-hand page is the table of contents, starting with Air Monitors and ending with Wipers. Nothing extensive here, just the main categories. Certain specialty sections are color-coded—chemicals (red), chromatography (green), safety (purple). The pages of these sections have a matching color-coded stripe down the edges, visible when the book is closed, thus giving the user easy and immediate access. For customers who aren’t inclined to browse and who know precisely what they want, a 200-page section containing indices is at the back. SKUs are indexed twice: by VWR catalog numbers and by manufacturers’ own numbers. And, of course, users can access a massive alphabetical index.

At the top outside of each page is the category (e.g., Safety, Balances) and the page number in bold, 14-point sans serif type. Each page is a model of textbook-correct catalog design. Most products are presented with a headline, illustration and descriptive copy block followed by a chart of specifications and ordering information. At the top of every spread are the URL and 800 number.

Products that require more explanation or detail are given them. For example, the furniture section details VWR’s complete furniture program, outlining its features and benefits to the customer. Nothing is left to chance. VWR offers a design team to work with the client on renovations, additions or new facilities. And expert installation is offered by a national network of professional, skilled craftspeople who will meet deadlines any time, anywhere. In short, the VWR catalog is a breeze to navigate, endlessly helpful and easy to order from—a model of user friendliness.

Throughout the catalog, cross-references (example below) are placed to encourage shoppers to move around the book. They suggest related products and services.

Of the more than 46,000 SKUs represented in the catalog, about 10,000 are VWR’s own branded products. For example, virtually all thermometers are branded by VWR or made for them. Not only is a special catalog produced that’s devoted to these house-brand products, but many of these items appear throughout the book in an effort to cross-sell.

The Act of Creation

Publishing such a massive work requires Herculean coordination. The supplier forwards relevant copy and price changes—or new product information and illustrations—to the VWR product manager, who then works with the VWR technical writers and designers to craft the presentation. Often times the suppliers work directly with the VWR technical writers.

Copy is then married to design and entered into the Pindar content management system. Pindar acts as a kind of electronic vault that stores all copy and design for each product in a central library. If, for example, the Life Sciences group wants to publish a vertical catalog that excerpts specific products from the main catalog, these can be extracted, the copy versioned so it speaks to that particular market segment, paginated and printed with relative ease. If a price change occurs, it’s entered once, and it ripples through the entire system—catalog pages and Web pages.

Hand-delivered Catalogs

Once the catalog is ready to ship, new challenges arise. At 2,600 pages and weighing 8 pounds, the catalog can be expensive to mail. VWR addresses this problem by continuously updating its corporate database of mail list names taken from various sources (e.g., rep input, Web and phone requests, BRCs). All get processed on a daily basis. Moreover, incorrect addresses and deleted names are kept separate and used to scrub against future mailings to ensure they don’t “sneak” back onto the mail list.

In addition, reps proactively manage their mail lists monthly and are encouraged to make updates and qualify sales leads. And of course, before any large mailing, reps scrutinize their lists to selectively identify and qualify potential catalog recipients.

In many cases, the sales reps not only call on their customers in the labs and purchasing offices, but also visit the mailroom managers to alert them that the catalog will arrive. Often arrangements are made to ship the catalogs to a specific holding area. When they arrive, the sales rep will show up with a luggage cart, unpack the cartons and physically go from lab to lab presenting the new catalog to customers and users.

While VWR’s marketing communications team likes to “touch” its customers four times a year with a quarterly tabloid newsletter plus special promotions and vertical catalogs, the delivery of the big book by the sales rep can be a major event. It gives them the chance to present the catalog to customers, answer questions and give them a free product with high perceived value. On these visits, the rep inscribes his or her name, phone number and customer account number on the inside front cover.

The task of Gualtieri’s team is to coordinate the shipping of catalogs with the reps’ travel schedules, a logistical challenge when you have hundreds of reps and 125,000 customers in North American alone. In their travels, sales reps often are accompanied by specialists who apprise customers of new developments and help them make correct marketing decisions in areas such as life science, safety, furniture, chemicals and more. All of this adds up to extremely effective customer care.

At the same time, a serious effort is made to retrieve undelivered books. A typical paper catalog that’s gone through the postal system twice—out and back—is too dog-eared to mail again. But the VWR hardcover book travels in a protective carton, so it will be in mint condition wherever it arrives. A total of 325,000 copies are printed in six versions, with 255,000 earmarked for the United States.

Operations

Although VWR has almost 2.7 million square feet of distribution space, some products are drop-shipped directly from the manufacturer. For example, suppliers ship extremely delicate instruments and highly complex products that should be accompanied by a technician from the manufacturer.

Analysis: A big part of the marketing communication team’s responsibility is to analyze results of catalog campaigns. Precise correlation of sales-to-source is difficult because of the multichannel marketing—catalog, Web, newsletters and special promotions, and an active field force. Square-inch analysis is used, and if a product falls below profitability, its viability is questioned. The item may be removed from the catalog but retained on the Web site.

Prospecting: Having a large sales force that keeps in personal touch with customers is valuable. Leads are qualified before they’re added to the VWR mail list. In addition, VWR exhibits at major scientific trade shows and advertises in relevant magazines and journals.

While the VWR tome appears to flout the current rules of cataloging by reverting to the 19th-century model, in fact today’s rules still are followed. Copy, design, inventory management, use of special offers, splashy announcements of new products, slicing and dicing the housefile to create specific catalogs and offers to vertical segments—all are practiced by VWR. In short, this company is an ideal model for 21st-century b-to-b catalog marketing.

About VWR International
Headquarters: West Chester, PA
Type of products sold: Scientific supplies, equipment and chemicals
Annual sales: $2.5 billion
Associates: 6,000
Customers: 250,000 worldwide
Suppliers: 5,000
Distribution space: 2.673 million square feet
Catalog pages: 2,600, hard-cover
Number of SKUs: 46,000+
Catalog printer: R.R. Donnelley

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From 1849 to Today

In 1849, a man named John Taylor left New York for Sacramento, CA, and soon after started John Taylor Co., Druggist & Chemical Glassware.

After his retirement in 1901, the business was merged with F.W. Braun Co. Its proprietor, Fredrick Braun, was running a business serving the mining, assay and laboratory fields. The company withstood the San Francisco Earthquake of 1906, although all inventory was destroyed.

In 1908, Braun merged with two of his trusted employees Gustave Knecht and Richard Heiman to form Braun-Knecht-Heiman (B-K-H), which produced scientific equipment. Heiman outlived Braun and Knecht and steered the company through the World War II era and its wild economy.

George Van Waters and Nat Rogers, two Seattle entrepreneurs, had been B-K-H distributors since 1930. Their main business was buying and selling naval supplies, paints, raw materials and cotton linters. The duo acquired companies, including half ownership of Scientific Supplies Co. of Seattle. In 1956, Heiman, who had outlived his partner, retired and sold the company to Van Waters and Rogers.

In 1966, the Van Waters and Rogers Co. merged with Union Pacific to form VWR United Corp. In 1970, Will Scientific was acquired, which led to the creation of VWR Scientific. Since 1999, VWR has been a wholly owned subsidiary of Merck KGaA, Darmstadt, Germany. It was renamed VWR International in 2001. —D.H.