Our sixth-annual ranking of the year’s leading catalogers as measured by housefile growth rates

Companies of all sorts can quantify their value in numerous tangible ways, from sales volume to store counts to merchandise value and so forth. For catalogers and multichannel marketers who rely primarly on the catalog/online/direct element of their businesses, it's all about growing the housefile. If a multichannel marketer is adding new customers at a rapid clip, that's a winning team you want to be a part of.

Launched in 2003, the Catalog Success 200 has always made housefile growth its raison d'etre. So here follows our sixth annual exclusive ranking of U.S.-based catalogers (or U.S.-based catalog units of foreign companies) with the fastest recent housefile growth rates. Here’s your guide to the companies that have added the most new customers to their databases over the past 12-month period. By viewing catalogers in this metric, you can get a good idea of the 200 healthiest multichannel merchants for calendar year 2007.

On these pages, you’ll find more than 40 catalogs that sell apparel, shoes or accessories. Other product categories that placed large numbers of catalogers include food gifts, toys and novelties, general merchandise, CDs, DVDs and videos, furniture, and equestrian supplies.

And, perhaps not surprisingly, 15 B-to-B catalogers make the chart, reflecting the success of B-to-B business models that rely on finding fewer, but larger, customers compared to B-to-C.

How This Works
The Catalog Success 200 contains those catalogers that have rented out their housefiles during the past two years. Among them, it contains just those mailers that record their 12-month housefile numbers on both their most recent and prior datacards. There are likely others out there. But without the numbers for the market to view, they can’t be charted.

Our chart doesn’t account for seasonality because our data partner, Marketing INFORMATION Network®, independently verifies this data with list owners (the catalogers themselves) on a rotating basis throughout the year. So please note the dates in the columns marked “Recent 12-mth. housefile and month confirmed” and “Previous 12-mth. housefile and month confirmed.”

The “confirmed by” dates can vary by cataloger. So please keep that in mind when comparing the catalogs in the chart.
—Paul Miller, Editor-in-Chief

* To view the chart as a PDF, click here or on the CS 200 link in the upper-right corner of this page.