A Chat With April’s Profile, Tim Burns, brand manager of Edmund Scientific

CS: What has Edmund Scientific done to combat the rising costs (postage, paper, printing) of running a catalog business today? For example, cut circulation or made changes to the catalog’s trim size?
TB: We do all that stuff. One of the things we have working for us is we’re part of a very large catalog company. VWR and its science education division are always in the top 10 of the Catalog 100. So we try to leverage all of those titles when we’re buying paper and we’re negotiating print contracts. And then we’re also looking at co-mailing opportunities. But the thing about Edmund is it’s a small, consumer catalog within a corporate B-to-B culture. So everybody understands cataloging, but we’re not a small, privately owned company. There are budgets that you have to adhere to. So when catalog costs go up like that, I really have to scramble to achieve my growth targets while maintaining the bottom line.

CS: What about the catalog industry appeals most to you?
TB: When I was a kid I used to love mail ordering. I’d collect Bazooka Joe comics and try to get the kazoo or the whistle that you got if you sent in a buck and 100 Bazooka Joe’s. So just the whole idea of mail order was always appealing to me.
And then on the merchandise side, I’m more of a gadget guy than I am a science guy, so I get my kicks on the merchandise side because I love gadgets and a lot of what Edmund Scientific sells falls into that category.

CS: Looking back over your career, what would be the biggest mistake you made? How did you recover from that mistake?
TB: This is interesting. People ask me that question and this is generally what I say: When I first came in, one of the things that made me nuts is that the copy always included dimensions — sizes: length, width, height, diameter,weight. One of the challenges I had was the density of the catalog. Edmund Scientific has typically always been a very dense catalog. So one of the things I did to make it more appealing, in the copy anyways, was to cut out all those dimensions so I could add more headline copy so the product pages sold a little bit harder.
I found out quickly that that was a mistake. Because our customers, that’s how they think. That’s one of the first things they want to know when they’re looking at something — how big it is. They think dimensionally. While I didn’t find that information particularly interesting or helpful, our customers considered it key. So I had to go back and fix all those products where I pulled the dimensions out of the copy.