Q&A: Redcats on Web Marketing and the Importance of Unique Product Design
Catalog Success: How do you plan on supporting it this year?
EF: We’ll start by doing normal e-marketing. We’ll optimize it for search and push more through paid search, as well as through our affiliate marketing channels.
Catalog Success: How will your implementation of multichannel marketing strategies change this year?
EF: We aren’t changing it, but we are maturing it. For us, it’s in-depth changes throughout the organization; we’re strengthening the organization by putting in place people with greater experience. We did launch a new Web platform in 2006, which by the end of the first quarter of this year will be rolled out to all of our sites. We’ll keep on developing that and bring in more talent for our Internet marketing efforts.
Catalog Success: What challenges do you face as a multititle cataloger in the coming year?
EF: Wth the overall retail environment in the United States becoming more competitive, each of our brands’ identities needs to be unique with more unique products. It’s really about product design and sourcing, when you’re talking about being competitive on a national front.
Catalog Success: In which ways are you developing more unique products?
EF: It’s a combination of increasing our internal design abilities and effectively sourcing the manufacture of those designs.
Catalog Success: Have you increased the size of your design staff internally?
EF: Yes. We doubled our design staff in 2006, and we’ll likely double it again in 2007.
Catalog Success: Are there actions catalogers should take this year as a result of the economic unpredictability you previously mentioned?
EF: I can’t speak for all catalogers, but as an apparel merchant, the unpredictability pushes us to be shorter in our lead times and shorter in our stock coverage to accelerate product rotation. That’s the first move I’d recommend. Secondly, at the industry level, we need to talk more with the government and the USPS to make them realize they’re damaging the industry with these increases. And there are lots of jobs at stake.
