Order Fulfillment

Catalogers’ Updates PetSmart: The multichannel pet supplies retailer in late April sold its State Line Tack equine assets to PetsUnited, a holding company for a Web-based marketer of pet and equine products, including Dog.com, Fish.com and Horse.com. PetsUnited plans to move the State Line Tack online and catalog business from Brockport, N.Y., to its Hazelton, Pa., facility by July. Cutter & Buck: This apparel cataloger/designer in April agreed to be acquired by the Sweden-based New Wave Group AB, a designer/marketer of assorted apparel lines for the corporate promotional and consumer retail markets in Europe. Under New Wave Group’s ownership, Cutter & Buck

Operations and fulfillment “is about people, not systems,” began Bruce Breckbill, vice president of sales for Lehman’s, a Kidron, Ohio-based cataloger of non-electric appliances and household goods, during a session at last week’s National Conference on Operations & Fulfillment in Schauburg, Ill. “Think of it this way: Good people can overcome and modify bad systems sometimes, but good systems with bad people [are] crap.” Breckbill’s presentation focused on four critical areas for O&F managers: * getting the right people, * understanding employees, * making them feel valued and, * fostering self-awareness. 1. “Getting the right people should be simple, but of course, it isn’t,” he said. “The key is

In a call-center context, successful upselling represents an important revenue stream, but not every call center is maximizing its upselling potential. Penny Reynolds, founding partner of the Call Center School, a training organization based in Lebanon, Tenn., discussed how to boost upselling revenue at last week’s National Conference on Operations & Fulfillment in Schaumburg, Ill., during her presentation, “From Order-Taking to Upselling: A Plan for Increasing Phone Order Revenues.” “At the heart of the plan,” she said, “is taking your call center out of an order-taking mode into a sales mode.” She offered the following tips: * Find the right people. Candidates should be interviewed and

Published rates have spiked throughout the parcel industry, and will impact the bottom line of any cataloger who ships goods through any of the major parcel carriers. But according to Tim Sailor, founder/president of Long Beach, Calif.-based Navigo Consulting Group, the impact doesn’t have to be negative. Despite recent rate hikes, catalog/multichannel shippers still can cut good deals if they play their cards right. “Shippers don’t have the advantage now, since carriers are incentivized to sell their services at the highest possible cost,” Sailor said during a session at last week’s National Conference on Operations & Fulfillment in Schaumburg, Ill. Recent rate

Sometimes after a meeting or a difficult interaction we think, “What a disaster!” Sadly, there have been many recent disasters, real ones, that have put families, businesses and communities at risk or out of commission. Most people avoid the topic of disaster planning like the plague — but it’s the plague that might be coming. An AT&T survey on disaster planning found that, on average, more than 30 percent of U.S. companies have no disaster recovery plan at all. What’s more, of the companies surveyed, more than 20 percent have neither updated nor tested their plans during the previous year, and more than

BACKGROUND: A trained CPA Liz Plotnick-Snay will soon enter her 12th holiday season with the Delaware, Ohio-based Gooseberry Patch catalog, a company started in 1984 by her next-door neighbors JoAnn Martin and Vickie Hutchins. The two working moms — JoAnn was a teacher, Vickie a flight attendant — shared a love of collecting antiques, gardening and country decorating. As their children grew, so did Gooseberry Patch and they eventually moved the business to a building large enough to house their kitchen and home décor products, gourmet foods, cookbooks, calendars and organizers. The Gooseberry Patch catalog is filled with hand-illustrations of its products. It also

TORONTO — For a good many years, I’ve periodically covered the Canadian catalog/direct/multichannel market — all, of course, from a U.S. perspective. Dating back to the early 1990s, I reported on catalogers’ experiences in expanding into Canada, usually focusing on brand-new efforts. More often than not, the results looked encouraging, the outlook appeared great. Most surveys showed that Canada was the number 1 logical choice for international expansion among catalogers. Yet, here we are in 2007, and finding catalogers that do any sort of truly significant business in Canada is just about as challenging as getting a ticket to a Stanley Cup playoff hockey

Upselling, the Multichannel Way It’s Time to Master the Phone/Online Upsell By Liz Kislik Since the 1980s, when the majority of catalog orders began shifting from mail orders to the telephone, it’s become standard practice to not just take phone orders efficiently, but also to incorporate the upsell as a regular part of call center operations. But it’s 2007, and the typical catalog order isn’t necessarily over the phone anymore. Consider this scenario: Your customer calls to place an order and everything in the process goes smoothly. Your order taker follows standard practice and offers one or more upsells. In the classic

Head: Lillian Vernon: Back to the Future Lillian Vernon’s year-plus road to recovery has seen a mix of return-to-roots and get-with-the-times changes. Many have worked, as president/CEO Mike Muoio reports. Here are three additional improvements the company has made: 1. Change the catalog size to preserve the brand. In 2004, Lillian Vernon changed the trim size of its catalog from its traditional 8-inch-by-8-inch format to an 8.5-inch-by-11-inch size. But the change had almost no impact on sales, and since the brand had been associated with 8-inch-by-8-inch books for more than 40 years, Muoio and his team reverted back to the old format last October. “People recognize

Having topped out at $287 million nearly six years ago, Lillian Vernon’s sales have been falling ever since; it’s expected to finish out its fiscal year at about $170 million. But the bleeding could stop soon. A public company until 2003, the general mer-chandise cataloger was sold to investment conglomerate Direct Holdings, led by media company Zelnick Media. But despite an aggressive game plan to broaden Lillian Vernon’s reach, Direct Holdings’ initiatives largely backfired. Direct Holdings bailed out in May 2006 and sold Lillian Vernon to investment firm Sun Capital Partners, which installed former Miles Kimball CEO Mike Muoio to turn the company