One Step Ahead

In today’s hotly competitive retail marketplace, private-label products let catalogers set themselves apart from other merchants. “You can gain a competitive advantage if you’re smart about your product development,” asserts Karen Scott, founder of One Step Ahead and Leaps and Bounds, two catalogs of children’s merchandise. For Scott, that meant coming up with some new and original product concepts and getting them to market before the big retail chains. “The mass merchants have entered our market,” she says. “They’ve learned to copy goods and sell them cheaply. By designing some of our own products, it gives us back our competitive edge.”

Why she started a catalog: When Karen Scott was expecting her second child, she spent a day sorting through her first child’s baby things to see what to keep and what to give away. She realized how many of those old baby products she didn’t want. Scott had an epiphany of sorts: Maybe moms like her needed someone to do the comparative shopping for them so they wouldn’t end up with useless items. Self-guided market research directed her to other new moms and confirmed her hunch that this was a business opportunity. Products she sells: infants’ and children’s merchandise such as apparel, bedding and