Alicia Orr Suman

Below, our annual index of all stories that appeared in Catalog Success throughout 2006, including this issue. (For easy reference, use the print screen.) Cataloger Profiles Cover Stories United Receptacle: “B-to-B Goes ‘Plug and Play’” by Alicia Orr Suman, January Reiman Publications: “The Synergistic Approach” by Alicia Orr Suman, February Boston Proper: “Billion-Dollar Opportunity” by Donna Loyle, May Spiegel Brands: “How Spiegel Recovered” by Paul Miller, June Smarthome Direct: “Growth the Smart Way” by Matt Griffin, July J&L Industrial Supply: “Shaped Up, Shipped Out” by Paul Miller, August Northern Safety Co.: “Safely Ahead of the Game” by Matt Griffin, September AmeriMark Direct: “Steady

By Alicia Orr Suman Cataloger/manufacturer United Receptacle supports its distribution sales network by creating and producing ready-to-use catalog layouts. You're flipping through a 500-page catalog for a major player in the janitorial and sanitation (jan/san) supplies market sector when you happen upon a section displaying waste containers. The catalog carries a host of well-known brands — including wastebaskets, can liners and other products made by United Receptacle. What you may not realize is that the other company's catalog that you're viewing actually features page layouts, photos and graphic designs produced not by that catalog, but by manufacturer and distributor United Receptacle. In

You’re flipping through a 500-page catalog for a major player in the janitorial and sanitation (jan/san) supplies market sector when you happen upon a section displaying waste containers. The catalog carries a host of well-known brands — including wastebaskets, can liners and other products made by United Receptacle. What you may not realize is that the other company’s catalog that you’re viewing actually features page layouts, photos and graphic designs produced not by that catalog, but by manufacturer and distributor United Receptacle. In addition to producing its own catalog each year to showcase its full product line, United Receptacle also helps many of

Ron Mis sees Galeton as the Dell Computer of the work gear industry: manufacturing and marketing its own product line to a loyal fan base. Mis, owner and president, likens Galeton’s business model to that of a true direct marketer, with cost advantages that a manufacturer enjoys when it sells its own goods direct to end-users. By selling direct in this way, Mis explains, it “makes our business truer to the original concept of a direct marketer than many who call themselves that today. Many who say they’re direct marketers actually are distributors of other manufacturers’ products,” he explains. Thus Massachusetts-based Galeton both

SMC Corp. of America needed a better way to present its complex product information — a method that would supplement its print catalogs and help customers, primarily engineers, do their jobs better. The world’s largest original equipment manufacturer of pneumatic components, SMC has been making and distributing actuators, valves, compressors, pumps and electrical components since 1959 and selling them to industrial customers worldwide. In the past, SMC annually produced a half million hard-copy catalogs for promoting its more than 8,900 basic products with millions of possible configurations. But not only were the print books expensive to create, maintain and distribute, they quickly became

If you think you’ve done all you can to improve the success rate of your list selections, you should stop reading right here. But if you suspect there’s more to be done, try database modeling. It’s a tool that can benefit nearly every catalog in terms of fine-tuning list selections — both on housefiles and outside lists. Here are five tactics to consider for boosting the effectiveness of modeling: Tactic #1: Recognize which kind of models can be most useful for you and will give you the biggest bang for the buck. According to Bryce Connors, director of the Consulting Services division for