Gail Kalinoski

Below is a comprehensive list of all the articles published in Catalog Success magazine in 2007. If you would like to view stories by issue date, click here. You can also use the Article Archive to search by keyword or topic. CATALOGER PROFILES Cover Stories Chinaberry: “Reinventing the Wheel” by Paul Miller, January After 5/Surf to Summit: “Kayaking and Cocktails” by Paul Miller, February Patagonia: “Shiny Happy People” by Matt Griffin, May Garnet Hill: “A Natural Issue” by Carolyn Heinze, June Fair Indigo: “Playing Fair” by Paul Miller, August The Nailco Group: “More Than Skin Deep” by Carolyn

My Twinn creates personalized, handcrafted dolls that lend themselves to gift-giving. So not surprisingly, the holiday season is its busiest and most lucrative time of the year. The company faces a time crunch, though, because its artisans use customer photos and information submitted by buyers to make doll heads that look like the little girls receiving them. “We make [the doll heads] one at a time. They’re not pre-ordered or mass-produced,” ex-plains My Twinn Vice President Craig Currie. So, it’s crucial for My Twinn to get the lion’s share of its holiday season orders early. To encourage customers to order earlier, it offers an incentive —

© Profile of Success, Catalog Success magazine, April 2007 Interview by Gail Kalinoski Catalog Success: When was the catalog established? David Lorsch: The company and the catalog were formed concurrently in 1989 with my fiancé and now wife, Cindy. Our first catalog order was Sept. 29, 1989. The order came from a dealer in Clovis, New Mexico. CS: How did the company get started? David: I was out of work. I had been working in national sales for a video accessory manufacturer. When I started thinking about what I could do, I realized there was a gap in the electronics accessory

BACKGROUND: “In the late ’80s, I realized there was a gap in the electronics accessory distribution market,” says David Lorsch, founder, president and CEO of DBL Distributing. “There were a few people in the Eastern U.S. that were growing the market via catalog and flier. But there was nobody in the West. Around the point I started my company in 1989, there was no distributor specializing in accessories to independent retailers west of St. Louis. I identified what I perceived to be a hole in the market. And luckily, I was right.” BIGGEST INITIAL CHALLENGE: Finding a customer. “I really started with

When a retailer suffers a data security breach, the results are far-reaching and include financial repercussion, loss of customer trust and damage to the brand. News accounts of high-profile retailers hit by credit account thefts have shown that marketers are vulnerable to such attacks and need to take strong measures to guard against them. Tim Odell, executive director of technology at SmartReply, a voice and mobile messaging solutions firm, says some retailers have been lax about data security and don’t realize the damage that follows when a breach occurs. One way to combat breaches is to hire hackers to attempt to penetrate your systems at

Some catalogers may think that CEM, customer experience management, is the same as CRM, customer relationship management. A new whitepaper from RightNow Technologies, a Bozeman, Mont.-based company that provides organizations with CRM and CEM solutions, notes that effective CRM should include CEM. The whitepaper defines customer experience as “the customer’s perception of interactions with a brand, from marketing communications to sale and service processes to the use of the product or service.” CEM manages those interactions to build the brand and produce long-term profits. The whitepaper notes that companies using CEM effectively are often the ones that achieve double-digit revenue and profit growth. Here