Noelle Buoncristiano

Responsibilities: Tim Kiss oversees HoneyBaked Ham’s catalog, Web site and retail direct marketing operations. A great save: In 1999, HoneyBaked Ham relied for the first time on an outside vendor for product fulfillment. A glitch in the vendor’s process caused almost one-third of HoneyBaked Ham’s orders to go unfulfilled. Kiss took control of the situation, and he and his team convinced HoneyBaked Ham’s upper management to mail apology letters to customers in an attempt to retain as many of them as possible; and to mail prospect catalogs to offset the customers they couldn’t retain. “In the end, our catalog production and circulation budgets that

The company’s beginnings: After Greg Cooper left for college, his father, Hal, bought a health food store, Arizona Health Foods, in their hometown of Phoenix. After numerous phone conversations regarding the business’s future, Greg left school to help his father open more stores. Arizona Health Foods catalog, which sell dietary foods and supplements, started out of necessity, explains Cooper. Soon after the third store opened, major road construction — slated to last two years — virtually shut down store business. “I had to find a way to sell goods,” he notes. He tested the direct marketing channel by first running a small ad in

How the catalog began: “Founding a catalog was the last thing I ever expected to do,” says Donna Salyers, president of Fabulous-Furs. During several visits to New York in the 1980s, she realized she was one of few people without a full-length fur coat. “Instead of buying a coat that day, I was inspired to create a luxurious alternative.” After a year of laying the groundwork, Salyers’ brainchild — a catalog comprised of faux-fur products — became a rapid success. “When customers began calling from Hollywood, I knew we were on to something.” Grew up: Covington, KY Experience: For 16 years, Salyers

Problem: Before Ward’s Natural Science could expand its catalog operations to the Internet, it needed to develop a central repository for the accompanying data for its more than 18,000 products. Solution: Ward’s installed Pindar Systems’ content management system. Data for all products are now stored in one central database. Results: Ward’s launched an e-commerce site that has resulted in increased overall sales; employees have saved significant time in their data-management processes; and Ward’s was able to reduce two full-time positions. When executives at Ward’s Natural Science decided to expand the catalog operations to the Internet, they knew they’d need one central product database