Hi, this is Frank Romano from WhatTheyThink.com. Welcome back to another episode. Well, the other day, I got the Restoration Hardware Catalogue in the mail; an absolutely beautiful piece of printing. I mean, every page is absolutely gorgeous. Now, it weighs a ton. I mean, mailing this thing had to cost them a small fortune.

But going through here, it made me want to buy some of their stuff. Well, the next thing I did was to go to their webpage. And everything you want is there, and more. Not only can you look at the item, but you can actually walk around it, you can enlarge it, you can get more information about it. And I thought – and by the way, the iPad here, even with the cover on it, weighs less than the printed catalogue. And you say, well eventually, they’ll just do this.

And why would they even want to do this? Because this made me want to do this. I don’t sit there every day and say, I think I’ll go to the Restoration Hardware website. It doesn’t work that way. Normally, you have to give me a reason to do that. Now, one reason, of course, is you sent me a beautiful catalogue. And, of course, there’s so much in here it got me interested in several things. However, maybe they didn’t need to do this; maybe they could use direct mail in some way with a smaller piece. I’m seeing that now with Crate and Barrel. I get more smaller catalogues rather than one very large catalogue. Of course, Ikea is something entirely different.

So we live in this new cross media age where we deal with print and we deal with pixels. And I don’t think it’s going to change. I think it’s going to stay that way. We’re not going to go entirely electronic and we’re not going to go back to entirely print. So you’re going to see print used as a motivator to get you to go to the website to order it and have it delivered or you might go to the store and pick it up, but what I’ve now discovered is, that many of the stores don’t inventory or stock a lot of the items that are in the catalogue. I mean, of all the things that are in this catalogue, half of them were not in the store.

And by the way, the stores are not that easy to get to because there aren’t that many of them. There was one in Boston on Boyleston Street, they closed it down, but now they’re opening into a larger location. There’s another one in Chestnut Hills, which is somewhat in the suburbs. So if I wanted to go to a Restoration Hardware, it would have been a trip, and when I got there I would have discovered that many of the larger items were not things that they had in inventory.

So, everything you want is on the website. And of course, that’s how most people are now ordering stuff. And then it gets shipped to them. By the way, the secret to all of this, this new age of marketing is shipping because it now has to get to you. So UPS is doing very well, Fed Ex is doing very well, etcetera. And now, as we enter the Christmas season, of course, everyone’s going to order stuff and try to get it delivered just in time to give as a present to someone.

So, this is the age. And I have to say, I give them credit for doing this. And I’m sure they didn’t just mail this to everyone. I have purchased from them before, which is probably why I got this particular catalogue. By the way, it has on here the closest store that I can get to and I’m sure they mailed this at the lowest possible rate, but again, the weight of it would mitigate very, very high charges.

This is where we’re going to go. And there’s absolutely no doubt that as we move forward, it’s going to be a partially print world and major electronic world.

And that’s my opinion.