On February 25, 2015, the Harvard Business Review published an article entitled “Why the Print Catalog is Back in Style.” According to the article, the Great Recession caused retailers to examine their expenditures more closely. With the move to online sales and marketing, print media seemed like a waste… but times have changed. J. C. Penney’s recently announced that it is resurrecting its print catalog, reflecting the return of the print medium as an important sales and marketing tool. This holiday season, firms like Bloomingdales, Nordstrom, and Saks Fifth Avenue are sending more targeted and specialized catalogs. Meanwhile, Williams Sonoma has transitioned its catalog into a tremendous source of valuable content with the addition of recipes.

In early December, MSNBC interviewed Ledbury co-Founder and CEO Paul Trible. Ledbury is a vendor of luxury shirts that are designed to offer superior quality and fit. These shirts can be custom-fitted or sold off the rack for price points in excess of $100. Trible elaborates, “We started using the online channel like a lot of other brands about six years ago when there wasn’t as much chaos and competition. I thought we would be able to reach the $10 to $20 million mark through good PR, word of mouth, and digital media, but now we need to go out and find new customers. Like a lot of other companies, we are discovering that catalogs are a great way to attract quality customers.”

Trible continued, “For us, it’s about segmenting our audience and finding people who buy luxury shirts. We reach them in their homes with catalogs to see if we can get them to come back and buy. What we are finding is that catalog customers are buying better than e-commerce customers. In fact, a customer that we acquire via catalog typically buys 1.5 times better than an e-commerce customer that we acquire online.”