Know-How Exchange : Strategy

Your questions are all researchable. I think you probably need to develop your marketing and business plans to see how much you'll have to invest to get this off the ground, how long it will take to payout, and what the business is likely to look like once you reach steady-state. (Will this be seasonal? Where will you start? What does the expansion plan look like? Etc.)

Once you have answered those questions, you'll know what the most important unknowns are, and you can develop a plan to research those questions by talking to prospective advertisers and customers/consumers.

To try to guess at those things is a bigger risk than I would recommend you take. Even with some expert input, I would not bank on having real answers without talking to some target advertisers and consumers. (The advertisers will also want to know what the consumers think of this idea.)

It's time to take your idea to the next level with a pro forma business plan, a rough marketing plan, and some sense of what investment will be required, how long you'll be at risk, and what the payoff looks like. Then you can extend that analysis to include the critical success factors and a related SWOT analysis.

If you're not willing to take this next step -- or pay for some outside expertise to take the step for you -- this will remain a "good idea" and not a serious business opportunity ... and it will be a "shoulda, coulda, woulda" for you.

Most catalogs are different than each other in regards to who they target/what their customer profile is. Each of the "affluent household" you send it to may be the target for some catalogs, but not others. You need to make sure the cost for your catalog is low enough that they get a decent cost for the subset of the whole list who are potential for them.

Also, many well established catalogs have spent a lot of time building and maintaining their customer list so that the least number of catalogs need to be sent out to gain the most sales. They do this to reduce costs. Will raise the bar of what you would have too produce cost-wise to be able to beat their costs for the same resulting sales.

Start by investigating your competition (below). Many of these are online-only for a reason:
https://www.catalogs.com/
https://www.gardenlist.com/
https://www.cataloglink.com/
https://www.catalogcentral.com/
https://www.amazon.com/Catalog-Catalogs-VI-Mail-Order-Directory/dp/18906270...

I'm not in the catalog business and never had been. So I may be unqualified to answer this but... as a marketer this seems to fly in the face of all of the current trends.

Affluent consumers are more likely to be online than others. Print advertising has nearly died during this recession. Why would someone wish to look through a large unwieldy catalog with duplications from different vendors when it could be done much more easily and quickly online? A large paper catalog isn't "green" so will upset some of the intended recipients.

And in this very lively forum many of the questions get dozens of answers quickly but this question has languished for several days with only a handful.

Frankly, I really don't think that it is a good idea, and I think most of the other active participants have avoided responding to you because of the desire to avoid this point. Basically, the time for catalogs has past. Keep thinking and come up with a better idea that leverages current technology to compete effectively.

Chris Kieff

My fuzzy memory tells me this was done some 10+ years ago. I remember getting precisely this piece. It may have even had a card you could send in with the catalogs marked that you wished to receive.

Keep thinking!

CVN