Brands lean on catalogs, direct mail to build awareness and drive sales

When Kate Spade died in 2018, fashion brand Frances Valentine faced a decision: either shut down or keep going “without one of the founders and core creative minds behind the company,” its director of marketing Florencia Gilardoni told Retail Brew.

Frances Valentine chose the latter, and one way it bolstered its brand presence in the years following Spade's death was a seemingly retrograde form of marketing: catalogs and direct mail.

“When we went into catalogs, customers’ mailboxes were still pretty slim and nobody was doing direct mail,” Gilardoni said. “So we were able to get a huge share of the mailbox at that time, which was great for us.”

But the fashion brand isn’t alone in reappraising the value of catalogs. The age-old marketing technique is seeing a comeback, as retailers seek a more direct route to their customers due to increased competition and higher costs in digital marketing.

Polly Wong, president of Belardi Wong, a marketing agency that specializes in DTC brands and counts Frances Valentine among its customers, said she’s seen a “resurgence” in the practice. Her firm launched direct mail campaigns for at least 75 retailers per year for the last five years.

“The No. 1 reason is that most of our clients are very sophisticated marketers who realize that you can’t put all your eggs in one basket,” she said. “You can’t just rely on Google and Meta, right?”

Mixing it up: Why not? Cost is one reason. Wong said digital advertising has become more expensive over the past five years. “If you look at CPMs and CPCs, they’re up double digits,” she said. “And with the increase in the cost of digital marketing, somehow we landed where you can send four direct mail pieces to a targeted audience for the cost of one click.”

Gilardoni agreed that it’s “much easier” to target customers through direct mail right now, noting that the digital space is “much more regulated.”

She added that while costs are comparable, “on digital, you have to touch them many, many, many more times to be able to convert a customer,” while catalogs cost more per impression, but recipients tend to convert more quickly and reliably.

Curating your brand: Putting the economics aside, some companies like catalogs for their ability to curate their brand awareness in a high-quality marketing product with plenty of real estate for shaping consumers’ perceptions of their products.

“We didn’t see catalogs as being performance marketing,” Tom Nowak, chief marketing officer of Evereve, an online retailer that recently increased its tempo of direct mail catalogs, said. “I mean, there’s a performance to it, but it’s brand building and performance together.

He noted that Evereve relies on there being a kind of “coffee-table effect,” in which the catalog sits in customers’ homes for long periods of time and increases the possibility of a conversion.

Wong agreed that catalogs offer brands more “real estate to tell [their] story,” which is especially important when you’re trying to sell big-ticket items. One client with a lot of name recognition was determined not to be a great candidate for catalogs earlier on because it was mostly seeking volume sales on cheaper items such as socks. Now that it’s expanded its offerings, a catalog makes sense.

Less mail, smarter marketing: But is there enough real estate in customers’ mailboxes? As Gilardoni noted, the relative lack of competition was one advantage for Frances Valentine early on. If more brands return to direct mail, will the market become oversaturated?

Wong explained that marketing mail is still down overall compared to 10–15 years ago. “Nobody’s putting 200 million pieces a year like Eddie Bauer or 400 million pieces a year like Victoria’s Secret into the mail anymore,” she said.

“I hate junk mail, too,” she added, but “nobody perceives something like a catalog from Design Within Reach or Anthropologie as junk mail. It’s not the same thing.”