I have been asked some version of this question for forty-five years. A small business owner gets a quiet afternoon, looks around the showroom, and says to himself, maybe what we need is a catalog. In 1981, when I was a junior copywriter at Spiegel in Chicago, the answer was almost always yes, because the country was running on third-class mail and the math worked. In 2002, half my consulting clients were trying to figure out whether to put their book online or kill it. Today, in the spring of 2026, I find myself surprised to be writing what I am about to write, which is that the answer is yes again. Not the same yes it was in 1981, but yes all the same.
The original version of this article, written sometime in the early 2010s, laid out six kinds of business that ought to consider a direct marketing catalog. The framework still holds. What has changed is the world around it, and the math underneath it.
The numbers that brought print back
For a long stretch, roughly 2008 to about 2018, every direct mail conference I attended had the same melancholy feeling, the way a county fair feels in late September. The catalogs that survived the 2008 recession were holding on, but the trade press kept writing the obituary one paragraph at a time. Then a curious thing happened. The cost of online customer acquisition started climbing, hard, and the people who run the numbers at the Association of National Advertisers began publishing figures that made the digital crowd quiet down at the panel discussions.
The most recent ANA response rate work, drawn into 2025 reporting, puts direct mail to a house file at roughly a 4.4 percent response rate, against email's 0.12 percent. Catalogs specifically run higher than the average mail piece, in the neighborhood of ten percent on a house list. ROI to a house file lands in the area of 161 percent, which is the highest of any paid channel that body tracks. Total US direct mail volume actually rose through 2025, the first sustained climb most of us in this trade can remember in twenty years. I am not in the business of cheerleading for print, but the figures are the figures.
The six kinds of business, revisited
1. Your products are unique
This was true when Hanover House was selling specialty kitchen gadgets in 1985, and it is true now. The big box stores carry what moves on a planogram, and the algorithm at the large online marketplaces buries anything that does not have a five-figure ad budget behind it. A tightly merchandised catalog of, say, fifty unusual products in a clear category, sent four times a year to a well-built list, can still build a real business. The trick, the same trick the old Sharper Image and Lillian Vernon buyers understood, is editing. A catalog is not a website. You cannot put thirty thousand SKUs in the book, and you should not want to.
2. You can offer a better deal
The B2B angle here is, if anything, stronger now than it was when the original article was written. Office product catalogs in the Quill and Reliable Office Supplies tradition are still alive, still profitable, and have moved into hybrid print plus portal models. If you can move volume that the local distributor cannot, mail order is still the cleanest way to put your price in front of a purchasing manager who will keep your book in a drawer for eighteen months.
3. You show your product better in print
This is the one that has changed least and matters most. The four-color signature, well art-directed, on a heavy uncoated stock, still sells home furnishings, garden tools, apparel, and giftware in a way that a four-second TikTok cannot. Restoration Hardware and West Elm both quietly continued mailing books straight through the supposed death of catalogs, and neither company appears to be giving up the format. There is a reason for that. A catalog is the only format in which the customer holds your art direction in her hand for the thirty-some minutes she spends with the book, on average, according to recent industry survey work.
4. Your demographic is not online, or not comfortable there
The original article wrote about the elderly and the mobility-challenged. In 2026 that demographic has shifted but not vanished. There is a real segment of Americans over seventy who use a smartphone for texting their grandchildren and almost nothing else. They will, however, sit at the kitchen table on a Saturday morning with a catalog and a cup of coffee. If your product serves people over a certain age, ignore that channel at your peril.
5. Your demographic travels, or is too busy for stores
The 2010s version of this paragraph mentioned CDs, which dates the original. The current version is simpler. A catalog still works in airports, in carpool lanes, in waiting rooms. So does its digital cousin. The interesting development of the last few years is that companies like ours at Catalogs.com have built dynamic digital catalog formats, the kind you can flip through on a tablet at thirty thousand feet, that bridge the print habit and the device. That hybrid is, I think, where the real growth is going to come from in the next five years.
6. Brick and mortar does not pencil out
Commercial real estate in most American downtowns is more uncertain in 2026 than it has been in my working life. Opening a second location is a serious capital decision, and the failure rate is not friendly. A catalog, mailed to a carefully built prospect file, can put your brand in a hundred thousand homes for less than the rent on a single 4,000-square-foot retail box. The math is not even close. It never really was.
What the original article did not say
A few practical things, from a man who has watched a lot of small companies make a lot of catalogs.
- Your list is the whole game. The book is the showroom, but the list is the lease. A bad list will kill a beautiful book. A great list will carry a mediocre one. Spend on the list before you spend on the photography.
- Plan for at least three drops before you read the data. One mailing tells you nothing. Three mailings, to the same audience, with disciplined source coding, will tell you almost everything you need to know.
- Mail and email belong together. The trade research now consistently shows that customers who receive both a catalog and a related email order at meaningfully higher rates than customers who receive either alone. Treat them as one program, not two.
- Postage is the silent line item. The USPS marketing mail rates have moved up sharply over the last three years. Build that escalation into your three-year plan, or you will be unhappy by year two.
So, is it time?
I started in this business in 1976. I helped produce a catalog in every economic environment a person could name, including the gas-line recession, the dot-com bust, the housing collapse, and the pandemic. There has been no period in any of those years when a well-targeted, well-edited, well-mailed catalog could not be made to work for the right kind of company. The book has changed, the printing has changed, the postage has changed, the economics around the digital alternatives have changed. The fundamental act, of putting a beautifully composed piece of paper in a customer's hand and trusting her good taste, has not. If your products are right and your list is right, then yes, it is time. It always was.
