The first catalog I ever helped lay out was a Spiegel fall book in 1973. I was a junior copywriter, twenty-seven years old, and my job that month was to write nineteen captions for a page of women's wool blazers, each one no longer than forty-two characters because the art director, a man named Lou Petrocelli, had drawn the grid in pencil and refused to redraw it. I remember being told, in no uncertain terms, that the catalog was the store. The mailbox was the front door. Every word had to earn its space. Half a century later, I find myself watching the trade I worked in for fifty years come quietly back into fashion, and I have some thoughts about what that means for the people on the receiving end.
What a mail order catalog actually was, and still is
For readers who came of age before the smartphone, none of this needs explaining. A catalog arrived in the mailbox, you sat down with it after dinner, you dog-eared a few pages, and a week later you wrote a check or picked up the phone. For anyone who came up later, it may sound quaint, the way a rotary dial sounds quaint. But the mechanics matter, because the mechanics are why the format is showing up again.
A mail order catalog is a curated, printed selection of merchandise from a single seller, mailed to a list of households the seller believes will buy. The list is the asset. The book itself, the photography, the copy, the paper stock, the binding, the trim size, all of it is in service of the list. At Hanover House in the 1980s, where I was an art director, we used to say that a buyer's job was to fill the pages, and a circulation manager's job was to fill the mailbox. Both still apply.
The mailbox in 2026
Here is where I have to update my own assumptions. For most of the 2010s, the conventional wisdom in the trade was that print was finished. Spiegel folded its main book around the early 2000s and the brand limped along online for a while before going dark. Sears mailed its last Big Book back in 1993, which still surprises people. Plenty of houses I worked with simply stopped printing.
And yet, walk to the mailbox this spring and you will find, as I did last Tuesday, a Vermont Country Store book, a Plow & Hearth, a Lillian Vernon, and a slim seasonal from a kitchenware company I had never heard of, founded by two sisters in Wisconsin in 2022. The U.S. Postal Service is even running a Catalog Insights Promotion through 2025 and 2026 offering a ten percent postage discount on qualifying mailings, which is the kind of thing that doesn't happen unless the volume is rising.
Industry surveys I have read recently put the average household holding onto a catalog for about twenty days before tossing it. About forty-seven percent of recipients set the book aside to read later. Those numbers, frankly, would have been considered unremarkable in 1985. Today they are quoted as evidence of a comeback, which tells you how far the floor had fallen.
Why the format is back, in plain terms
Three reasons, none of them mysterious.
- Digital advertising got expensive. The cost of acquiring a customer through a Facebook or Google ad has roughly tripled, by some accounts, over the last decade. A catalog mailed to a well-built list now compares favorably on a cost-per-order basis, especially for higher-ticket merchandise.
- Inboxes are full and mailboxes are not. The average American gets dozens of promotional emails a day and almost none of them get read. A printed book has the table to itself.
- Print feels honest. A recent survey I came across, which I take with the usual grain of salt, found that seventy-one percent of consumers consider print catalogs more trustworthy than digital ads. Whether that is genuine sentiment or simply fatigue with online clutter, the effect on response rates is real.
How to get on the good lists
The most common question I get from old friends is how to bring more catalogs to their own mailbox without drowning in junk. A few practical points.
- Order something. List rentals are still the lifeblood of the trade, and active buyers are the most rented names. One purchase from a reputable house and you will be in a dozen related books inside six months. Often more than you wanted.
- Use the catalog request forms. Most of the surviving houses, including Montgomery Ward (which is now an online operation owned by Colony Brands but still mails its book), Ginny's, Current Catalog, Oriental Trading, and Independent Living, have a request form on the website. Fill it out honestly. Ask for what interests you and skip what doesn't.
- Go through a portal site. Catalogs.com, where this article lives, exists precisely so that a shopper can browse hundreds of catalogs by category in one place. It saves the trouble of remembering the name of that gardening book your sister-in-law mentioned at Thanksgiving.
- If something is overwhelming you, the Direct Marketing Association still runs DMAchoice, which lets you reduce mail from member companies. It is not a complete cure, but it helps.
What's still around, what's gone
This is the part that gets me a little wistful. Spiegel, where I started, is gone in any meaningful sense. The Sears Big Book has been gone for over thirty years, though Sears.com is technically still open. Hanover Direct, the company that absorbed Hanover House, was eventually broken up and most of its imprints were sold off. Lillian Vernon was bought and sold and bought again and is still mailing. Harry & David, which was always more of a gift book than a general merchant, is alive and well under 1-800-Flowers ownership. Vermont Country Store remains family-owned and to my eye still produces one of the best-edited books in the country.
A few houses I worked with have simply gone quiet without any formal announcement, the way old businesses sometimes do. When I cannot find a current website or a recent mailing, I assume they have folded their tent, but I try not to write the obituary in print. I have been wrong before.
For the catalog shopper of a certain age
If you are reading this, odds are you remember when the Sears Wish Book showed up in October and the entire family negotiated over which page got dog-eared first. That ritual is mostly gone, but the underlying pleasure, the sit-down-with-coffee, mark-the-pages, take-your-time pleasure, is exactly what the format is built for. It rewards patience, which is in short supply elsewhere.
My advice, after fifty years in the business and five years out of it, is this: pick three or four catalogs you actually like, request them, buy from them when they earn it, and let the rest go. A small stack of well-edited books on the kitchen counter is a perfectly modern way to shop, and it always was. The format never really needed reinvention. It just needed the rest of the world to remember why it worked.
