The first time I held a Victorian Trading Co. catalog, I was sitting in a rented apartment in St. Louis sometime in the late 1990s, and I remember thinking that whoever art-directed the thing had spent serious money on photography. Lace edges on every page, hand-tinted greeting cards, jewelry shot on velvet pads in soft north light. It looked like a book you would pull off a shelf, not a piece of mail you would throw away. After fifty years in this trade, you learn quickly which catalogs were made by people who loved catalogs. Victorian Trading was one of those.
So when readers write in asking how to order a free Victorian Trading catalog in 2026, I have to give them an honest answer that has two halves to it. The short half is the request mechanics, which I will lay out below. The longer half is what has actually been happening with the company, because the catalog you might remember from a decade ago is not quite the catalog being printed today, if one is being printed at all.
A quick history, because the catalog is the company
Victorian Trading Co. was started in 1986 by Randy and Melissa Rolston, working out of an attic art studio in their old Tudor home. They originally called it Westport Card Company after a Kansas City neighborhood, and the early years were spent selling fine-art greeting cards by mail. They eventually moved the operation back to the Kansas City area and built it into the romantic, antique-leaning gift catalog that mail-order shoppers came to know.
By the early 2000s the catalog was a fixture in the gifts-and-collectibles category. The merchandise mix leaned heavily on antique reproductions, costume-quality jewelry, vintage-inspired clothing, calling cards, and the kind of small parlor items that had largely disappeared from American department stores by then. The company did go through a bankruptcy filing back in 2007, which was not unusual for the print-catalog business in that era, and it kept going afterward, headquartered out of Lenexa, Kansas.
How to request a Victorian Trading catalog (the official method)
For the better part of two decades, the standard way to request a free Victorian Trading catalog was through the company's own website. You would go to victoriantradingco.com/request_catalog.asp, fill in your first and last name, full mailing address, and email address, and submit the form. They are a US-only mailer, so a domestic shipping address was the one hard requirement. After that, the catalog typically arrived within ten to fourteen business days.
You can also browse and shop their listings at catalogs.com/catalog/victorian-trading, which has carried the brand for many years. Catalogs.com hosts a request form there as well, and historically that was an alternate route for getting added to the mailing list.
For phone orders, the long-standing customer service number was 844-724-2340, with hours of 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. Central, Monday through Saturday, and 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. on Sunday. The corporate mailing address was 15600 W. 99th St., Lenexa, KS 66219.
What is actually going on in 2026
Here is the part I will not pretty up. As of early 2026, Victorian Trading Co. has gone notably quiet. The retail outlet store in Lenexa closed sometime around 2022 and Yelp currently lists the storefront as closed. Reports through 2023 and into 2024 indicate the company stopped operating its physical retail locations and shifted toward what was described as a digital-only model, and various secondhand sources suggest the print catalog has not been mailed on its old schedule in some time. The main website, victoriantradingco.com, has not been reliably reachable for me as I write this.
What I have not seen is any clean public announcement saying the brand is permanently shuttered. The corporate entity still appears in business databases, and the trademark and customer list have real value to whoever ends up holding them. In direct mail, a quiet stretch is not always the same as a closed door. I have watched catalogs disappear for two and three years and then come back under new ownership with a slightly different mix and the same logo on the front. Whether Victorian Trading does that, I genuinely cannot promise.
So if you submit a catalog request today, treat it as a hopeful gesture more than a dependable transaction. It may arrive. It may not. If nothing shows up after a month, that is your answer for now.
What to do in the meantime
If you loved the Victorian Trading look and you want something to flip through this season, a few avenues are worth considering:
- Secondhand catalogs. Old issues turn up regularly on eBay and Etsy, sometimes for a couple of dollars. For collectors who liked a particular season's cover or a specific jewelry line, this is honestly a charming way to get the original printed piece back in your hands.
- The resale market for the merchandise itself. Many of the cast-metal jewelry pieces, the calling card cases, and the embroidered linens have held up beautifully and are listed on resale platforms by people clearing out collections.
- Other gifts and collectibles catalogs in the same lane. Through The Bradford Exchange, Potpourri, and Nature's Jewelry you can still get a printed catalog mailed to your house, and the photography and copy in those books is the closest current cousin to what Victorian Trading did so well.
A small thought to close on
I spent years writing copy for catalogs that no longer exist, and I can tell you the ones that endured did so because somebody in a back office cared about the comma in a caption and the weight of the paper stock. Victorian Trading was, for a long time, a catalog that cared. Whatever happens with the corporate side of it in the next year or two, the books they printed are still out there in attics and on coffee tables, and they are worth pulling out. If you can get a fresh one in the mail in 2026, consider it a small bonus. If not, the back issues will tell you most of the story all by themselves.
