Every December for years, my husband Dan would pretend not to notice the Figi's catalog when it landed in our mailbox in Madison, and every December he would still end up with a box of summer sausage and brick cheese under the tree. He grew up on a dairy farm in Sauk County, so a catalog headquartered up the road in Marshfield felt practically homemade. Readers ask, often, what became of it. The short version: the food catalog you remember is gone, and the home decor catalog that briefly carried the name is gone too. The Figi's name itself, however, is still printed on a small selection of holiday gift boxes sold through other retailers. The longer version is worth a few minutes.
A short history of Figi's, for the curious
According to a profile maintained by the Marshfield genealogy archive and corroborated by Wisconsin Cheese, John Figi started the business in 1944 as a one-man cheese mail-order operation. The story passed down is that he filled forty-three orders that first year, cutting wheels of aged Wisconsin cheddar on his kitchen table and sealing the pieces in cellophane warmed on the stove. Whether that detail is exact or burnished a bit by retelling, it captures the spirit of the thing: a federal cheese inspector with a Rolodex of dairy contacts and the patience to mail boxes one at a time.
From those forty-three orders, Figi's grew into one of the better-known direct-mail food gift companies in the country. By the 1980s and 1990s the flagship catalog, Figi's Gifts in Good Taste, was a fall-mailbox fixture across much of the upper Midwest and well beyond. The lineup leaned into what central Wisconsin does best: summer sausage, smoked cheddar, bricks of Colby, butter toffee, fruitcake, and the kind of holiday assortments designed to be shipped to a brother-in-law in another state and arrive intact.
The 2013 sale and the 2019 closure
It's worth noting that the timing of Figi's troubles roughly tracks the wider decline of mid-tier mail-order catalogs. In October 2013, Figi's was sold to Mason Companies, Inc., a long-running multi-catalog firm based in Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin. Local press at the time, including news8000.com and the Chippewa Herald, framed it as a rescue: Figi's was already losing money, and Mason had the warehouse, fulfillment, and call-center experience to try to right the ship.
That effort lasted a little over five years. On January 4, 2019, Mason Companies announced that the Figi's Gifts in Good Taste and Birchland Market gift catalogs would close by the end of March. Wisconsin Public Radio reported the closure cost roughly 276 jobs in central Wisconsin, with an initial 129 layoffs that day and another 147 to follow. The Hub City Times in Marshfield ran the same story under a stark headline, “Figi's to close.” Mason's statement at the time said it had spent “millions” trying to make the food gift business profitable and had also tried, without success, to find a buyer.
For anyone who saved a Figi's order form from 2018 hoping it might come back: it didn't, at least not in its original form.
Figi's Gallery: the brief second act
After the food catalog shut down, Mason Companies kept the Figi's name alive on a separate publication called Figi's Gallery: Home and Gifts. This was a different animal entirely — small electronics, jewelry, costume jewelry, kitchen gadgets, household decor, the sort of mid-priced goods Mason already specialized in through other catalogs in its portfolio. For several years it ran in parallel with Mason's other titles, and the catalog archive still has issues dated as recently as April 2024.
That April 2024 issue, however, appears to have been the last. Visiting figisgallery.com today redirects to Stoneberry, another Mason Companies brand that operates on a buy-now, pay-later model. So the home-and-gifts version of Figi's is now also closed; its customer base seems to have been folded into Stoneberry's. As of early 2026, there is no active Figi's-branded catalog being mailed.
So what is being sold under the Figi's name today?
This is the part that confuses people, and reasonably so. If you search for “Figi's gift basket” online you will still find products carrying the name — Figi's Holiday Classics, Figi's Wonderful Wisconsin, Figi's Chocolate Carousel, and so on — sold through major retailers including Bass Pro Shops, Walmart, Target, and Amazon. Mason Companies' corporate documents indicate that Figi's Wholesale, Inc. remains an active subsidiary, which is consistent with what we're seeing: the brand has been preserved as a wholesale label, with the products distributed through other people's storefronts rather than a direct-mail catalog of its own.
I have not been able to find a press release confirming exactly how that arrangement is structured, and I'd rather say so honestly than guess. What I can say is that the gift sets carry the Figi's mark, the meat-and-cheese assortments still emphasize the Wisconsin connection, and the items ship from third-party retailers rather than from a Figi's catalog of their own.
Practical alternatives for the meat-and-cheese gift box
If what you actually want is the Figi's experience — a gift box of upper-Midwest summer sausage, aged cheese, crackers, and a bit of confectionery, mailed for the holidays — several long-running catalogs cover that ground:
- The Swiss Colony, founded in Monroe, Wisconsin in 1926, is the closest in spirit. Cheese, sausage, petit fours, and a fruitcake or two; their holiday catalog is the most direct successor to what Figi's used to mail.
- Hickory Farms covers the Beef Stick ® and cheese assortment territory and is widely available at retail as well as by mail.
- Wisconsin Cheeseman and Mascot Pecan appear in similar searches and ship comparable assortments.
- Priester's Pecans in Alabama is a different region but a similarly long-tenured family business if pecans, pralines, and Southern candy are what the recipient enjoys.
- Wine Country Gift Baskets assembles gift packages around wine, cheese, and crackers if you want a presentation closer to a hostess gift than a holiday box.
None of these will be exactly Figi's. The catalog you remember had its own typography, its own coupon codes, its own way of describing a sausage as “hearty,” and a particular Marshfield postmark. That's part of why people still write in to ask about it — the absence is specific.
A small takeaway for the holiday-shopping reader
If you are over sixty and you have spent decades ordering from a particular catalog, only to have it disappear, you already know how often this story repeats. The mail-order food gift business contracted sharply in the years on either side of the pandemic, and the names that survived tended to be either very old (Swiss Colony, Harry & David), or owned by a larger group with retail distribution to fall back on. Figi's tried both routes and ended up only with the second.
So: order the Figi's gift box from Bass Pro or Walmart if the name still matters to you, knowing the box and the catalog are not the same thing. Or order from The Swiss Colony, sixty miles south of where Figi's started, and tell the recipient it is a Wisconsin gift box. Either way, send it early. The post office is a different operation than it was in 1944, and a sausage that arrives on January 3rd doesn't taste the same as one that arrives on December 22nd.
