I had a stack of Improvements catalogs out in the shop for the better part of twenty years. Eileen would set the new one on the kitchen table when it showed up, and I'd carry it out to the workbench by Saturday and dog-ear the pages with the gutter guards, the heavy-duty doormats, and whatever LED shop light they were running that month. Practical stuff. Reasonable prices. Things a man with a forty-acre farmstead and a 1998 Sierra actually used.
So when folks ask me what happened to the Improvements catalog, the answer's a little more complicated than “it's gone.” The brand still exists, sort of. The book in your mailbox does not. Here's the plain version.
The short history
Improvements launched in 1992 out of West Chester, Ohio. The pitch was the tagline — Do It Yourself and Save — and the merchandise backed it up. It was the catalog you went to when you didn't want to pay a contractor to put up shelf brackets, when the screen door needed a closer that actually worked, when the gutters were full of maple leaves again come November and you needed a ten-foot reach tool that wasn't junk.
The parent company at the time was Hanover Direct. In 2001 they sold Improvements to the Home Shopping Network for a little over thirty-three million dollars. Hanover used the money to pay down debt. HSN ran Improvements as its own outfit out of the Cleveland area for the next seventeen years, and during that stretch the catalog kept showing up in mailboxes the way it always had.
Then in July of 2018, the parent company — by then it was QVC Group, which had bought HSN the previous year — announced they were folding Improvements into HSN proper and shutting the Cleveland operation. The last printed Improvements catalog went out in the fourth quarter of 2018. After that, no more book.
Is the brand actually dead?
No. That's the part that confuses people. If you go to hsn.com and search for “Improvements,” you'll still see products under that name — collapsible storage bins, over-the-door organizers, garden tools, the heavy-duty stackable boxes, kitchen odds and ends. Same kind of merchandise that used to fill the catalog, just sold through HSN's website and television channel instead of a printed book.
What's gone is the catalog itself. There is no Improvements catalog you can request, no order form to mail in, no toll-free number ringing through to a Maple Heights call center. The standalone improvementscatalog.com website that used to redirect customers has also been quiet for years. If a third-party site claims to mail you the current Improvements catalog in 2026, I'd be careful — that book hasn't been printed since the Obama-era playoffs.
So can you still buy Improvements products?
Yes, but only through HSN. A few notes from somebody who's actually clicked around there recently:
- Selection is thinner than the catalog used to be. The standout items — the gutter cleaners, the welcome mats with the year-round backing, the seasonal porch covers — show up and disappear depending on the season.
- Pricing is HSN's pricing, which sometimes runs a little high before discount and a lot fairer after. Watch for the on-air specials and the email codes.
- Shipping is whatever HSN's running that week. Free shipping shows up around the holidays and around big promo windows.
- Customer service questions about old Improvements orders go through HSN now. The old direct numbers are dead lines.
If you want the experience of paging through a printed home-improvement catalog at the kitchen table the way you used to, that's where I have to give you the honest answer: that exact thing isn't coming back. Most of the catalog houses that survived the last ten years did it by going digital. The ones that still mail print mostly use it as a billboard pointing you to a website.
What I'd buy from instead
Eileen still likes a paper catalog, and so do I when I'm sitting on the porch with a cup of coffee in March waiting for the ground to dry out. Here's what's actually on our coffee table these days — outfits that cover the same ground Improvements used to.
Plow & Hearth
Closest cousin to Improvements in spirit. Practical home and yard merchandise, fire pits, doormats, weatherproof cushions, the kind of stuff you actually use outdoors instead of staging for a photograph. They still mail a catalog if you ask. Madison, Virginia outfit, been around since 1980.
Grandin Road
Owned by Qurate too, as it happens — same family as HSN. A little more decorative than Improvements was, but the storage and outdoor sections overlap. Halloween catalog is a piece of work if you've got grandkids.
Country Door
Out of Monroe, Wisconsin, part of the Swiss Colony family. Country and farmhouse leaning, but plenty of useful household goods. They still mail a real book.
Sturbridge Yankee Workshop
New England country style. More decor than tools, but if Eileen liked the Improvements porch sections, she'll like this one.
Frontgate
Higher-end than Improvements ever was — this is where you go when you decided the cheap version didn't last and you're going to spend once and be done. Outdoor furniture, doormats that survive Nebraska winters, the heavier-duty version of what Improvements sold.
Lakeside Collection
The opposite end of the price ladder. Inexpensive household and gift items, the way the back pages of Improvements used to feel. Good for stocking-stuffer territory more than serious tools.
Harbor Freight
Not a catalog company in the old sense, but worth saying out loud: if you bought tools and hardware out of Improvements, Harbor Freight covers most of that ground now, and they mail a flyer monthly. The quality runs a wide range — some of it I wouldn't trust on the tractor, some of it I've had in the shop for a decade. Read the reviews and you'll do fine.
A few practical takeaways
Look, here's where I land on it. The Improvements catalog had a thirty-year run, did right by a lot of folks, and the brand still puts out merchandise — just under a different roof. That's not the worst ending in the catalog business. Plenty of names from the 1990s went away entirely.
Three things worth keeping in mind:
- Don't pay for catalog requests. Any service charging you a fee to mail you the Improvements catalog is selling air. The book hasn't been printed since 2018.
- Bookmark hsn.com/shop/improvements if you liked the merchandise. Set an alert if there's a specific product line you want — the storage bins and over-the-door racks are the most consistent.
- Spread your catalog requests around. No one outfit covers what Improvements used to. Plow & Hearth for the practical, Frontgate when you want it to last, Country Door for the kitchen and porch.
And if you've still got a stack of old Improvements catalogs out in the garage like I did, hang onto one. Not for ordering — for the model numbers. I went out last spring looking to replace a pair of shoe-storage benches we bought in 2009, and the dimensions and the part name from the old catalog page were enough to find a near-twin from another outfit. Beats measuring it with a tape and guessing.
