Believing that you’re never too young to appreciate art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art in late September mailed 500,000 copies of a MetKids catalog. The 32-page spin-off mailed to house file and museum members; about 25% of the mailing went to prospects. While Jody Malordy, the Metropolitan’s general manager of marketing and publicity, won’t divulge the companies from which the catalog rented names, she says that the museum tested “some well-known kids’ lists in the market.”
New York-based catalog agency AGA Marketing and Design, which has been designing the museum’s gift catalogs since 2000, collaborated with the nonprofit’s marketing team on the children’s title.
Like the products sold in the core Metropolitan Museum of Art catalog, many of the items featured in MetKids are based on objects in the museum’s collection. For example, the catalog features Egyptian and African art puzzles, which sell for $9.95. The Art Safari collage, which sells for $19.95, is an activity kit featuring the works of Matisse, Rousseau, and Chagall.
This isn’t the first time that the museum has issued a kids’ book: The Metropolitan mailed a children’s-products catalog in the mid-1990s, Malordy says. Results fell off over time, however, so the museum discontinued it in 1997. But strong sales of products for kids in its core catalog prompted the Metropolitan to give the children’s market another try.
“It’s a natural extension of our gift catalog,” Malordy says. “We’ve seen an increasing popularity of children’s merchandise, and we think this a wonderful way to expand upon the educational mission of the museum.”