Kick it up a notch

As for the layout of the catalog pages, Revgear.com would do well to embrace a more consistent approach. Pick font styles and colors and stick with them so customers can immediately recognize the products, the testimonials, the endorsements, and so on.

The spreads seem to be independent of each other, with no flow, and they often change dramatically with the turn of a page. One spread may feature all silhouetted products on white sweeps, while the next may show the products on screened backgrounds with dividing rule lines and inset photos.

Building some consistency between the spreads would invite more customer involvement as they find it easier to go cover to cover. Developing a basic page template would be a good place to start.

Other treatments prove to be valuable selling tools. The inset photography highlighting product features and benefits is good.

And the problem/solution approach used to sell the hand wraps is excellent. Revgear.com has placed itself in the customers' position, identified a problem and shown ways to solve the problem. There's no stronger approach to marketing than that.

Overall, the Revgear.com catalog has some inconsistencies that don't facilitate an easy shopping experience, but most of these issues are easily corrected. Imbedded within the pages, the product, and the brand lies great energy and excitement. The key is harnessing that energy and delivering it to the customer in a way that makes sense and makes their catalog experience an exhilarating one.

	Sam Allen and Mark Rockwood

The Revgear.com catalog represents many of the aspirations and problems of niche market mail order books. With a client demographic ranging from martial arts novices and their families to world class fighting champions of every description, Revgear.com must offer simple access to both high-end gear at a pro level and information to help the inexperienced find the appropriate product choice. On this count alone Revgear.com scores more successes than defeats.

On the successes side of the scorecard, the catalog presents an appealing action cover, which shows the support of the stars of the various sports it supplies. Its tone is more of a magazine than a catalog, which has some additional appeal for practitioners.

On the negative side, the busy background and overload of exclamation-drenched text left us wandering the cover and missing critical information such as contact numbers and addresses. The larger concept of presenting an action introduction is a good one, but could be more effective with less of an information overload.

The majority of the products spreads in the catalog are well designed, accessible, and easily one of the best features of the book. The same cannot be said for the opening spread. Beginning inside the front cover, company story, president's statement, product guarantee, and sponsorship announcements fight one another for attention.

Multiple pictures of the president dilute the impact of showing him supported by luminaries of various martial arts disciplines. We would merge the president's statement with the company's story, eliminating one large somewhat redundant block of copy. Also, we would choose one photo of the three for this valuable entry page, leaving additional space to display more effectively the substantial guarantee or a product offer.

The following page highlights Revgear.com's effective pictorial product table of contents. We tested its functionality by having staff members search for specific products in the book. In every case, the products were found more quickly than through a random search of pages. We did encounter some confusion about different locations for what seemed like the same product lines. Gloves and headgear of different types proved the most confusing.

The opening spread overall is an uncomfortable and poorly integrated combination of the dense, copy-block-heavy left page and the open, airy more graphical right. The spread would benefit from more design integration, simplification, and use of valuable opening spread real estate. Again, how about offering a popular product or two, creating some desire to own some of this very cool gear!

Once past the open, the book presents products well in simple open page layouts that are easy to navigate. Product density is low enough to allow photos to be large and uncrowded throughout the book. This also allows descriptive copy and inset photos to be easily connected to the products they support. Each page also contains an informational color band describing the product category and making critical ordering information available on every page without clutter.

And the use of child models in connection with products also available in child sizes keeps the buyer for being forced to read every gray info block to look for kid sizes. But good design is not enough on the equipment packages spread. The layout of the offering is clear and effective with product lines well described in the text accompanying each photo. But the photos themselves are a mystery.

The group product shots were clearly done for another layout and don't really fit into the space allotted for them. Some of the photos have been cropped so heavily to make them conform that they offer almost no visual information.

In fact, Revgear.com faces being knocked out due to the inconsistency of its photography. As in many modestly budgeted catalogs, a mix of photo sources — from free high quality vendor images to much lower quality hired product shots — frequently means some products are beautifully illustrated while others are a puzzle.

For example, on the page 2-3 spread, the leather bag glove on page 2 is a well-lit black object. The angle at which the product is viewed and the intelligent placement of highlights describe the glove perfectly.

In comparison, on page 3 the elite leather boxing gloves — which sell for twice the price — are almost featureless blobs requiring a second inset photo to show what the product looks like. The problem occurs again and again throughout the book, from the off figure clothing shots to the product demonstration model shots.

Very well-executed photos are shown on the same page or spread with much lower quality shots. As costly as good photography is, a product that cannot be seen cannot be sold. And a bad quality photo implies things about a product that are almost never true.

On the whole, we would score Revgear.com's catalog a seven-rounds-to-three winner in the competition for effective presentation of a highly specialized product line. Despite what seems like many criticisms of the Revgear.com catalog, its problems stood out because so many other aspects of the piece were exactly right.