The terrorist attacks of Sept. 11 led women’s apparel cataloger/retailer The Talbots to temporarily suspend prospecting, according to spokesperson Margery Myers. Myers won’t specify how many prospecting catalogs the Hingham, MA-based marketer had mailed during the first three quarters of 2001. But she says that total circulation for the year was 57 million, down about 2 million books from 2000—though the shortfall wasn’t totally attributed to prospecting books.
“We’ve made a temporary decision to stop prospecting after Sept. 11,” Myers explains. “We prospected for a year, and now we’ve felt we’ve grown our file sufficiently enough to take a break for a while. We felt we had to protect our margins.” Talbots will eventually propsect again, though Myers won’t say when. “We will continue to monitor the situation.”