(Direct Newsline) Apparel and home goods marketer Urban Outfitters will launch a catalog for its flagship brand later this month. The company already produces a catalog for its other retail chain, Anthropologie.
Chief financial officer Stephan A. Feldman says than an initial mailing of 200,000-300,000 60-page saddle-stitched catalogs is scheduled to drop in late March, with another mailing scheduled for the back-to-school season. Recipients will be pulled from Urban Outfitters’ house files as well as from some outside lists.
The jump in direct-to-consumer sales was driven by the strength of the Anthropologie catalog and Website, Feldman says. “Given how the weather was so ugly in December, people took advantage of the ease and growing comfort level” of distance shopping, he explains. “With the shortened holiday selling season and ugly weather in the Northeast, if your choice was to fight the traffic to the mall or let your fingers do the walking and ‘mail it in’ this Christmas, a lot of people had rather good results on their Websites.”