Sheplers sold to investor group
Private equity player Gryphon Investors, working with Growth Ventures Group, has acquired $125 million-plus western wear merchant Sheplers.
Marketing
Ballard Designs opens store
To celebrate its silver anniversary, Ballard Designs is headed to the mall. The home decor, gifts, and garden accessories cataloger this week opens its first store, in the Tampa, FL-based International Plaza.
Catalog mail slows to a crawl
June is generally a slow month for catalogers, but this year Catalog Tracker saw it as even slower than usual. Perhaps it’s a sign of tighter mailings as a result of the May postal increase, but the service of Direct Media had just 234 catalogs in its mailbox, down from 265 in June 2006, and from 281 in June 2005.
Raw description is no longer in
Each year, scanning through the winning catalogs representing the best of the best at the annual Multichannel Merchant Awards, we look for a thread make
Say hola to the Libre-Creacion catalog
Sending greeting cards, writing letters, and mailing invitations to various fiestas is
Swiss Colony heads to Shanghai
Swiss Colony has been buying clothing and furniture from suppliers in China for about eight years,
Vermont Country Lore
A Multichannel Merchant staffer found a pair of men’s shorts she wanted to buy as a gift in the Vermont Country Store catalog. But when she called to
Everything old is new again
As soon as I arrived in Washington for the eTail conference last month, I was ready to be hit with the latest and greatest online technologies and strategies. And while there was plenty of talk about e-mail strategies, live assistance techniques, and Flex vs. AJAX, the big buzz about the show seemed to be
From Fido and Fluffy to frogs and ferets
According to New York-based media brokerage firm ParadyszMatera, the pet supplies market list segment has increased during the past two years.
J.C. Whitney revs up
Retail sales are sluggish, and high gas prices have put the brakes on consumer spending (and driving). The last cataloger you would expect to be doing well is J.C. Whitney. Yet the auto parts and accessories merchant is cranking, with double-digit growth for the first quarter.