POSITIONING: Bullock & Jones facelift?

| Mark Del Franco

Is the venerable Bullock & Jones showing its age? Having closed its landmark San Francisco store in February, the $14 million menswear cataloger – which

Spiegel’s power play

| Diane Cyr

Over the years, Spiegel Catalog has assumed more personalities than Madonna – and for the most part, with less success. The current Spiegel catalog tagline

STRATEGIES: Get ready for merger mania

| Sherry Chiger

Dot-coms expected to seek deals with catalogersOn the defensive from the dot-com upstarts, the majority of print catalogers have built Websites to complement

Building a Better Brookstone

| Diane Cyr

As a gadgets marketer with “innovation” as its tag line, Brookstone in the past few years has innovated:- an electronic barbecue fork- a hair dryer that

MERGERS AND ACQUISITIONS: Bargain investments

| Mark Del Franco

Private equity firms buying into b-to-b catalogs account for top dealsEveryone likes a bargain – including private equity investment firms. And that explains

Minors are major for Star Struck

| Mark Del Franco

There’s nothing minor about Bethel, CT-based Star Struck’s Minor League Baseball business.Thanks to the boom in Minor League Baseball attendance (a record

APPAREL: market leaders – BRYLANE

| MCM staff

Bought last year by French retail giant Pinault-Printemps-Redoute (PPR), the formerly public Brylane has built up a solid group of specialty-size and

A sporting chance

| Paul Miller

Just as there’s more than one way to skin a cat, Dallas-based Collegiate Pacific has found that there’s more than one way to grow a business. For the

EXPANSION: NEBS and McBee team up

| Paul Miller

Acquisition lets both companies add sales channelsBy expanding its product line and introducing a 180-page catalog, business forms marketer McBee Systems

APPAREL: trends analysis

| Paul Miller

Selling apparel will never be an easy job. “Just when you think you’ve figured out exactly what your customers want, everything changes – sometimes overnight,”