Oh, hey there! You may have noticed it’s been a quiet few weeks from EOB. Between the professional sprint towards Q1’24 at my day job and the personal chaos that is the blackhole between Thanksgiving and New Year’s Eve, I’ve been barely keeping my head above water. If this sounds familiar, hang on tight — we’re almost there.

In the spirit of EOY insanity, I thought this week might be the perfect time to talk about the wild world of Christmas catalogs!

As a child, there was no greater joy than the ginormous stack of holiday catalogs in our living room each year. Some companies would send them as often as once a week through all of fall and winter, with gorgeously styled photos and maddeningly vague descriptive blurbs like “50% cotton, 50% viscose. Natural fit. Dry clean.” written in 6pt font at the bottom of the page.

A once ubiquitous part of the direct mail world, print catalogs have slowly faded towards extinction, except for the peak shopping season between (roughly) November 1 and December 15. For those 45-ish days, any brand you’ve ever briefly scrolled past on Instagram or made a single purchase from in the past 25 years will probably send you a flyer, leaflet, “look book,” or catalog.

Snuggle up with your stack of seasonal hard copy as we explore where the heck retail catalogs came from and why these holdovers from the pre-internet era are still a favorite for driving holiday revenue.

The very first mail-order catalog in the United States was not, as you might have assumed, Sears; it was the 1845 Tiffany & Co Blue Book, which the company still sends. (The 2023 holiday theme is Out of the Blue, featuring a cheeky collection of sea creatures crafted out of precious stones and metals.)

Montgomery Ward (1872) and Sears & Roebuck (1888) both followed suit, and by 1890 you could buy anything from a diamond necklace to a house and have it delivered. Then, in 1933, Sears unlocked a whole new category of catalog with the launch of their Wish Book — an entire issue dedicated exclusively to Christmas gifting.

Initially, the Wish Book wasn’t much larger than the standard Sears Book catalog, at 78 pages. But it grew larger each year, topping 600 pages in the 1960s and staying roughly that thick into the 90s. It featured candy, toys, home decor, bibles (“the most precious gift of all!”), wooden clogs imported from Holland, and live singing canaries. And, while it may have felt magical to children, the beauty of the Wish Book was how firmly attainable the items were for the growing American middle class.

On the other end of the affordability spectrum is Neiman Marcus’s annual Christmas Book. Since 1926 Neiman’s has sent a catalog filled with luxury gifts, like lizard skin cigarette cases. In the 1950s Stanley Marcus, son of the chain’s founder, began the practice of including wildly expensive and impractical gifts as a PR stunt. These “fantasy gifts” are outlandish by nature and often come in His & Hers sets, including:

• His & Hers camels (1967, $4,125)

• His & Hers mummy sarcophagi (1971, $6,000)

• His & Hers Chinese shar-peis (1983, $2,000 each)

• His & Hers diamonds (1985, $2M)

The gifts are often cheeky in the flashiest way — the 1968 His & Hers jaguar gift set included a Jaguar XKE Grand Touring Coupe (his) and a jaguar coat (hers), each just under $6k. And while they may seem purely for show, the fantasy gifts do often sell. In 2000 the retailer paired with Ford to create a limited edition Thunderbird that sold out in under two hours via phone orders.

[As an aside: I find it fascinating how accurately these outrageous “stunt” gifts predict upcoming trends. For example, in 2011 Neiman Marcus offered a $75,000 luxury yurt. While it seemed ridiculous at the time, rustic yurts with power and running water soon became popular ways to stay in locations like National Parks and on African safaris. Less than five years later, in 2016, “glamping” was officially added to the dictionary. Similarly, share-peis were once declared the world’s rarest dog by the Guinness Book of World Records, but nine years after Neiman’s fantasy puppy pair the Chicago Tribune declared a “shar-pei resurgence.”]

Over the last 20 years, the advances in internet shopping have made phoning, mailing, or (god forbid) faxing in your gift orders unnecessary — so how have paper holiday catalogs retained such cultural staying power? They check 4 key boxes for marketing:

They stand out in the digital era.

At the most basic level - catalogs are not an email. Email saturation and fatigue have reduced the effectiveness of individual campaign sends, and all too often retailers follow the old 1995 J.Crew catalog strategy mentioned by the Hartford Courant: if it works, send more. In 2022, retail email volume was up 15% YoY.

As the amount of physical mail sent and received decreases, catalogs help a brand to stand out in the “sea of sameness.” Plus, they allow for very easy browsing, with no need to scroll through pages and pages of items. While online you sort by price (low to high, always — duh), in a catalog the items come to you, flowing seamlessly through departments and price points while you flip the pages.

They offer the perfect upsell/cross-sell moment.

Instead of easily ignorable You May Also Like… boxes at the bottom of a product page, brands can show multiple products in action at once. In Catalog Land, scarves, socks, and mittens don’t exist on their own; they’re part of a 10-piece ensemble that all coordinates perfectly. Plus, the full product range is more discoverable, which is key during gifting season. Perhaps, for example, you never buy from the men’s section, but you need a gift for a partner or family member. By including both lines in their catalog, a brand can subtly remind you that they offer clothes for men too, making them a great gift option.

The visual nature of catalogs makes them particularly well suited for marketing to children. They’re so effective that Amazon (the definition of the internet) offered a printed toy book this year that included games and stickers, in addition to a PDF version. After all, it’s a lot easier to circle your wishlist on paper, and like the TikTok below notes, Santa has an unlimited budget — right?

@alissaluan

EVERY. SINGLE. PAGE. 💰😅💰 #christmas #amazoncatalog #amazonprime #kidsbelike #moms #momsoftiktok #relatable #fyp #foryoupage

They allow for editorialization.

In the same vein as offering cross-sells and upsells, catalogs build a fantasy world through editorialization. Neiman Marcus’s holiday extravaganza is literally listed under the Editorial tab.

More traditional retailers like L.L. Bean don’t just show you a set of outdoor wear in a flat-lay photo - they use editorial images to help you envision what your life will be like once you buy these items. You can wear them to cut down your Christmas tree or spend the day frolicking with your family on the ski slope. Best of all, catalog children never complain that they hate their mittens or don’t want to wear their hats. Everyone is always happy in Catalog Land. Maybe you could be this happy, too.

Editorial imagery also offers brands a subtle way to share their values and build brand loyalty. For example, in the late 2000s and early 2010s, momentum towards marriage equality was building. Catalog imagery traditionally featured the standard ideal family (i.e. white, heterosexual, married). In a subtle signal of support for LGBTQ rights, brands began expanding who they included in their photos. Notably in January 2013 Crate & Barrel showed two men eating dinner by candlelit on a page of their catalog. While this (hopefully?) seems benign in 2023, this was during the efforts to overturn DOMA and any brand that included a photo of a gay couple received press coverage. See: JCPenney’s Mother’s Day ad in 2012 and J.Crew in 2011.

Retailers have continued to use catalogs as an opportunity to signal their values, with stores like Target committing to more representation, including models with disabilities who more accurately mirror the diversity of their customer base. The photos used for catalogs are then repurposed across multiple surfaces, including ecomm, social media, and smaller print media like discount code mailers. (Or, more often, the retailer shoots a large batch of seasonal photos with the explicit intent to use them for all media channels rather than as catalog-specific imagery. Either way, it’s always money well spent.)

They’re free.

Simply put, a good catalog offers much of the escapist joy of a magazine with none of the cost. With modern publications devolving into mostly ads anyway, many consumers would rather get the pretty pictures for free. In 2014, Restoration Hardware notoriously sent a 15+lb Source Book issue that would have kept me engrossed for days. Vogue’s September issue has and could never.

While we’ve moved away from the phonebook-sized behemoth books of yore, I’ll continue to spend my December leisurely flipping through any print content that brands want to send. It’s the original holiday doom scroll, and frankly, ‘tis the season. One more week, kiddos — giddyup.

What I’m Circling In My Sears Wish Book

• Food-themed clothing from nepo baby Katie Kimmel. Some faves of mine include Seafood Tower, Dirty Martini, Chicken Parm, and the Tater Tot onesie.

• His & Hers Essential Sweatpants. It’s no matching set of goldplated submarines, but I think they’d make a great couples’ gift.

• Real Housewives stickers. Perfect for your bestie’s Yeti tumbler or RTIC cooler.

• Diamond Locket Ring. As long as we’re talking fantasy gifts, I wouldn’t mind this $51k ring. If I must be more reasonable, I’m happy to settle for this $6k signet ring. (And if I must be even more reasonable, I would take a puppy, Shar-Pei or otherwise. 🙃)

• Want to keep reliving the joy of the catalog? Wishbook Web has dozens of vintage Christmas catalogs from brands like Sears and JCPenney painstakingly scanned in, page by page. Highly recommend taking a walk down memory lane. And for those of us who feel like the economy is very bad despite all evidence to the contrary, I’d recommend taking a look at the 90s JCPenney prices. They’re… not that low? ($79 for a skirt or pants set is $176 today.)

_{[Editor’s Note: This issue was inspired by a conversation with my dear friend, Lisa, who’s always scouting concepts for EOB.} ❤️ _]