The Shopping Method That Isn’t Going Anywhere

J.Crew has 2.7 million followers on Instagram, and more than 300,000 on X. But earlier this fall, it announced that it was trying to reach prospective customers the old-fashioned way: by reviving its print catalog. In 2024, everyone shops online. But in recent years, some retailers have returned to the catalog as a way to attempt to grab a bit more of shoppers’ coveted attention. People can and do scroll past the endless stream of marketing emails and digital ads on their phone. But completely ignoring a catalog that appears on your stoop or in your mailbox is tougher. Simply put, you have to pick it up, even if you are planning to throw it in the recycling bin—and brands hope that you might flip through some glossy photos along the way.

Catalogs’ heyday came before the financial crisis—but they never fully went away, and billions have been sent to American consumers every year since. The catalogs of 2024, in part a nostalgia play for those who grew up with the trend, are generally sent to targeted lists of customers who have either shopped with a brand in the past or are deemed plausible future buyers. Some retailers are maintaining what they’ve always done: Neiman Marcus, for example, continues to send a catalog, even as some of its peers have stopped. Both traditional and digital-first companies use catalogs: Amazon has issued a toy catalog since 2018. Brands have started playing with the format too, taking the concept beyond a straightforward list of products: Patagonia puts out a catalog that it calls a “bona fide journal,” featuring “stories and photographs” from contributors. Many of these catalogs don’t even include information about pricing; shoppers have to go to the website for that.

Amanda Mull, writing in The Atlantic in early 2020, foretold a new golden era of catalogs—brands at the time were becoming “more desperate to find ways to sell their stuff without tithing to the tech behemoths.” Since then, the pandemic has only turbocharged consumers’ feelings of overwhelm with online shopping. Immediate purchase is not necessarily the goal; these catalogs are aiming to build a relationship that might lead to future orders, Jonathan Zhang, a marketing professor at Colorado State University, told me. The return on investment for companies is pretty good, Zhang has found, especially because more sophisticated targeting and measurement means that brands aren’t spending time appealing to people who would never be interested (this also means that less paper is wasted than in the free-for-all mailer days, he noted).

With catalogs, brands are supplementing, not replacing, e-commerce: Zhang’s experiments with an e-commerce retailer found that over a period of six months starting in late 2020, people who received both catalogs and marketing emails from a retailer made 24 percent more purchases than those who received only the emails. A spokesperson for J.Crew told me that following the catalog relaunch, the brand saw a nearly 20 percent rise in reactivated customers, adding that this fall, 11 percent more consumers had a positive impression of the J.Crew brand compared with last year. E-commerce is the undeniable center of shopping in 2024, so brands are finding creative ways to use in-person methods to build on its success—including, as I’ve written, reimagining the brick-and-mortar store.

A well-designed catalog may appeal to some of the same sensory instincts that enchant die-hard in-person shoppers. Catalogs work especially well for certain types of products: Zhang said that “hedonic” categories of goods—luxury clothing, perfumes, vacation packages, chocolate—are some of the best fits for stories and photos in a print format. (I smile when I think of Elaine taking this type of luxury marketing to parody levels in her stint running a catalog on Seinfeld.) Zhang himself has been wooed by such a campaign: Around February of this year, he received a mailer from a cruise company (one he had never interacted with in the past). He spent a few minutes flipping through. In August, when he started thinking about planning a winter vacation for his family, he remembered the catalog and visited the company’s website. “That few minutes was long enough for me to kind of encode this information in my memory,” he said. He decided to book a trip.

The catalog has moved forward in fits and starts: 30 years ago, they were the central way to market a product directly to consumers. Then the pendulum swung hard toward online ads. Now we may start to see more of a balance between the two. Some of us would rather turn away from advertising altogether. But if brands are going to find us anyway, print catalogs could add a little more texture to the experience of commerce.

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