Friday, November 2, 2007

Catalog Season



We all have memories from childhood of holiday catalogs. Sitting and dog-earring pages, circling our carefully selected future gifts and hoping for the best after we turned it over to our parents, and maybe written a letter to Santa detailing our goodness over the past year.

This article in Jewelers Circular Keystone (or JCK as it’s known around these parts) goes into the methods behind the production madness of a holiday catalog. If you didn’t click the link, I’ll sum it up for you. Basically, a catalog is a great way for Fink’s to get in front of our customers while defining our brand, highlighting our key vendor collections and showing what we’re made of. Each of our buyers works with our vendor partners to choose merchandise that is relevant and of the latest style. In addition, Fink’s always tries to show pieces that you’ll only find here, like our Fink’s diamonds.

The Fink’s Jewelers holiday catalog is the biggest marketing project of the year. Our in-house ad agency, Marc Advertising is responsible for almost all aspects of the catalog. The process starts around June and doesn’t end until all 250,000 catalogs have been delivered to customer’s homes and are displayed in our stores in November.

There are two main aspects to the catalog: Prep and Production. Prep includes choosing the merchandise to feature, laying out pages, choosing a photographer, model and location and some color correcting and touching up photos where needed. Production is basically the execution of everything involved in prep. More details and a view of the catalog from a store’s perspective coming soon!