|
|
||||
|
|
Today
many shops publish catalogues to support their offer in-store - but a
century ago it was only department stores for the very rich that had
catalogues for their customers.
Woolworths in America were one of the first High Street stores to experiment with catalogues, starting with a simple shopping guide published for customers to take home as part of the Company's 50th anniversary celebrations in 1929. |
|||
| It was a list of the sorts of product available, rather than naming the individual items, and was given free to every customer visiting a store during the Summer months of 1929. To the Company's surprise many customers chose to keep the booklets and throughout the 30s, from time to time, a customer would show up in store, point out a particular page in their booklet and ask where they could find the item. |  |
|||
 |
During the 1930s, Woolworths in the UK responded with their own handy pocket-sized booklet - a supplier-funded "advertorial" with a mixture of topical tips for customers and advertisements for items from the range. It was popular and turned a healthy profit. |
|||
| A
new edition for 1940 concentrated on products to support the war effort
- blackout curtains, sew and mend items and the like. It was an
austere publication, reflecting the dark times when it was issued.
In marked contrast, across the Atlantic (where the United States were not yet at war), Woolworths produced their first, spectacular Christmas Catalogue. At the time it was a very radical design, with big bright photographs of the products on one page, keyed to a listing of the items on the opposite page. It is a design that has stood the test of time. |
 |
|||
 |
|
|||
| By
the 1950s the Americans were publishing catalogues regularly - many
doubling up a child's colouring book or comic alongside product
listings. There were Spring and Summer catalogues as well as the
main Christmas Gifts and Toys catalogue in the United States and Canada
- but the British company saw no made, making as many sales as it could
handle without.
It was not until the 1970s that the British company published their first catalogue - but with a real touch of panache it was the first catalogue to be distributed as a stapled in centre section in Britain's best selling weekly magazine, the BBC's Radio Times. The catalogues were popular and generated substantial increases in sales. |
 |
|||
 |
||||
| During the late 1970s, alongside the retail Christmas catalogues Woolworths launched two experiments. The first was a catalogue store format called Shopper's World, which was progressively expanded to a chain of 55 stores by 1983. | ||||
 |
||||
 |
The second (which aimed to exploit the infrastructure created for Shoppers World) was a mail order business called "Woolworth by Post". This never really took off and was quietly abandoned in the late 1970s. |
|||
| Every year since 1983, shortly after Paternoster (Kingfisher) bought the British Woolworths out of American ownership, the company has distributed a Christmas Catalogue, with some copies given out in store, others inserted into one of a number of magazines and others home-delivered. It has become quite a tradition, with a skilled Marketing team working with the Buyers on the design and range throughout the year. |  |
|||
 |
In the late 1990s, as part of a wider Kingfisher initiative, catalogues were used to introduce customers to a Home Shopping service as well as to promote the offer in-store. Work on this was suspended following demerger, with the Company moving to a smaller web-based home shopping option. | |||
| In
2002, responding to customer feedback, more than 60 years after
Woolworths launched their first A4 format catalogue in 1940, a smaller,
thicker handbag sized catalogue was introduced.
Behind the scenes work is underway on the 2004 edition - it's going to be the best yet ! |
 |
|||
|
Decorations Cards In and out the windows Catalogues Advertising and TV
|
||||
