The Idea Blog

I’ve written often about the furniture industry, usually in critical terms. There’s so much wrong with the retail model, not the least of which is the, uh, retailers.

Case in point, this 32-page catalogue which fell out of The Post & Courier this morning. It’s a Drexel Heritage piece, obviously provided by the manufacturer. Masterful photography, elegant typography, glowing product descriptions … in short, beautifully-prepared.

(Sorry for the glare on the photo. But, hey, you get the sense this is pretty nice.)

It all falls apart in the delivery. Take a look at this:

That’s the retailer’s identification, a sticker placed crookedly on the back. It’s painfully obvious to me that the retailer, a carriage house called “Southeastern Galleries, had a bunch of these to get out, so rather than pay for a nice imprint, some bored group of employees - either at the paper or in the store - mindlessly slapped a cheap sticker on the catalogue and placed the insertion order.

What’s worse, even, than the sticker: no prices. Thirty-two pages of product, beautifully presented, but no more than dimensions and descriptions.

It would make me cry if I hadn’t seen it so many times before. No strategy, no plan. A sticker. Geez.