F. Curtis Barry & Company’s Multichannel Operations & Fulfillment Blog

Washington, DC June 27, 2008. Ammerican Catalog Mailers Association’s (ACMA) National Catalog Advocacy and Strategy Forum.
Hamilton Davidson, Executive Director, and the Board of ACMA) put together an absolutely effective event for catalogers to have a dialogue with to USPS, Congressional staff, Postal Regulatory Commission (PRC) officials and other catalog management.
In a straight forward way […]

We attended VendorNet’s conference at the beginning of this month to present a speech and a roundtable on Vendor Compliance Policies. The speech covered:
• Role of vendor compliance in reducing costs and speeding receipts through the DC
• Trends in vendor compliance
• Contents of vendor compliance manuals
• […]

We want to remind you once again about a very important event, taking place in Washington, D.C. on Thursday, June 26 and Friday, June 27. The American Catalog Mailers Association (ACMA) has organized a groundbreaking forum that will bring together key officials of the U.S. Postal Service, the Postal Regulatory Commission and members of Congress […]

Save the Date:
National Catalog Advocacy & Strategy Forum
June 26-27, 2008
Washington, D.C.
The American Catalog Mailers Association (ACMA) has been engaged in continuing important discussions on how we can address the current state of affairs in the catalog industry with the USPS, and has been making progress on a number of fronts. These will be covered at […]

At our recent Executive Forum we talked about how rising postage costs, increasing paper costs and the fall off in prospecting response rates have radically changed the traditional catalog business model. While there are large, efficient catalogs that spend in the high 20-percents on the total cost to create and mail catalogs, many businesses are […]

No CEO needs one more thing to do. Everyone has been hard at work to offset the effects of the postal increase. But have you been proactive with your congressional representative or the USPS? I am concerned that catalog executives are not making their voices heard.
Recently, F. Curtis Barry & Company joined American Catalog Mailers […]

This is a question that needs to be asked because of some recent trends. Consider:
1. Production chases low cost labor. Where Japan and Taiwan were the centers before China, production is starting to move from China to other Asian countries such as Indonesia, Vietnam and Cambodia—as well as Mexico, Central and South […]

The results of the postal increases in 2007 and 2008 have been devastating for all catalogers. At our recent Executive Forum we talked about how important it is to make the results known to the Postal Commission. They just don’t seem to understand what they did to our industry. Hamilton Davison, Executive Director, American […]

The postal increase has severely hurt profitability, that’s for sure. But you know another thing that has an even larger, longer term repercussion? Think of the thousands of jobs that are at risk throughout the direct industry. All the thousands of merchandise and catalog suppliers as well as many companies right size […]

In the next few weeks, all the carriers will complete their 2008 pricing announcements. As we look at the future, it’s probably a good bet that these carriers’ rates aren’t going down any more than the cost of oil. So what’s the impact and action plan for your business? Given the size of the increases […]