Land's End reviews catalogue production

No company can afford to ignore the Internet and its effect on consumer buying habits, and for heavily print-centric environments such as mail order, future business success is going to be dependent on flexibility throughout the operation.

For production departments that will mean having the capacity to both react nimbly to change and to be proactive in spotting opportunities that technology might deliver. This much has already become apparent to Joanne Hurst, familiar to many as the one-time production director at VNU Business Publications (and joint chair of the PPA Technology and Production Committee at the time of her departure from VNU), now having fallen on her feet as European print production manager at Lands’ End Direct Merchants, the mail order clothing retailer.

Hurst has only been in the job for a handful of months, heading up a production team that as part of the European Creative Team produces a catalogue a month both for the UK and for the German markets, as well as special clearance issues, marketing print, and the sourcing of boxes and packaging for goods to be delivered to customers. Run lengths average about one million per catalogue for the UK, while in Germany they are sometimes over two million.

So print is important at Lands’ End, and there is a lot of it, which is a welcoming environment for Hurst to walk into. She observes: “It’s quite refreshing in these hard times, where you find print is under threat, to come to a company where print is not a dirty word.”

Even so, the print that Lands’ End currently produces is under scrutiny. The business wants to grow its volume of online revenues, and heads are being scratched about how best the printed catalogues can support that. It doesn’t necessarily mean that print volumes will reduce, but Hurst has come in at a time when changes are afoot in a production schedule that has tended to be somewhat static in the past, and she is excited by the challenge this places at her own doorstep.

“One of the things I have found is that the culture here has been quite inward-looking, because catalogue production is quite samey: this month’s catalogue does not look a million miles apart from last month’s or next month’s, whereas in magazines, every magazine is different,” she says.

“But the business is changing and there are new and different demands. Because of that we are looking at the format of the catalogues, the paper, and how the catalogues look. Really the product has been like this for some time; is it what we want to be sending out? Does it allow enough brand development? Should we be doing things differently?

“That’s quite exciting on the production side because the company has a tradition of producing a lot of print but it has been kind of the same from one catalogue to the next, and we are now looking at perhaps doing things rather differently. It’s nice for me, coming from a different production background – I hope I have got something to offer there.”

Currently the catalogues are produced in a format that was inherited from Lands’ End in the US (the company was founded in the USA in 1963 and is still headquartered in Wisconsin). The format measures 255 x 210mm and is particularly suited to gravure print, as provided to Lands’ End in the UK by Polestar Sheffield and Prinvois Liverpool (though covers are printed web offset). Improvements in the quality of web offset printing however are opening up Hurst’s eyes to the possibility of switching some of the print away from gravure, in particular where UK run lengths sometimes come down to about 750,000 copies.

“This is perfectly within the realms of web offset,” Hurst continues, “so, do we want to look at a mixture of gravure and web offset? The problem with that is this is a very web unfriendly size of product - the paper wastage is horrific because the format is too short.

“Gravure is great for catalogue print because of its consistency and punchy colour, while web offset has been less consistent, and less punchy, but that is changing with the new presses. So I’m looking at the web offset options for us, but it would almost certainly have to be driven by a format change.”

What will tip the decision? “It will be a mixture of cost, quality and speed, but it will be driven by business change. The MD is keen for us to grow the online side of the business; you cannot stand still. So there will be physical changes but I cannot tell you I have a feel for what they will be yet. It will be driven by the needs of the business and my challenge is to come up with the best format, the best process and the best quality that I can offer from the manufacturing side, which will support the needs of the business. It’s quite a big challenge and one that I’m looking forward to getting my teeth into.”

Hurst admits that the business model is quite different to that which she was used to working with in magazines. At Lands’ End, production schedules are agreed a year in advance; all the paginations for 2009 are already known. Even in the short period of time that Hurst has been at the company though, the drawbacks to setting plans in stone so early have become apparent.

A late request was made to add another eight pages to the most recent catalogue in production, and while in magazines it would be an awkward yet surmountable request, for a company producing print in the volumes that Lands’ End does, there were more problematic issues to solve, principally involving paper reel sizes. Lands’ End’s paper suppliers manufacture the paper specifically to order for every catalogue, so adding eight pages late in the process ruins the calculation. On this occasion the problem was overcome but, says Hurst, “the flexibility to adjust according to what the business demands are has not been there, and it will need to be.” She adds: “That’s why I’m here.”

Hurst’s experience of bringing prepress in-house at VNU will also probably be called upon, although she points out that prepress within a B2B magazine publishing house is a very different animal compared to the catalogue environment, where colour is crucial. At the moment, Lands’ End performs about 50% of its own repro through a digital imaging department that handles colour correcting and swatch matching. Other repro work is put out to two external suppliers: WK360 in Luton and Schawk in Leeds.

“Bringing all the repro in-house is our preferred strategy,” she states. “I have arrived at a point where we are doing 50%, so we are on that cusp. How do we phase bringing the other 50% in? At VNU in 2002 we did it in a phased way without much repro support because we were able to, but it was B2B: heavily templated, not big colour requirements; whereas here there is a lot of quite detailed colour work and retouching of images. It’s a different kettle of fish.

“I cannot imagine that we would not have external repro support even if in theory we might be doing all the pages. We are working with good companies and I would like to see us continue to work with them, maybe in different ways. I have learned through experience that it’s a complicated process though, and you do need to phase it; you need to be sure that the strategy you are developing is right for the business, and that you know what the pitfalls are along the way, because there are lots of those.

“Then there are staff and training, knowledge and experience issues to deal with. At VNU it changed forever the kind of staff I had to recruit. They really needed to be more technical and have a different idea of what their responsibility was, ie that the buck stopped with them.”

As a newcomer to catalogue production, Hurst is taking her time to learn the business before implementing big change, although she points out that right now is the time to don thinking caps, because from the start of the autumn things will get busy in the lead up to Christmas.

The company is debating how to use targeting better and how the printed catalogues will support these business needs. Hurst is therefore seeking flexible solutions and proactive initiatives from herself and the production team, and she believes she can personally lead the way through her talent as an internal evangeliser.

“As a production person you want to be doing a lot of the driving, rather than being driven,” says Hurst. “That’s why it’s important to be an internal sales person. Production really can drive the business forward from the back end.”


• www.landsend.co.uk