“Welcome to the party, pal!”
Yeah, I know it’s not quite that season yet to roll out a classic movie quote. But that’s the first thought that came to mind as I listened to a story about mail catalogs reported by “Marketplace” on my local public radio station this past Monday.
Now, you may want to sit down for this, because it turns out that retailers and brands are returning to the homes of consumers with actual printed and mailed catalogs in the holiday season now underway. The reporter noted that it’s becoming a trend for reasons that I’ll get to in a second.
But the next thing I thought of was “Haven’t I heard this before?” Cataloguers getting into (or returning to) the mail … it just sounded very familiar.
So I dove into my PDF archive of news items about print and mail, and sure enough, I wasn’t hallucinating.
“A Big Department Store Pivots to a Catalog”
-The New York Times, October 26, 2025
“Why some retailers are going old school and returning to catalogs”
-NBC Today Show, October 30, 2024
“J.Crew Fans, Get Ready: The Catalog Is Back”
-The Wall Street Journal, September 4, 2024
And so on and so on, going back to the early 2010s. You get the idea.
It’s gratifying to feel some validation from people outside our giant print and mail ecosystem that a focus on digital communications channels is not enough, or always the best way to deliver messages and offers to prospects or customers.
Read the rest of this story on Printing Impressions, a publication of PRINTING United Alliance, ASI’s strategic partner.
