{"id":7079402,"date":"2026-10-07T16:15:19","date_gmt":"2026-10-07T16:15:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/fivemor.com\/?p=7079402"},"modified":"2026-10-07T16:15:19","modified_gmt":"2026-10-07T16:15:19","slug":"working-with-a-great-partner","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/fivemor.com\/?p=7079402","title":{"rendered":"Working With A Great Partner"},"content":{"rendered":"<p> <br \/>\n<\/p>\n<div id=\"post-body-7577717724981886199\" itemprop=\"description articleBody\">\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><span style=\"font-family: arial;\">When I worked at Eddie Bauer, I was part of what was called the &#8220;Catalog Business Team&#8221; &#8230; CBT. It was our job to execute the catalog and ecommerce marketing, merchandising, inventory, creative, and operational team plans. Not being Lemonheads, we took our mandate further. We acted like we owned the catalog\/ecommerce division, for good reason of course, because if we messed up, we were fired. Best to be fired setting the tone rather than following marching orders.<\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><span style=\"font-family: arial;\">I was responsible for catalog marketing and analytics. My inventory partner was the best. We made the company a ton of money by working together, partnering on what our business \/ sales plan would be long before anybody else paid attention. By doing that, we had a solid plan when the Executives chose to pay attention. They nibbled around the edges of the plan, but the plan was truly our plan.<\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><span style=\"font-family: arial;\">The most profit the catalog\/ecommerce channel ever generated happened on our watch.<\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><span style=\"font-family: arial;\">We partnered on dictating the merchandise assortment we&#8217;d feature in catalog and online. Back then the catalog drove everything, today it would be quite a different story. Let&#8217;s pretend that last year&#8217;s October catalog had the following composition.<\/span><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><span style=\"font-family: arial;\">24 pages of mens existing merch.<\/span><\/li>\n<li><span style=\"font-family: arial;\">24 pages of mens new merch.<\/span><\/li>\n<li><span style=\"font-family: arial;\">36 pages of womens existing merch.<\/span><\/li>\n<li><span style=\"font-family: arial;\">36 pages of womens new merch.<\/span><\/li>\n<li><span style=\"font-family: arial;\">8 pages of home.<\/span><\/li>\n<li><span style=\"font-family: arial;\">8 pages of womens tailored merch.<\/span><\/li>\n<li><span style=\"font-family: arial;\">136 pages total.<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><span style=\"font-family: arial;\">I would determine how many pages we could profitably mail next year, based on last year&#8217;s productivity. Let&#8217;s say I could only author 120 pages. My partner would go back and optimize performance of each category above based on last year&#8217;s productivity, yielding a plan that might look like this.<\/span><\/p>\n<ul style=\"text-align: justify;\">\n<li><span style=\"font-family: arial;\">16 pages of mens existing merch.<\/span><\/li>\n<li><span style=\"font-family: arial;\">20 pages of mens new merch.<\/span><\/li>\n<li><span style=\"font-family: arial;\">40 pages of womens existing merch.<\/span><\/li>\n<li><span style=\"font-family: arial;\">36 pages of womens new merch.<\/span><\/li>\n<li><span style=\"font-family: arial;\">4 pages of home.<\/span><\/li>\n<li><span style=\"font-family: arial;\">4 pages of womens tailored merch.<\/span><\/li>\n<li><span style=\"font-family: arial;\">120 pages total.<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><span style=\"font-family: arial;\">From here, I&#8217;d calculate the expected productivity of the pages. Fewer pages means less sales but better productivity. I&#8217;d calculate &#8220;merchandise productivity&#8221; &#8230; showing that my partner&#8217;s optimization resulted in each page being 10% more productive. Sales would decrease, but each page was more profitable. This allowed me to circulate deeper, converting more customers.<\/span><\/p>\n<div style=\"text-align: justify;\">\n<ul>\n<li><span style=\"font-family: arial;\">Last Year:\u00a0 3,000,000 catalogs at 136 pages, sales = $20,000,000. Demand per Thousand Pages Circulated = $49.02.<\/span><\/li>\n<li><span style=\"font-family: arial;\">Next Year:\u00a0 3,500,000 catalogs at 120 pages, sales = $22,320,000. Demand per Thousand Pages Circulated = $53.14.<\/span><\/li>\n<li><span style=\"font-family: arial;\">Demand\/Sales would be +12%, ad costs would be +3%, profit would increase by $700,000.<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><span style=\"font-family: arial;\">We replicated this for every catalog we&#8217;d mail, we&#8217;d adjust merchandise productivity and give direction to the nascent ecommerce team, our plan would fold into plans for the call center, the distribution center, for inventory buys, and it would give direction to our merchants and creative team.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-family: arial;\">There were two teams that generally argued with the plan.<\/span><\/p>\n<div>\n<ol>\n<li><span style=\"font-family: arial;\">The merchandising team.<\/span><\/li>\n<li><span style=\"font-family: arial;\">The creative team.<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<p><span style=\"font-family: arial;\">The merchandising team did not like constraints &#8230; constraints like &#8220;16 pages of mens existing merchandise&#8221;. They wanted 32 pages. My partner and I would run the scenarios for everybody, showing how much sales\/profit we&#8217;d give up adhering to their direction. To some extent this happens at every company, but disciplined companies push back when the merchants want &#8220;more&#8221;.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<p><span style=\"font-family: arial;\">The creative team did not like constraints. They wanted eight pages for &#8220;branding&#8221;. No selling. We&#8217;d explain that was like flushing $80,000 of profit down the toilet. We&#8217;d ask the creative folks if they wanted to explain their ideas to the CEO. They didn&#8217;t want to explain their ideas to the CEO.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-family: arial;\">There&#8217;s nothing that destroys the profitability of an old-school catalog division like a creative director who wants to explore &#8220;branding&#8221;.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-family: arial;\">But when you have a great business partner &#8230; and the two of you work in lock-step &#8230; you can achieve record profit.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-family: arial;\">Within a year I&#8217;d leave to work in the dot-com world (what ultimately became the &#8216;retargeting&#8217; industry), watched my stock options go from 78 13\/16 to 1, then accepted a job at Nordstrom, where I again had great partners (the merchant\/creative person and the inventory person were both very good).<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-family: arial;\">There are few things in business more enjoyable than working with great partners who have facts and work in lock-step with you to achieve great things &#8230; and then great things happen.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>When I worked at Eddie Bauer, I was part of what was called the &#8220;Catalog Business Team&#8221; &#8230; CBT. It was our job to execute the catalog and ecommerce marketing, merchandising, inventory, creative, and operational team plans. Not being Lemonheads, we took our mandate further. We acted like we owned the catalog\/ecommerce division, for good [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12033],"tags":[2338,4327,1600],"dealstore":[],"offerexpiration":[],"class_list":["post-7079402","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-analytics","tag-great","tag-partner","tag-working"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v26.4 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>Working With A Great Partner - Som2ny Network<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/fivemor.com\/?p=7079402\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Working With A Great Partner - Som2ny Network\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"When I worked at Eddie Bauer, I was part of what was called the &#8220;Catalog Business Team&#8221; &#8230; CBT. 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