Mail order catalog
A mail order catalog is a listing of goods offered by a particular mail order company; it is a particularly detailed form of the advertising brochure .
In the mail order catalog, the goods are usually shown and illustrated. In addition, you will often find structured further information on the article in text form, in each case for example the price. This is usually printed in a conspicuous design next to the product image.
history
American entrepreneur Aaron Montgomery Ward sent his first mail order catalog in 1872 for his mail order business in Chicago. It consisted of a single sheet of paper with the offers and shipping terms.
In German-speaking countries, the first illustrated catalogs were sent from 1886 by the men's outfitter Mey & Edlich , which was founded in 1870 and still operates as a mail order business today . The then Saxon purveyor to the court Mey & Edlich is considered to be the founder of the German mail order business. Josef Witt , founder of the Witt Weiden mail order company, was one of the first to pick up on the idea of the mail order catalog in Germany . In 1907, Witt listed a selection of his product range in a directory with appealing descriptions and illustrations. His goal was to expand his customer base regardless of the geographic location of the potential customers.
Kastner & Öhler Versand was founded in Graz in 1887 , making it the oldest mail order company in Austria.
Popular mail-order catalogs in German-speaking countries were, for example, the catalogs from Otto , Quelle , Neckermann or the specialty area Conrad Electronic in the universal trade area .
“Yes, it still exists, 'our petty bourgeois hell'. These are the words the young Hans Magnus Enzensberger used in 1960 to characterize Neckermann's range of goods in a way that was critical of culture. He founded the genre of mail order catalog reviews for the young Federal Republic. This type of reading has been tried again and again since then in order to find out about the zeitgeist in the consumption Bibles of the economic miracle by Neckermann, Otto or Quelle. "
In the course of the online presentation of goods , the importance of catalogs has declined sharply since the 2000s. The Quelle and Neckermann catalogs have now ceased to appear. However, there is still a demand for catalogs in digital form. The market is shared by a handful of platforms on which requests for PDF catalogs or catalogs that can be browsed online are listed in directories and forwarded to the respective providers. These are, for example, katalog.com , the catalog kiosk and 123kataloge - on the market for over 20 years .
Individual evidence
- ↑ Shopping Innovations: The History of the Shopping Mall. August 9, 2016
- ^ 1. Mey & Edlich catalog . In: The New York Public Library Digital Collections . January 31, 2017 ( nypl.org [accessed May 16, 2018]).
- ↑ Mey & Edlich - Buy fashion for men online. Retrieved May 16, 2018 .
- ^ André Loh-Kliesch: Mey, Ernst - entrepreneur in Leipzig. Retrieved May 16, 2018 .
- ↑ DiePresse.com: Neckermann should have been saved. Accessed December 16, 2012 : “Eurotops has been present on the Austrian market for five years and, like Neckermann, is active in the catalog business. Originally founded as Kastner & Öhler Versand in 1887 - and thus the oldest mail order company in German-speaking countries - the company was sold to the German company Neckermann in 1994. "