L.L. Bean "Shop By Catalog"

L.L. Bean is a $1 billion multi-channel retailer specializing in sporting goods and apparel for outdoors-oriented customers. The company is one of many retailers making print catalogs available online. Many other retailers have taken steps to tighten links between catalog and website by letting customers order items via catalog number on the website. But L.L. Bean takes the strategy further by replicating their print catalogs page-by-page online, taking advantage of shoppers' built-in familiarity with the catalog format, while leveraging technology to improve its presentation in the web environment. By clicking a product image in the catalog, the user is brought directly to an item page in the ecommerce portion of the site.

Business Need

L.L. Bean saw an opportunity to improve the merchandising aspect of their Shop-By-Catalog presentation. In particular, they wanted to leverage their investment in catalog copy. The quality of the L.L. Bean catalog advertising copy is legendary, and contributes significantly to their brand. So the ECommerce group set out to find a new vendor partner to create a presentation that would drive increased revenue by fully leveraging the company's investment in the paper catalogs. In addition, the new vendor partner would also be responsible for converting and integrating some 3000 printed catalog pages per year.

An additional challenge was that part of the mandate for a new solution was that it must reduce costs while improving functionality.

The Solution

T4G´s Cost-effective Shop-By-Catalog Solution Provides Improved Merchandising by allowing users to read catalog copy, and through T4G´s unique product-description roll-overs. T4G´s Content Services works with L.L. Bean´s ECommerce group to ensure that the Shop-By-Catalog presentation is available online when the printed catalog launches. In fact, our first catalog was the 300pp L.L. Bean Christmas 2001, which we delivered in a matter of days, including custom programming, catalog page conversion and all item linking (approx. 900 items). T4G has been providing virtual catalog services to multi-channel retailers since 1999.

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