Jeff clearly articulates some key facts that are shaping the debate around paper-based direct marketing:

More than 17 billion catalogs were mailed in the U.S. last year — about 56 for every American.

In the U.S., catalogs account for 3% of the roughly 80 million tons of paper products used annually.

Much of what used to be done through the mail, including bill payments and personal correspondence, is now handled electronically.

The average U.S. catalog retailer reported mailing about 21 million catalogs in 2007, sending out a new edition every 26 days.

Only 1.3% of those catalogs generated a sale

The paper typically used in catalogs contains about 10% recycled content, according to industry consultant RISI. That is far less than paper in general, which typically contains about 30% recycled content.

Consumers who received catalogs from a retailer spent 28% more on that retailer’s Web site than those who didn’t get a catalog.

Jeff’s article includes some clear insight on the topic.  As the title of his article “Marketers Still Prefer a Paper Trail” implies:

But catalogs pay. Like so many environmental initiatives, from solar energy to hybrid cars, reducing the impact of catalogs runs into economic realities that favor the old way of doing things.

But there is hope and that is where Catalog Choice comes in.  First, consumers who want to slow the flow of unwanted catalogs can use our service to opt-out.  Now that we are two years into our effort, our systems are honed and we are efficiently delivering and verifying that the mailer will honor consumer requests to over 1,000 mailers.

Jeff notes:

The catalog industry says it is working hard to reduce the environmental impact of its mailings, by pushing retailers to increase their reliance on recycled paper and by making it easier for consumers to opt out of mailings they don’t want to receive.

But we have to do more than just close down a channel.  In order to facilitate significant change in the direct mail industry, viable digital alternatives need to emerge.  Jeff clearly describes the vision behind our iCatalog program following a lenghty call with me.

Jeff writes:

Chuck Teller, executive director of Catalog Choice, is working on an idea that could wean catalog retailers away from paper-based marketing without hurting their businesses. His “iCatalog” aims to adapt the accessibility of a paper catalog to the digital realm. Using an online widget that consumers can install on a personal Web page or social-networking site, Catalog Choice continually updates and customizes retailers’ product selections.

This is where you come in. We need you to use the iCatalogs and give us your feedback.  What works; what needs improving?  Collect your favorite brands and build your list of favorites for the coming holiday.  When you are ready to buy, click through to the brands web site from the Buy Now link in the iCatalog.  Each retailer provides a small percentage of the sales price back to Catalog Choice, which helps us fund our free mail preference service.

We all know how convenient and effective labeling rules can be.  Whether it’s a printed warning on a cigarette packet about smoking’s health hazards, the listing of trans fat on a food label, or a recycling logo on packaging, labels inform our choices and empower our actions.  We are hoping that you’ll see more Catalog Choice logos printed on catalogs and that marketers will make mail preference choices more visible and convenient on their websites.

And here’s where you can help.  Look at the catalogs you receive this month and through the holidays.  Can you easily find the notice for how to modify or eliminate the mailing?  Is it easy to read and understand?  Let us know which companies are doing a good job and which ones need improvement.  We’ll pass on the results of your findings to mailers and the DMA.   Thanks for your help!

Green America’s vision for the next 25 years is for us to join together to rapidly deploy their 25 strategies across the economy, so that the marketplace and our society completes the shift to green by the middle of the century.

You can read the entire article here, starting on page 8.  You will find Catalog Choice in item 17 – Be WoodWise.

So what is necessary to give consumers the ability to opt-in to getting the white pages?  Like many things, some laws have to be changed.  There is something that you can do about it.  Head over to Banthephonebook.org and sign their petition.

Thanks to NPR for running a short segment on this.

I can’t remember the last time I used the white pages to look up a phone number.  Can you?

The iCatalog:

1. lets you browse products from your favorite retailers in the privacy of your digital home – your computer’s desktop, your personalized homepage (iGoogle, MyYahoo, etc.), your Facebook page, or your secure Catalog Choice account.
2. lets you build a collection of your favorite retailers all in one spot
3. provides real time updates from retailers on new products, special deals and closeout sales, without inundating your email inbox
4. lets you share your discoveries with friends via email, bookmarks and messages in your favorite social network.
5. lets you go entirely paperless, saving natural resources and having fun at the same time.

Let’s take a closer look at an iCatalog from one of our launch partners, Crate&Barrel. Roll your cursor over the widget below and you’ll see a series of category tiles that correspond to the major product categories at Crate&Barrel’s website.  Click the blue arrow > to see the other categories.  It is summertime, so let’s check out what is available in the Outdoor Living category.  To make your browsing easy, each category is divided into various subcategories shown in a convenient list view.  Let’s take a look at the Bristol family of products.  Now you can quickly browse through the products by using the right or left arrows (<  >) along the product strip.  At any time, you can skip back to another category by using the breadcrumbs located in the upper right hand portion of the screen.  See something you like, click Save and a copy is saved to My List or Buy Now to go directly to the product page at www.Crateandbarrel.com.  Want to share you discovery with a friend, select Share and send a quick email with a link to your find.

The best part about the iCatalogs are that you can put them on your desktop or your personal homepage.  I am an avid iGoogle user. I visit my iGoogle page throughout the day to get headline news, weather, stock information. Now, I have set up my iCatalogs page, so I can shop from the privacy of my digital home.  Here is what my personal shopping page looks like.  You can add this set of iCatalogs to your iGoogle page by clicking here (it comes with the cityscape).

We will be building many more iCatalogs in the weeks and months ahead.  Let us know what you think and who else we should add to the iCatalog gallery.  If you are a retailer and you are interested in getting your own iCatalog, contact us at team(at)catalogchoice.org.

Proceeds generated from iCatalogs help us fund our free mail preference service.

A recent article in The Wall Street Journal spotlights the growth and validity of these eco-seals. “As green marketing has proliferated, so has the number of ‘eco-labels’ competing to be the environmental equivalent of a Good Housekeeping seal of approval.”  The article states that there are more than 300 such labels putting a green stamp on everything from cosmetics and seafood to bird-friendly coffee. Is the result helping consumers or creating confusion?   Both, it turns out.  The federal government may need to play a stronger role in shaping eco standards so consumers can trust green marketing promises.  To read the entire article here.

Here’s a sampling of some of the many environmental offerings available through our participating Catalog Choice merchants:

Blue Canoe:  Organically grown cotton clothing – all made in the U.S.A.
Crate & Barrel: An assortment of ecologically harvested and FSC certified outdoor and indoor furniture
Cuddledown:  Many certified eco-friendly items from towels, sheets, blankets and sleepwear
Fair Indigo: Full line of fair trade clothing and jewelry and fashionable organics
Fetch Dog: Eco-friendly dog supplies from dog beds to leashes to toys
Garnet Hill:  Organic cotton clothing, bath accessories, and sleepwear
Johnny’s Selected Seeds:  A variety of organic seeds and tools to help organic growing
REI:  A variety of outdoor gear made from recycled fibers
The Y Catalog:  Organic yoga and fitness clothes, beauty products, and eco-friendly yoga mats
UncommonGoods:  An assortment of handmade, recycled, and organic merchandise

Jen also gets alot of fan mail, on behalf of the team. Here are several that have come in over the last couple weeks.

Just wanted to say THANK YOU so much for providing this great service! Not only am I not receiving unwanted catalogs but I’m also helping to save the environment! Your website also provides me with an easy way of finding any merchant and their website, also saving the environment. Thank you to all those merchants that have honored my request!
Barbara

Thanks so much for this service! I have been inundated with catalogs, so this site has been a tremendous help to me. I will be mailing a donation.

Kind regards, Jade

I am down to an occasional straggler as far as catalogs go! Many thanks for your help. I really appreciate your service and have been telling as many people as possible about it. In the latter part of 2007, I began using Catalog Choice. Initially, I visited the site frequently in my quest to end the onslaught of unsolicited catalogs in my mail box. That mission has been accomplished with your help.  Since then, I continue to visit Catalog Choice periodically to check on the status of my choices. Each time, I have been impressed with the ongoing improvements to the site. It’s easier than ever to use the site and access/review the information about my choices.  Interestingly, it’s very easy to request a catalog online but next to impossible to “unsubscribe” to one online. All the more reason to thank you for creating Catalog Choice, an ideal solution to that lack.

An appreciative fan,  Lynn

You are nothing short of phenomenal! I was listed on over 200 catalog mailing lists. We literally had to buy a larger box to accommodate them all. Yes, it took a while for me to “opt out” of so many of them, but going to my mailbox these days is a pleasure… I now average about 6 a week…almost all of them are welcome.  Thank you for your remarkable service…it truly works.

I want to share with you how Catalog Choice is making a difference. In
2001, at the urging of my spouse, who was amazed and disgusted with how
many catalogs were arriving in our mailbox, I collected, counted, and
catalogued all the catalogs for the entire year. By the end of the
year, we had a 3-foot high stack of catalogs — a total of 396. I kept
track of how many we received each month, and how many from each
company. (I’m an evaluator by profession). I signed up with Catalog
Choice in late 2007, and after a full year of using Catalog Choice, I
decided to track the catalogs coming in the door again this year (2009).
For the first three months of this year, we have seen a 69% decline in
the number of catalogs compared to the first three months of 2001.
That’s a huge difference!!! I’m going to collect them all year, and
maybe as some of the reluctant-to-stop companies finally get on board, I’ll see even fewer in
my mailbox.
Thank you,
Carole

I have definitely noticed a difference–42 catalogues confirmed! I am so pleased! Congratulations on pulling this off!  Thanks so much, Josie

If you have a story that you would like to share with us about how you have taken control of your mailbox, send us an email at Team(at)catalogchoice.org – we would love to hear what you have to say.

The site navigation has moved from the left-hand side of the site to tabs and a login strip.  The tabs are the key elements of the site – Dashboard, Find Catalogs, My Choices, Cool Catalogs, Invite Friends and Donation.

Other key elements of the navigation have been moved to the Login strip, located at the top of the page.  In the lefthand portion of the Login strip, you will find About Us, Blog, Privacy, FAQ and Contact us.  On the right side of the Login strip, there is a log out link and a link to My Profile.  The screen shot below shows you where each element of the original UI has been moved.

This change will make it straight forward for us to add in other forms of mail (beyond catalogs) to the site.  Look for this upgrade in the near future.

Still Receiving is back.  For a week, we removed the Still Receiving link from My Choices.  We heard from alot of members that they wanted it back.  We have put it back in My Choices. It works slightly different than before.  When you select Still Receiving, you will be taken to the catalog’s mail preference page where you will need to fill out the request form again.  This will allow us to use the most up to date contact method for the catalog and capture the relevant name and address information.

You can now add a new mailbox on the mail preference form.  We have made it easier to add new addresses while you are filling out the mail preference request.  The new mailbox link is right on the form so you can add a new address without leaving the page.

We have added a new mail preference delivery method that we refer to as “Form pop-up”.  While over 525 catalog titles use our secure merchant account to obtain your requests, many catalog mailers continue to ignore your request provided through our free merchant service.  We have been emailing your requests to hundreds of merchants using our anonymous email system – we never release your email address for a mail preference request.

The new method is designed for companies that use “contact us” forms on their site instead of email addresses.  When you go to set a mail preference request for one of these companies, we will open their contact us form within our site so that you can fill out the form.  If you want to keep your email private and have the company’s email response stored in your Catalog Choice account, use the anonymous email address shown on the top of the page.  When you are done filling out the form, select the “Save and Go Back” button and we will record the request in your account.  We recognize that the user experience of the form pop-up is a little jarring since a new website will suddenly show up on the page.  However, this feature is necessary to make the service work for a number of merchants.

We hope you like the site upgrades and continue to pass the word about Catalog Choice.  Together, we are making a difference in the world of direct marketing for the good of the consumer, the enviroment and the mailer.  As always, we welcome your comments below.

At Catalog Choice, we are celebrating Earth Day by making it easier for consumers and merchants to reduce the amount of unwanted mail in their mailbox and go paperless.  We are celebrating the accomplishments of our one million members and 500 catalog partners who together, in just 18 months, have:

• removed over 85 million unwanted catalogs a year from the mail stream.
• Saved more than 192,000 trees and
• Prevented 82 million pounds of greenhouse gas emissions, the equivalent of removing about 7,500 cars off the road (Source: Environmental Defense paper calculator)

These are significant accomplishments for our community.  These are saving that don’t materialize if we take the easy way out and just recycle or throw away unwanted catalogs.  These savings require our members to record their mail preference for each catalog title and our merchant partners to integrate our preference file into their mailing processes.  While it seems easy, there are lots of moving parts that need to fit together to make the process work.  Today, we are celebrating the fact that we have used the power of the Internet and human ingenuity to removed over 85 million unwanted catalogs a year from the mail stream.

For Earth Day’s sake, let’s do more to develop processes that make our world more resource efficient.  In the world of direct marketing, let’s improve channels of communication between consumers and companies so that companies can get their marketing messages to the people who want them as efficiently as possible.