Deep Dive: Turning the Catalog Into a Living Sales Channel

0:00Kate Robertson: And here's where it actually breaks. So you spend months making this catalog, right? It goes out and not even a month later you have new prices, you obviously have new products, you have products that don't even exist anymore. So now you're sitting with this catalog that's quite new but not really. So you have to make a compromise. Like do I redo it? Do I send a correction sheet? Do I just hope nobody orders the discontinued one? Usually it ends up with the rep attaching an Excel spreadsheet with the real prices next to the PDF. So now you have two documents that kind of disagree in the same email thread.

0:40Bogdan Mile: The product catalog is one of the oldest tools in commerce and one of the most underrated. Long before storefronts went digital, the catalog was how a seller reached a buyer they'd never met. It carried the products, the prices, and in a real sense, the whole relationship. Farmers ordered tools from it, households furnished their homes from it, and retail empires were built on the strength of a book that showed up in the mail. What's easy to forget is how much power lived inside those pages. A catalog set expectations, it shaped demand, it told buyers what was possible and what it would cost. And for a manufacturer or a distributor, the catalog wasn't marketing, it was the business.

1:22Bogdan Mile: That hasn't changed as much as you'd think. In wholesale, the catalog is still where the buying decision happens. A distributor's reps still walk into meetings organized around it. Buyers flip through a range and decide what to stock, and the catalog remains the center of the commercial relationship. What has changed is the medium and the expectations that come with it. A printed book that took three months to produce and went out of date the week it shipped no longer fits how business moves. Buyers expect current prices, live availability, and something they can act on immediately. They expect the catalog to behave like every other digital channel, dynamic, measurable, and always up to date.

2:04Bogdan Mile: That's the tension we're exploring today in a special deep dive episode of Retail Remix. The catalog isn't going away. It's becoming something new. And Bogdan Mille, the chief product officer at FlipSnack, works at the point where that shift is happening. He built Catology, a Flipsnack product that turns a company's product feed into a living catalog. We'll start with where catalogs came from and why they still matter, and then work our way toward the very real problems facing wholesalers, manufacturers, distributors, and retailers right now. Let's get into it.

2:42Bogdan Mile: Bogdan, thanks so much for joining us on Retail Remix.

2:46Kate Robertson: Of course, Kate. Thanks for having me.

2:47Bogdan Mile: For a lot of us, the concept of the catalog is tied to nostalgia, you know, receiving this thick book in the mail and flipping through it, finding your favorite Christmas presents that comes to mind. But in wholesale, of course, it's not really about that. Can you explain the role the catalog plays in a wholesale relationship and why it's so different from the consumer shopping experience?

3:15Kate Robertson: Yeah, I mean, listen, the nostalgia part is real. I grew up with those two. But in wholesale, I think the catalog was never something you actually enjoyed. It was something you actually worked from. So the simplest way I can put it is when I open a consumer catalog, I'm actually looking for something that I want. And when a buyer opens a wholesale catalog, they're typically looking for what they can sell at what price and in what quantity. It's not necessarily a mood. It's more like a commercial document. And honestly, it sits very close to the order form. And also the person reading it isn't really spending their own money on themselves, right?

3:53Kate Robertson: They're deciding what a hundred stores will carry for the next, let's say, six months. So if they get it wrong, it's their problem for quite a long time. So they read it very differently, almost like a contract. The other thing, and honestly, this took me years of watching our customers to really understand, is that the catalog is how sales rep actually communicate. So it isn't marketing that supports the sale. It is the actual sale.

4:17Bogdan Mile: The medium has changed completely from print to PDF to something digital and live. But the catalog itself hasn't lost that really important role that it's playing. Why do you think the catalog has stayed so central to wholesale, even as so much of commerce has moved online?

4:37Kate Robertson: Yeah, I think because even though the commerce went online, I think the buying decision didn't. And here's the thing. Most wholesalers with a B2B web shop, they still make catalogs because the catalog does things a shop just can't. Like, for example, a rep can build a bespoke catalog for one client in a few clicks. If a buyer only cares about, let's say, countertops and backsplashes, they get countertops and backsplashes. So they're not going to be filled with 15 ,000 other SKUs. A web shop can't do that. It just shows everything to everyone. And, you know, print isn't that either. Some buyers still want paper, like, for example, at the trade show or a showroom.

5:16Kate Robertson: You can print a catalog, but you can't really print a web shop. So, yes, as you've mentioned, the medium kept changing, but the job didn't. Somebody still has to present a range to somebody else and help them decide. And that, I think, is the catalog.

5:30Bogdan Mile: So the role has stayed the same, but expectations around it have shifted. What do today's buyers expect from a catalog that they never would have expected from a printed book? And where does the old way start to break down?

5:46Kate Robertson: I don't think buyers change their expectations for catalogs specifically. I think they change them for everything. and the catalogs just didn't keep up. More specifically, I'd say three things, right? So they definitely expect the price to be today's price, not the price that it was when it was printed. They also expect to know if it's in stock before they actually place the order. And definitely they expect to be able to place that order from the catalog directly, not via email or phone. None of that was a fair expectation from a printed book, but all of it is a fair expectation from a link. and here's where it actually breaks.

6:23Kate Robertson: So you spend months making this catalog, right? It goes out and not even a month later, you have new prices. You obviously have new products. You have products that don't even exist anymore. So now you're sitting with this catalog that's quite new, but not really. So you have to make a compromise. Like, do I redo it? Do I send a correction sheet? Do I just hope nobody orders the discontinued one? Usually it ends up with the rep attaching an Excel spreadsheet with the real prices next to the PDF. So now you have two documents that kind of disagree in the same email thread. It's kind of crazy. So that's, in my opinion, the real gap, right?

7:00Kate Robertson: The product data changes every day. The PDF, it is a snapshot of one afternoon. And the only way to close that gap is to start over. So I guess the expectation is simple. Whatever I'm looking at is true right now. And the old way just can't promise that.

7:14Bogdan Mile: So there are a lot of moving pieces with the information that needs to be up to date here. Walk me through how a product catalog actually gets made in a wholesale business today and, you know, how much time it's taking and what it costs.

7:31Kate Robertson: Sure. So, OK, when I started customer support at Flipsnack, I've read a lot of messages from people in the middle of making a catalog and they were almost never about design. They were always about their actual pain, right? So their typical process is, you know, someone exports the products from their PIM system into a spreadsheet. Then it goes to a designer or two or three, depending on the case. They place everything in InDesign, product by product. And that alone just takes weeks, right? So then, of course, you have rounds of proofing because prices have changed while they were working on them.

8:05Kate Robertson: Then you get approvals, you get export, you get print. So all in all, it takes you months to do that. And honestly, if you ask me, it shouldn't even be legal to make a person do that. There is no amount of coffee that will make that experience pleasant. And also, on top of that, on top of the time that it actually takes for you to create them, you have two more problems, right? So the first problem is the fact that by the time it's out, it's already describing the past. And the second one is because it's so painful to create it, nobody really wants to touch it again, right? So if you find a mistake two days after you've created your catalog, you just have to live with that, right?

8:44Kate Robertson: You're going to be living with that for maybe six months until you make the new one. The last thing I would maybe point here is the fact that you cannot make a version for, let's say, Germany or for that one big customer because you just can't afford to do it.

8:56Bogdan Mile: Right.

9:01Kate Robertson: Catalogy turns your product feed into a branded shoppable product catalog in seconds. Connect your ERP, PIM, or spreadsheet and publish your entire range to one link that never goes out of date with ordering built right into the page. Send your feed and we will build your first catalog with your own products free of charge so you can see it with your own data before deciding anything. Contact us at Petalogy.com.

9:26Bogdan Mile: There is another problem that you and I have talked about before where, you know, you send a PDF to 15 accounts and then there's sort of a visibility gap once the catalog leaves your system.

9:42Kate Robertson: Yeah, basically you have zero visibility. Right, zero visibility. So nothing, basically. You see nothing. You send it and then you wait. You don't know if they've opened it. You don't know if they've reached page 36 where your new range is. You don't even know if they spent enough time on it. And everything else in the business is measured, right? So you have the newsletter, you have the website, but the one document the whole relationship is built on is like a black box. And then the order comes back, right? And this is the part people outside wholesale don't believe. So wholesale is still very much old fashioned.

10:18Kate Robertson: A lot of the companies that come to us, they're selling by phone, right? or a buyer has to fill a spreadsheet by hand from a PDF code by code. We've even had clients, and I'm not joking, where the buyer sends WhatsApp screenshots of the catalog pages and it circles the products with WhatsApp's drawing tool and writes the quantities in a separate message. And obviously someone at the other end has to sit there and type all that into the system. So it's crazy. It's madness. You get so many errors. You get wrong codes, wrong quantities. is you get a product that was discontinued maybe two months ago.

10:54Kate Robertson: It's just so much time. And obviously, a lot of clients lost because it's a quite frustrating experience, right? Nobody really talks about this because, frankly, it's embarrassing, right? But it's everywhere. But the moment that catalog is a link instead of a file, then both sides change, right? You see who opened it, how long they stayed, which pages, and the order happens inside the catalog. So the rep stops guessing and the buyer stops circling things in their screenshots.

11:21Bogdan Mile: Yes, you do see this at trade shows all the time, this exact kind of behavior. This format has been under pressure from the pandemic and now with buyers starting their research through AI assistance. You've said both moments point to the same root cause. What is that root cause and why does it keep showing up?

11:45Kate Robertson: Yeah, so the root cause is that the catalog was always a copy of the product information. It was never a connection to the product information itself. It gets made once and then from that moment, it just starts to drift. So in 2020, with the coronavirus, that showed up in a very, very physical way, right? So trade shows stopped, visits stopped, and suddenly the document had to work without a person in the room actually explaining it. And it couldn't, right? Because it was designed for a table and not for a screen. And most companies, they just put the same PDF online and called it digital, right?

12:18Kate Robertson: It wasn't, right? It was the same thing, but with just a download button. I think now it's showing up again with the different sites. So with the new AI thing, buyers start with an AI assistant, right? Like Cloud or ChatGPT, but they don't use it to actually buy, but they use it more like to find suppliers. So who makes this? Who ships it in my region? Like, give me five names. That will be the prompt. So what you get from AI is just an introduction. That's it. the buyer still lands on your side and you still have to win them, right? So there's then the same old question that comes back, like what do they land on?

12:51Kate Robertson: Is it a PDF from last spring that they have to download and scroll through? Or is it a live catalog with today's prices that they can order from? Basically, it's the same door, it's the same buyer, but one of those closes the deal and the other one loses it. And both times, I think it's the same weakness. So it's the information that is locked in a format made for paper and is disconnected from the real data. And it keeps coming back because I think companies keep fixing the surface, you know, like a nicer PDF, a flip animation, this and that, instead of just fixing where the data actually comes from.

13:26Bogdan Mile: Flipsnack has worked with enterprise companies for 15 years and over that time, one group kept surfacing the same problem. Tell us more about how that led to Catology and what that group actually changes about how a catalog gets created and managed.

13:46Kate Robertson: Yeah, so people hear Flipbook and they think small, right? But it's just not the case. Like, for example, FlipSnak is an enterprise publishing platform, right? 15 years, we've been working with some of the largest companies in the world, whether it's retailers, universities, hotel groups, you know, beauty and consumer brands, you name it, real estate networks. they're all running their catalogs, their sales materials, or their internal documents on it with everything that an enterprise might need. You know, a single sign on, security, brand control, all the good stuff. But in those 15 years, one use case got pushed to was harder than any other.

14:21Kate Robertson: And that's just catalogs. So the bigger the company, the harder they pushed because they had the most products. They had the most markets, the most versions, and the most money on the line when the page was wrong. And in different words, they all ask for the same thing. Basically, it's connect this to my product data, cut down the time it takes for me to create these catalogs. So essentially, just stop making me rebuild it. And look, we've been going that way for years. But at some point, it's obvious you can't get there by just adding features to a publishing platform. It has to start with the data.

14:54Kate Robertson: So we built Catalogy as its own standalone product on top of everything Flipsnack already does. The pitch here is that product data goes in, catalogs come out, right? You connect the PIM and you generate the catalog that's on brand in a few clicks instead of a few months. Thousands of SKUs, they're always live and the buyer can actually add these products from the catalog into a quote that gets sent to the sales team. Oh, and you get full visibility on the catalog.

15:20Bogdan Mile: Amazing. You have some very interesting sounding case studies. Pandora runs 130 stores off a single system. Pot Factory cut their catalog production from up to 10 days to under 24 hours. And Melissa and Doug saw conversion climb by as much as 90%. Tell us more about what those examples are showing you about what happens when the catalog becomes a living channel instead of a static document?

15:53Kate Robertson: Yeah, I see those as three different things people get out from the same change. So in Pandora's case, it's all about control. They have one system. Everyone sees the same thing. Nobody has an old version on their desk. With Podfactory, it's all about speed. And in Melissa and Doug's case, it's all about the result. Because when a buyer can act inside the catalog, guess what? They do act on it. But if I'm being honest, the one that I care most about, I would say, is the speed. And not because faster is nicer, but because when a catalog takes between 40 to 60 days to create, you behave a certain way.

16:29Kate Robertson: You make one for everyone. You don't change it because you really can't, right? You can't afford it. But when it takes a day or less, then you start behaving differently, right? Then you make one for this customer, one for the other customer. Then you try something new for a month. Then you find a mistake and you fix it on the spot. So for me, these examples don't say, look, it's faster and it converts. They say the catalog can stop being an event and start being something that you run every week. And that, I think, is the real change.

16:58Bogdan Mile: Tell us what's next for the wholesale catalog. Do you have any cool features in the works? Where is this going?

17:04Kate Robertson: Well, yeah, some of what people call the feature is already there. It's already here. So buying inside the catalog, life prices, livestock. We have customers doing that already today, right? So I'm not going to count that as next. What I think is next in catalogs for me is I think it just stops being just one thing. Today, even a live catalog is still one catalog that everybody opens. So the next step, I think, is that every buyer opens a different one with your assortments, your prices, your language, your product that you ordered last time up front, new products that you need to try. And they all get assembled the moment you guys open up the catalog.

17:45Kate Robertson: So think of it like a thousand buyers having a thousand catalogs, each for their specific need and use case, and there's no designer in sight to touch any of the catalogs. I think that would be the future of the catalogs. But yeah, also, then it turns around and starts talking back to you, right? So today, that data flows one way into the catalog. Soon, I think what happens inside it is what gets looked at. Ordered, let's say ignored. It all flows back and changes the assortment. So the catalog stops reflecting your product decision and more like starts making the decisions for you. And then I think this is the part that I find more most interesting is the fact that the reader isn't even a person.

18:28Kate Robertson: A buyer's assistant opens your catalog, asks what you have in a certain size, asks for a price on, let's say, 200 units. And your catalog answers and should be no email, no rep, no PDF. I think whoever's catalog can hold that conversation better wins the buyer. So if you ask me what the catalog is in five years, I don't think it's a document that you make. I think it's more like a live surface of the relationship between a supplier and a buyer. And I think print will just be one of those things where you can just click and export it on. Right. But it's going to be pretty much forgotten. Wow.

19:06Bogdan Mile: So interesting. And for a company still working the old way, what's a realistic first step? Where should they start if they want to create a live wholesale catalog document?

19:20Kate Robertson: My advice is don't start with the design. I know everyone wants to. I know it's exciting. I know it's sexy, but I think it's the wrong end. You should start with the foundation. One clean set of data, like one category, one market, a couple hundred products. You get the images, the prices right, the descriptions right. I know it's boring, but you got AI for that, so it should help you out a lot nowadays to generate all of that. But once you do that, then you just make one live catalog from it and you send that to, let's say, five handful, like five customers that you have a good relationship with.

19:53Kate Robertson: And just watch what they do. That's what it takes you like two, maybe three weeks to do all of that experiment. I promise you, you will learn more from those five customers opening a link than you will from an entire year of discussing the next sprint, like the next sprint run. The hard part for me, I think it's the data. But once that data is clean and pretty, I think the catalog is just the easy part. So most companies do it the other way around.

20:16Bogdan Mile: That's great. Thank you, Bogdan, so much for this conversation. I feel like the first thing I'm going to do after we finish chatting is going and looking up some examples of these cool sounding catalogs. Thanks again for joining us.

20:30Kate Robertson: Definitely. It was very nice to talk to you today, Kate. Thank you.

20:34Bogdan Mile: Thanks for joining us for another episode of Retail Remix. Be sure to subscribe so you don't miss a future episode. You can find us on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, YouTube, or your favorite podcast app. Until next time, keep mixing it up.