Red Envelope No More?

According to Techcrunch, Red Envelope is shutting down.

Red Envelope is a catalog/online multichannel gift retailer. Folks aligned with gifts, apparel, and catalogs are really being tested right now.

This individual offers Red Envelope a few suggestions on how he would have fixed the business.

If you're somebody who truly has a proven track record at re-configuring catalog customer acquisition strategies into profitable online marketing tactics, the world is your oyster. It's a skill not currently being taught by multichannel advocates.

Ann Curry And The Today Show Feature The Cute Kids Cancelling Catalogs

If you were at work this morning when The Today Show featured a piece on how to cancel catalogs, please watch the segment here.

Ann Curry sat at a computer monitor, and opted-out of Red Envelope, Pottery Barn and Mrs. Fields catalogs.

Kudos to Catalog Choice and those cute kids for getting attention via grass roots efforts. This goes to show you how individuals and small teams can make a difference. How things get done in this world is rapidly changing ... Catalog Choice provides a great example of how to market a useful service via social media, illustrating how mainstream media does the work for you when social media is executed properly.

Catalog Choice reports that they've had an onslaught of traffic today. Ted Wells reports that 500 visitors an hour are checking out his blog.

The Today Show, via their website at MSNBC, is challenging all schools to do what the cute kids accomplished. Here is a link to the Today Show Challenge.

Of course, there's some level of irony involved in having NBC and The Today Show take shots at companies like Red Envelope, Pottery Barn, and Mrs. Fields.

When I ran Ann Curry's video on the MSNBC site, I was subjected to unsolicited advertising from Best Buy, I could not fast-forward over the ad, MSNBC forced me to watch it. I might have wanted to opt-out of that advertising opportunity, however, I could not.

Here's a sampling of the national companies that pay the salaries of employees of The Today Show via unsolicited commercials I did not have a choice to opt-out of while watching the program in real-time this morning:

• Honda, Smuckers, Hyundai, Pillsbury, Olay, Air Wick, Dannon, Clorox, Turbo Tax, Slim Fast, Pampers, Cheerios, Kashi, Olive Garden, Progresso, Oreo, Bank of America, Head and Shoulders, Nestle, Lysol, Visine, Capital One.
  

Obviously, I cannot speak to any details on the practices of these companies ... I am simply hopeful that all of these companies don't over-harvest trees or mis-use fossil fuels to produce the products, services and packaging that paid the salaries of the folks bringing us The Today Show, the show that promoted Catalog Choice.

Multichannel Forensics at Red Envelope

Reading the comments of leadership at Red Envelope, you cannot help but believe that they conducted some sort of Multichannel Forensics analysis. That's a good thing, and I had nothing to do with it!!!

The comments suggest that Red Envelope is not acquiring enough new customers to fuel growth ... and the failure to acquire enough new customers means that the business is projecting lower sales in the next twelve months. This is the very essence of a Multichannel Forensics analysis ... identifying negative or positive business trends before they happen! Good job to the person(s) responsible for initiating this analysis!


Read these comments from Chairman John Pound:

"The negative trends that can be seen in our fourth quarter results reflect three core legacies of last year. They are: an uninspired and unfocused creative message (as manifested in both our catalogs and our web site); an unfocused and tired product assortment; and a shift in our marketing focus away from the critical necessity of customer acquisition".

"In particular, we expect that there will be a cumulative overhang from our lower customer acquisition rates that will affect the balance of this fiscal year, simply because we are drawing on a smaller and less motivated customer base relative to the Company's historical customer pool. We currently estimate that it will take two to four quarters to change direction as we rebuild the customer file. While it is difficult to quantify the impact at this time, we currently believe that for fiscal 2008, RedEnvelope's top line will be below that of fiscal 2007 just ended, and that the Company will experience negative net cash flows".

We will "more effectively drive demand through the web rather than primarily through our catalog distribution (as is currently the case, in spite of notionally being a web business".

We have "tapped our customer data to develop a rigorous understanding of our demographic and the dynamics of the business, we built a baseline financial and operating plan based on a bottoms-up analysis supported by the dynamics of our customer file".

Frank Buettner Named President of Red Envelope

Red Envelope announced the appointment of Frank Buettner to President and COO.

I had the good fortune of playing lunchtime basketball against Frank at least 700 times during my tenure at Lands' End. He was one crafty athlete.

I got to see his professional abilities while working with him at Nordstrom Direct in 2001 and 2002. He did a very nice job of managing a call center, distribution center, and information technology staff. Better yet, he fully understands how to leverage database marketing.

Kudos to Frank!!