Live from ECMOD: N Brown’s Internet Centricity
(Multichannel Merchant) N Brown Group is as traditional a catalog company as you can get. It has roughly 20 titles, among them JD Williams, 50 Plus, and Simply Be, most of which target women 45-65 years old. About 75% of its revenue is from apparel and footwear, with plus-size clothing accounting for a significant portion. About 1.4 million of its more than 2 million customers run an account with the company, in keeping with the tradition, now dying out, of U.K. catalogs as a means of buying on credit for consumers who didn’t qualify for bank credit cards.
Yet in his session at the European Catalogue and Mail Order Days conference in London, N Brown chief executive Alan White declared: “We see ourselves as ultimately being Internet centric rather than catalog centric.” And in fact, in addition to its 20 print catalogs, N Brown operates 42 Web sites, including clearance sites and pure-plays.
Like most other catalog companies, White said, N Brown had originally viewed the Web as an ordering channel that could save the company money on fulfillment costs; each Web order costs N Brown 70 pence less to process than each phone order. Then the company realized how the Internet could efficiently enable range extensions. During the past World Cup, for example, N Brown sold
