A well-tanned, fine-boned man lounges on a wicker chair in the middle of a vast lawn, the picture of leisure in his long-sleeve polo shirt and cotton twill trousers. A fresh-faced young woman walks barefoot on the beach, smartly / turned out in white cotton shorts and a sleeveless blouse. A square-jawed baby boomer clad in a classic linen shirt and cotton pants gazes serenely along a shoreline as if he is planning a bright future.
The people in these scenes, which evoke the studied relaxation of a Ralph Lauren ad, look like the sort of folks who would hate to spend any of their precious free time at a shopping mall. In fact, their well-composed snapshots come from the pages of America's popular new crop of mail-order catalogs: Lands' End,* J. Crew and Tweeds. These three retailers are reaping handsome sales by offering sporty, preppy wear to customers who are partial to natural fibers and toll-free shopping. Last year the three companies mailed a total of more than 120 million catalogs to prospective customers in all 50 states.
Many of the buyers are baby boomers, especially working mothers, who have all
but given up on department stores. Says Tess Goodier, 36, of Vienna, Va., mother of two young children: "It's so much easier than going over to J.C. Penney and chasing after my wandering kids." While the new catalog kings have much in common, each is trying to carve out its own identity:
LANDS' END. The largest of the three, Lands' End posted revenues of $456 million for the twelve months ending last January, an increase of 35% from the previous year and not far from the $580 million in sales racked up in 1988 by L.L. Bean, still the captain of the sportswear-catalog industry. Lands' End, launched in 1963 by Chairman Gary Comer, then a 36-year-old advertising copywriter at Young & Rubicam in Chicago, sells moderately priced, well-made staples. Among them: oxford-cloth shirts ($19.50); cotton twill skirts ($32.50); and silk foulard ties ($19). One of the company's specialties is the many-pocketed canvas attache bag ($39.50), which for many people has replaced the formal, hard-sided briefcase.
Lands' End makes its home amid the rolling cornfields of Dodgeville, Wis., (pop. 4,000), where 3,000 workers fill orders in a warehouse the size of ten football fields. The Middle-American locale is what Lands' End is all about. The company cultivates a shamelessly folksy image, urging readers of its magazine ads to call a "friendly southern Wisconsin voice." Lands' End operators, many of whom are housewives or students from the surrounding farm country, are famous for their willingness to chat, even about the weather. "We're trying to build a relationship with a customer, not consummate a sale," says President Richard Anderson.
The catalog keeps the conversation going. The text is often full of lengthy and technical explanations of how Lands' End products are made. Example: "At our yarn-spinning facility, every bale of cotton is inspected on both sides to insure top quality. (They end up rejecting 10% of the bales -- fussy, fussy folks.)"