Creating seasonal product catalogs for your brand may seem like an overwhelming task, given the over-the-top marketing that often accompanies certain holidays. But creating beautiful seasonal product catalogs that will enforce your brand’s aesthetic, tell a story and engage with your customers in a meaningful way can make seasonal product catalogs memorable and profitable. Planning, designing, and printing a catalog for your business that reflects the emotions and excitement of the season can create a critical boost to your holiday business, so learning how to maximize this essential marketing and sales tool is important for businesses of all sizes.
- Decide Your Brand’s Approach to the Season
- Stay In the Season
- Design Seasonal Product Catalogs for Scanning over Reading
- Include Actionable Content in Seasonal Product Catalogs
- Organize Your Seasonal Product Catalogs Flow Purposefully
- Putting it All Together for Your Seasonal Product Catalogs
- Printing Your Seasonal Product Catalogs
Decide Your Brand’s Approach to the Season
Before focusing on details like what your seasonal product catalogs will include or how it will be structured, spend some time thinking about how you want your brand to be presented to your customers during the upcoming holiday season.
Seasonal product catalogs should reflect and confirm a brand’s aesthetic from the first page to the last, so deciding how you want your customers to feel and think about your brand through the visual medium of seasonal product catalogs will help guide your design choices. Staying true to your brand’s feel is critical, so think about what an overall look and feel for your brand should look like: emotions and feelings, colors, imagery and seasonal connections.
The approach your printed catalog takes should match up with how your customers already see your brand. A company known for moody, thoughtful branding that presents a whimsical catalog full of bright primary colors would be jarring and inconsistent with the brand’s image, even if the colors and imagery match the popular schematics of the season.
Instead, thoughtfully choose how you want to present your brand in connection with the season, considering how the color palette, imagery, and phrases build a cohesive story for your brand that your customers will appreciate and recognize as an extension of the brand they already know and love.
Stay In the Season
To create a memorable seasonal catalog, include both trending and classic seasonal elements to speak to your audience’s need to be on-trend as well as their connection to familiar seasonal designs, colors, and themes.
Trending Content: Don’t be afraid to include nods to the hottest trends in your seasonal product catalogs design. Trendy colors or references to pop culture phenomena can be a fun addition to your seasonal marketing tool by showing your customers that you don’t take yourselves too seriously. Be careful to use non-brand forward content sparingly, rather than letting it overwhelm your design plan, making your seasonal product catalogs feel out of touch or disconnected from the brand’s normal vibe.
Relevance: Businesses can use seasonal content to connect with the customer’s emotions, so creating a tangible marketing tool like a seasonal product catalog that customers can hold on to and flip through time and time again can be very powerful. The warm feelings that a holiday season evokes can be visually and tangibly connected to your brand in a printed catalog that customers will likely hold on to for a while, making the marketing tool even more valuable over time.
Seasonal Elements: The strength of a seasonal catalog lies in the feelings and ideas evoked through simple seasonal elements. Instead of screaming at the customer with cliché phrases, obvious color choices and familiar graphics, whispering elements through thoughtful design, muted but appropriate color palettes and subtle seasonal touches that bring out the best of a season.
- For spring, use soft colors and watercolor imagery.
- For summer, focus on light gradients, sun, sunshine and lens flare.
- For fall, utilize warm lighting and soft shadows.
- For winter, think frosty patterns and muted imagery.
Design Seasonal Product Catalogs for Scanning over Reading
Take advantage of the natural tendency of consumers to scan something. Even beautifully crafted seasonal product catalogs may be scanned rather than read closely, at least at first. So instead of working on ways to force the user to read deeply to discover important information, create a scannable catalog that leans into this lighter reading. By making your catalog understandable at a glance, you will capture the reader’s attention where you need it most.
- Use placement and hierarchy to subliminally indicate the key products so that readers will naturally view those items first.
- Headlines and smaller supporting copy clarify at a glance the big picture content for scannable pages.
- Contrasting colors or shapes can be used to highlight the call to action text, repeated throughout the catalog for quick reference.
- Small visual cues like arrows or lines can be added to pages to draw the eye to key content without interrupting the visual design of a page layout.
Include Actionable Content in Seasonal Product Catalogs
Another strategy to create effective seasonal product catalogs is to add a variety of intentional calls to action that result in the ultimate success: sales. Short phrases that take the reader right to the point of the catalog – buying product – should be sprinkled throughout the pages so that your call to action looks different throughout your catalog but ultimately leads your customer toward making a purchase.
- Back in stock creates urgency.
- Collect them all helps to persuade buyers to consider all items in a set.
- Scan for more information can draw buyers into more content and your brand’s story.
- Use the promo code leads buyers to make the purchase now to take advantage of the sale.
- Visit our website gives buyers a way to buy products right now.
Organize Your Seasonal Product Catalogs Flow Purposefully
Creating a natural flow to your seasonal catalog enhances the reader’s experience and helps you convert sales more efficiently.
Begin the catalog with eye-catching seasonal content that will wow your readers. Tell a story or memorably present the products so your readers will experience the emotions of the season from the very first page.
Focus on hierarchy throughout the main body of your catalog so your readers can glance through the pages and quickly determine the most important or valuable products. Place critical products in larger physical spaces and use white space and margins to indicate importance and product connections on layout pages.
Finish with surprise elements like groupings of products, strong year-round sellers or other smaller products that are excellent add-ons to larger sales.
Putting it All Together for Your Seasonal Product Catalogs
Creating content and a layout that looks great and appeals to your potential customers is only the first step in crafting beautiful seasonal product catalogs.
Binding
Choose the catalog binding that works the best for your seasonal catalog. Larger catalogs can be put together using Perfect binding that creates a spine, giving businesses an additional location to add in color, graphics or text to tie in the seasonal theme. Perfect-bound books look sleek and professional and are ideal for lookbooks, end-of-year collections or high page count catalogs. For budget-friendly catalogs that are also lightweight, saddle stitching is a good option. Utilizing strong industrial staples to bind pages together, saddle-stitched catalogs are a sturdy option and a common construction choice for many businesses’ catalogs because they typically offer a quick print time turnaround.
Paper Weight
The type of binding you select can impact the paper weight, measured in pounds of a ream of uncut paper. Heavier papers are thicker and more substantial and can be used as a front and back cover of a catalog to add strength and perceived value to the catalog. For smaller or saddle-stitched catalogs, a lighter-weight paper is often used for both the covers and the body of the catalog to keep mailing costs down.
Paper Coating
Adding a coating like a gloss or matte finish to a catalog enhances the visuals on the page and helps a catalog stand out. High gloss finishes make colors pop and help photography look great, making it a perfect coating for product-heavy catalogs. A matte finish added to the cover or interior pages of a seasonal catalog creates a more moody, low-key vibe that can be an excellent extension of a brand’s image. UV coating adds a layer of protection to your catalog and is a great option for all seasonal catalogs.
Proofing
The final step in crafting seasonal product catalogs is to carefully proof your files before sending them off to the printer. Each page should be reviewed for content accuracy as well as consistency with the rest of the catalog, as well as color and size discrepancies. Double-check to make sure all photographs are saved in 300 DPI to ensure they look good after printing and request a hard copy proof of your catalog before bulk ordering your catalogs so you can catch any last-minute changes beforehand.
Printing Your Seasonal Product Catalogs
Finalizing your catalog in time to get it into your customers’ hands as they anticipate the upcoming season means thinking about the timing of your catalog’s creation. Working with a digital, on-demand printer like Dazzle Printing can help you make the most of your seasonal marketing tool by helping you quickly take your finished catalog and turn it into a gorgeous catalog your customers will love. And the sooner they have it in their hands, the sooner your business can start to make sales and connect with your customers during the upcoming season.
