Garden Nominated Catalogue
(The National Trust: Buying)

The Garden Nominated Catalogue is a collection of carefully selected products that designated National Trust shops can order from at their discretion. This is to give a greater diversity of products available shops.

I started work at the National Trust as a Buyers Assistant, performing administrative duties. My first involvement with the Garden Nominated Catalogue was simply printing and the despatch.
At this time, the catalogue was basically a series of spread sheets with supplier and product information.

When the catalogue was re-issued for the following season, my responsibilities were increased and I was also tasked with the updating of information.
With limited time, I didn't have the opportunity to make vast changes but I did manage to include sheets of product images that the shops had not received before. Now the shops knew exactly what the products were that they were ordering.

Trading on the catalogue went up by 64% from the previous versions of the catalogue without images.

When the next version of the Catalogue was due, I was responsible for its management. This included the discontinuation of existing products and the insertion of new lines. This meant looking back through all of the sales figures from the previous season and analyzing them as well as sourcing new products and suppliers for the new version.

Because I was managing the catalogue now, I had more time to spend on the development of it.
Having sought feedback from the shops on previous variations of the catalogue and products, I was aiming for the catalogue to meet their needs much better than previously.

I scrapped the system generated spread sheets that had been used previously. Instead, I included all of the necessary information with the images to make the catalogue more economical, user friendly and to avoid flicking between pages to match product detail with product images.

I also introduced the catalogue on CD for the shops.
The purpose of this was to get the shops used to using the catalogue in an electronic format so that the next version of the catalogue would not have to be printed. This would make the catalogue more environmentally friendly and save on postage costs.

In the following 6 months (since the launch of the catalogue above), sales have increased once again and are now 40% up on the previous year, with sales reaching over one million pounds.

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