Pagination Ping-Pong
WHO DETERMINES what items go on each page of a catalog? Does it matter if it’s the catalog artist, the merchandiser or a marketing person? Does it sometimes seem like the one making this decision alternates between responsible parties, too much like a bad Ping-Pong game?
My initiation into pagination came at American Express. Here the merchants not only decided exactly what would be offered in the catalog, but the density of the pages, what went where and at what price. As this was in the days before merchandise analysis, no sales figures influenced product placement; where they landed was entirely up to the merchants’ instincts.
Based almost solely on aesthetics influenced by gut instinct, the items’ arrangement and order involved no apparent reasoning. One of these mysterious shenanigans was to concoct spreads themed in such a way that individual products complemented, but did not compete, with each other
