This month, Topbulb will drop the initial test mailing of Lighting for the Home, the company’s first consumer catalog.
Overall, 100,000 copies of the 72-page catalog will be printed and distributed via package inserts and mailings to house file names and online requesters. The book will target homeowners with household incomes of $150,000 and up, said Philip H. Bonello, president and CEO of Gray Supply Co., the parent company of Topbulb.
Lighting for the Home will feature table and floor lamps ranging in price from $9 to $4,000, as well as specialty products such as lighting for children’s rooms.
“There’s a great opportunity for this because people are spending more time at home and investing more in their homes,” noted Bonello.
As its name suggests, the East Chicago, IN-based company’s main product line has traditionally been light bulbs. In the past, Topbulb targeted mainly businesses, because it was pretty much impossible to find lists of consumers with pressing light bulb needs.
Lamps, however, are a bit more of a decorating decision.
“It’s so much easier” to market, said Bonello. Unlike bulbs, “[lamps] aren’t usually an emergency buy.”
For the test mailing, Topbulb is using names from its more than 100,000-name house file. Many of those customers found Topbulb via the company’s Web site (www.topbulb.com), which currently gets about 40,000 visitors per month.
A full rollout of the catalog is slated for early 2004. Bonello said the company probably won’t jump into list rental right away, but when it does, it will look at magazines and books in similar niches, such as Gump’s and Martha by Mail.
Creative is being handled both in-house and by Quebecor World’s Q-Net subsidiary. Bonello said that while Topbulb’s flagship catalog design is fairly utilitarian and looks much like a directory, an effort was made to make Lighting for the Home more pleasant to look at.
“The key is that it is browsable,” he said, adding that the book will be on a heavier paper stock than the Topbulb catalog.
One thing that makes that easier is the more aesthetically appealing and eclectic nature of the products, such as a $2,400 chair lighted from the inside, created by Chicago artist Critz Campbell (see photo at right).
Last November, the company launched Lightingforthehome.com, a lighting portal that features products from Topbulb and other distributors. In June, the company began collecting catalog requesters’ names from this site.
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