Frequently
Asked
Questions
Asked
Questions
|
Frequently Asked Questions |
| Below are some of the questions people most frequently ask us. Click on the question to see the answer. Click your browser’s back button to return to these questions. |
Why do I need a catalog? |
What if I do not have the ability to export a computer file like the one you need? |
Can you really get a catalog ready for printing in 24 working days? |
How long does it take you to enter new products that are not in your database? |
How do my private label items get into my catalog? |
Your process is for a merchandise catalog. What if I want equipment? |
What if I want other custom pages in my catalog? |
What about manufacturer ads? |
What if I want to pay for a photographer to do a special cover shot? |
How much does a catalog cost to print? |
I know someone who says they can make a catalog for us for less money. Why do you say it costs hundreds of dollars per page and it takes a year or more to create a catalog using traditional methods? |
So you can do a new catalog for less than I can, but wouldn’t maintaining the catalog myself cost less in the long run? |
You did a catalog for XYZ company and we sell a lot of the same products. Can’t you just make a few changes to their catalog and charge me less money? |
Isn’t your process really just one big generic layout and you customize it from there? |
Can we go in with another dealer and share the cost of a catalog layout? |
Do we get the source layout files after our catalog is printed? |
Won’t my catalog look just like another dealer’s catalog you have produced? |
Why not just buy my own database publishing software so I can do my own catalog? |
Why not just build my own database so I can do my own catalog? |
What if you go out of business and can no longer produce my catalogs? |
Whose catalogs are you working on now? |
Why do I need a catalog? |
You
need a catalog because:
|
| What if I do not have the ability to export a computer file like the one you need? |
| We
can provide a file that is a complete listing of all the products we have
in our database for you to edit. You can remove the items you do not want
in your catalog. You can also add new items like your private label items.
Upon request, we can create order numbers for you or you can update our
file with your own order numbers. If you do not have your ordering and inventory computerized, the database we provide makes an excellent foundation for implementing better controls for your business. It will also make producing the file for your next catalog a breeze. As an S&A client, there is no additional charge for this database. |
Can you really get a catalog ready for printing in 24 working days? |
| Yes,
five weeks is more than enough time provided you are ready to give us your
final computer list of catalog items and we have all of your items in our
database. If you read our How It Works page, you will see that we can provide our clients with a rough draft in 24 hours. We have found that once our clients see the rough draft they generally want to add items to their list and maybe remove a few before we generate another rough draft. Our clients generally send us files several times. Understandably, this delays the final catalog. Your list may contain a large number of items that are not in our database like private label items or new products. During this initial phase, we work very hard to make sure we have entered all of the missing items so that once you have your final list ready, we are ready to generate your final layout without delay. Once the final layout is generated, the process goes into the final layout stage. We make your catalog a team effort with different people doing the cover & page design, final formatting, and ad placement. Even though our process is exceptionally efficient, there are still hundreds of man-hours that go into creating your final layout. |
How long does it take you to enter new products that are not in your database? |
| It varies a great degree depending upon whether a product has a lot of variations of the same item, like different sizes, flavors or colors, or if a product is just a single item. We have created specialized software that helps us average about 50 - 100 items per day depending upon how many people we have working on the items. At the risk of stating the obvious, we need to get the product information and images from the manufacturers before we can add them to our database. How quickly we are able to enter additional products is dependant upon how quickly the manufacturers respond to our requests. Fortunately, our database has grown to a size where this is less of an issue. |
How do my private label items get into my catalog? |
| Private label items are those items which have your company name or your brand name. In other words, no one else in the industry sells that brand of product. We ask you to supply the product information and images and then we add them just like any other product. The only difference is we add them to a custom database created just for you. They do not become part of our master database. |
Your process is for a merchandise catalog. What if I want equipment? |
| We do include small equipment as part of our process. Our definition of small equipment is anything that can be shipped to a dental office and it can be plugged into a wall outlet. If it requires installation by a service technician then we consider it to be large equipment. Large equipment layout requires special attention and must be done manually. Our preference is for you to supply your own equipment pages. We will open a section for you to have your pages inserted, at no cost to you. Equipment layout is available by us at our normal hourly rate. |
What if I want other custom pages in my catalog? |
| We can place them anywhere in the catalog you wish. We can design them for you at our hourly rate, or you can provide them for us to place. |
What about manufacturer ads? |
| We provide you with the ad specifications and you contact the manufacturers to solicit ads. We insert the ads in the appropriate section being careful to not place competitive ads on facing pages. You get to keep 100% of all advertising revenue! |
What if I want to pay for a photographer to do a special cover shot? |
| A custom photo shoot is well worth the investment. Several of our clients have fine examples of a professional cover shot. We do not charge extra to use your custom image. |
How much does a catalog cost to print? |
| The
short answer is typically $4.00 to $9.00 per catalog. The long answer is
$4.00 is about as low of a printing quote as you will find, and no one is
usually willing to pay more than $9.00 per catalog. Overseas printing
costs are much lower. By definition catalogs have a lot of pages and printing a catalog generally costs more than our catalog layout fee. This means it simply is not economically feasible to print less than 5,000 catalogs. 2,500 catalogs will cost almost as much as 5,000 catalogs so people will order the 5,000 quantity to keep their cost per catalog down. 10,000 catalogs will not cost much more than 5,000 and that is where you will start seeing a reasonable cost per catalog. Please do not think you can print 500 or 1,000 catalogs for a reasonable cost. You can’t. Several of our clients have printed their catalogs in China and Mexico. The quality is superb and the savings are considerable. The down side is delivery times are generally longer. Most of our clients prefer to arrange their own printing. That is our preference, also. If you do not serve a large enough area to justify the printing cost, we have an economical alternative. We can turn your entire catalog layout into an Adobe Acrobat® file. You can then burn as many copies as you want to CD and give them out as electronic versions of your catalog. With your catalog in Acrobat format, you can also make your catalog available on your web site. |
I know someone who says they can make a catalog for us for less money. Why do you say it costs hundreds of dollars per page and takes a year or more to create a catalog using traditional methods? |
| If
you are talking about a 300 page catalog complete with descriptions, kit
contents, images, charts and an index, then the person who says they can
get it done for less than what we charge, or in a few months, has never
done a dental catalog before. One person cannot complete a 300 page dental
catalog in one year, let alone a few months. Run far and run fast before
you find yourself realizing you are six months into the project and only a
small part of the catalog has been done. The designer will want more money
to finish the project and by then it is too late to rectify a bad
decision. You will be stuck with an incomplete catalog and money down the
drain. We have seen it happen. Because our process is so efficient, our rate is typically in the $60-$70/page range. We have seen it as low as $52/page. Does it seem realistic to think that you can hire a graphic designer to work for less than this? Only someone who has never done a dental catalog before would answer "yes" to that question. Do a Web search for "catalog layout cost per page" and check out other company’s prices. You will see how much experienced catalog designers charge per page for doing just page layout. Their catalog page layout runs from $130 to $1,500 per page. Even though they charge double or more, you are responsible for contacting every manufacturer, writing your own product copy and gathering and creating all the high resolution images. (Website images are low res and cannot be used for print purposes.) Also, you still must supply a line item list (like the one we ask for) so they know what you want in your catalog, and what your prices and order numbers are for each item. In other words, you will have more hours into the project than they do. A graphic designer can do a well designed dental catalog at a rate that averages eight hours per page. This includes image and information gathering, layout, image correction, chart creation, text editing, etc. Some pages can be done in a few hours while other pages, like charts and instruments, can take several days per page. Burs, finishing & polishing, files & reamers, x-ray film, film mounts and creating instrument images takes months and months to complete. The most common mistake dental dealers will make is they try to get their catalog done with just one person. The reason this ends in failure so often is that by the time the designer is part way through the catalog, the sections that were completed well over a year ago need to have new products added, old products removed and prices changed. This means finished pages need to be redone. Taking time to reformat the already completed pages takes away from the time to finish the catalog. It is a trap that many dental dealers have fallen into. Some for years. Their "economical" way of producing a catalog ends up costing them far more in lost sales because they don’t have a catalog. We know several dental dealers who have tried the one-person method. It has always resulted in substandard or unfinished catalogs, wasted time, wasted money and lost sales. It is a hard and expensive lesson to learn. Some have gone out of business because they failed to see the bigger picture — a catalog in hand does not cost you money, it makes you money. Often, it is the manufacturers who make it difficult or impossible to get images and information about their products. They will only send a portion of what has been requested. This means you need to go through the entire process of requesting the same information again and again. Why do they do this? Who knows. We can only speculate their employees are unmotivated, disorganized and just want to get you out off the phone. This additional follow up is time consuming, costly, wasteful and frustrating. Once you do receive the information from the manufacturers, you will find many of the images from the manufacturers will require editing to make them useable. Often they will send website images and not press resolution images. You would think the manufacturers would do everything they can to make it easier to sell their products, but many don’t. Some are so disorganized they make getting a catalog completed on time and within budget impossible. This is not an exaggeration. We can easily name names. Of course, if a solo designer skips most of the images, product descriptions, kit contents, charts and indexing it is possible for one person to finish a catalog in one year. We have seen catalogs like this and they look truly awful. They look like someone printed a computer dump. It will do your company image more harm than good. |
So you can do a new catalog for less than I can, but wouldn’t maintaining the catalog myself cost less in the long run? |
| People
who do not know how the design process works always have the misconception
that once a dealer has a master layout that it is a simple matter to
update a catalog from year to year. If each page were dedicated to just
one product that may be true. But, the reality is that each page contains
multiple products from different manufacturers. The designer had to format
every page to get the products to fit on the page and appear in a pleasing
format without looking crowded or containing too much white space. Each
page of an existing layout takes hours to format properly. When you remove products or add new products to update a catalog, every subsequent page is affected and needs to be reformatted. In addition, prices need to be updated and a new product index needs to be created. Multiply several hours of reformatting for each page by several hundred pages and you may get a sense of what updating a catalog is all about. It is a huge undertaking that only the inexperienced believe is a part-time job. Keeping an existing catalog current is a full time job and requires a team of skilled graphic designers for even an average size catalog. By comparison, our catalog pricing is an unprecedented bargain. |
You did a catalog for XYZ company and we sell a lot of the same products. Can’t you just make a few changes to their catalog and charge me less money? |
| The few changes that seem so easy would require more time than our process would take. Keep in mind we would need to manually change the prices, order numbers, add products, delete products, re-flow the images and text, reformat the entire layout, create a new index, change phone numbers, create a new cover, etc., etc., etc. The list goes on. It would take more time than what you think. This method has all the same issues as the previous question above. |
Isn’t your process really just one big generic layout and you customize it from there? |
| No. We find that people generally have an incorrect impression about how our process works. Our process does not take an existing layout and change it to suit a company’s needs. Our process starts every new layout and every repeat catalog with a blank page. It is our software that lays out the products image by image, paragraph by paragraph, chart by chart, section by section. |
Can we go in with another dealer and share the cost of a catalog layout? |
| Not
in the manner you suggest because no two dealers will ever have the exact
same product mix and prices. Once you start down the road of manual
changes, all shared savings are lost. But if you think about it, our entire process and the pricing for our process is already based on sharing a catalog layout. The amount we charge each client for a custom layout is only a small fraction of the investment we have made in building the database, writing the software and creating the process. You could never hire a graphic designer to create a comparable layout at the low rate we charge. At the small rate we charge per item we need to sell that data many times to different dealers just to break even. When you give us an item you want in your catalog that is not in our database, we add it at the same rate we charge you for items that are already in our database. But, we will not recover our costs for entering that new item until we have resold it many times. In addition, we do not have different fee levels based on how popular an item is. Our whole concept is that it balances out in the end. Plus, we do not charge extra for your private label items when you commit to three catalogs. For these reasons, it does not make economical sense for us to split the cost between two dealers because we end up doing almost twice the work anyway. If we were to create one common layout for two dealers, no changes allowed, it would still have all the disadvantages and compromises that come from sharing a layout. This contradicts our stated purpose of creating our process in the first place, i.e. creating a custom layout with only the products a dealer wants, with the dealer’s prices & order numbers, and at a cost that is a small fraction of other custom catalogs. |
Do we get the source layout files after our catalog is printed? |
| Sorry, no. While we understand why you would want them, your catalog fee does not begin to reimburse us for our development costs. Your fee is a licensing fee. It is not a work-for-hire fee. |
Won’t my catalog look just like another dealer’s catalog you have produced? |
| Not at all, for the very simple reason that no two dealer’s design choices and product mix are the same. This means that starting with the first page, your catalog will look different and contain different products which means the overall formatting will be different. Don’t forget, you get to pick your own layout options, colors, fonts, borders, cover design, etc. to give your catalog its own unique look and feel. It would take an extremely astute customer to realize that we had produced both catalogs. And even if someone did, why would that person care as long as the information was easy to use, complete and accurate? |
Why not just buy my own database publishing software so I can do my own catalog? |
As
you already know, the devil is in the details. Before we wrote our own
custom software we looked at off the shelf database publishing software.
What we found was a utilitarian, "one size fits all" approach that gets
the job done but at the cost of professionalism and ease of use:
And one more point we cannot overstate: It is a HUGE undertaking to create and maintain a dental database. See next question. |
Why not just build my own database so I can do my own catalog and website? |
Building
your own database suitable for print and website publishing is a
monumental task. It takes experience, brains and passion to
do it the right way. Be prepared to hire people with the following
abilities:
Whenever you replace one of these people, you will discover each new person has their own style that will affect the consistency of your catalog. You may find some of these inconsistencies during the proofing process. Some will be caught after your catalog is printed. More will be introduced by the time you do your next catalog. It is a never ending cycle. It is unavoidable. That is why we have written and constantly improve our custom error identification software to help us catch these inconsistencies. Every time we prepare to run a rough draft an error report is generated allowing us to make corrections before continuing. |
What if you go out of business and can no longer produce my catalogs? |
| There
are no guarantees in the business world. But we have been in business
since 1994 and are confident in the business model and future of our
company. Here is how we look at it: You have two choices when producing your own custom catalogs. Have us do it for you and save tens of thousands of dollars on each catalog we create for you. Or, do it yourself and pay top dollar from the beginning. In a worse case scenario, you always have option two as your Plan B. In other words, you are not out anything and have saved tens of thousands of dollars in the meantime. Let us imagine for a moment you had devised a way to sell dental merchandise for a mere fraction of what other dental dealers were charging. What would your response be to a potential customer who was reluctant to start doing business with you because you might go out of business? The same logic applies. |
Whose catalogs are you working on now? |
| It is our policy to not discuss projects that are in the works. We want each client to receive the greatest marketing impact possible when they introduce their catalog. We are happy to provide you with samples of previously completed projects. |
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