As one scrapbook magazine after another has closed its doors the past few years (Memory Trends, Simple Scrapbooks, Digital Scrapbooking, Memory Makers, and now Scrapbooks Etc), it is tempting to declare that scrapbooking is dying. Why else would the industry be littered with the shredded remains of revered publications?

The answer is simple. Yes, it’s inescapable that something is dying. But that something isn’t scrapbooking. It’s something larger: the printed word on paper.

Scrapbooking is certainly undergoing a decline after a few years at an unsustainable high as a fad, but not one so catastrophic that it would cause the industry’s leading magazine to pull the plug on its publication.

Instead, the culprit is the internet, and the iPad, and the Kindle, and the Nook, and the numerous electronic methods of publishing and viewing content that have exploded in the past five years. They’ve changed everything from the business model of delivering content, to the consumer’s expectation of that content.

We used to be content to sit down once a day to watch the evening news for an hour and be told what is going on in the world. Now, in the internet age, we have something called the “24 hour news cycle”. It means that we want (no, expect) to know everything the moment it happens. Big news spreads like wildfire via Twitter before the stories even hit official news channels. Newspapers aren’t published once a day anymore. They are expected to post breaking stories online on their websites as soon as they happen. Consumers want a constant flow of new content. Print news outlets have been struggling to adjust to this new reality, as newspaper and news magazine subscriptions have fallen dramatically and they have yet to figure out how to effectively convert to monetizing their web operations.

This same problem affects publishers in every industry. Readers don’t want to wait 5 months of print lag time anymore to read about today’s new fashions, computers, cameras – or scrapbook supplies. In fact, they don’t want to wait the 5 minutes it takes to write and hit publish on a blog post! The modern reader has now been conditioned by a frenetic and never-ending stream of internet content to expect a constant availability of fresh content, and to have their finger on the pulse of things the minute they occur. We no longer accept having content delivered to us in a huge chunk long after the things it talks about were new – we want instead a constant flow of new, up-to-the-minute content.

There’s another shift that has occurred: consumer price sensitivity. Because such a wide range of quality content is available for free online, it has lowered the perceived market value of magazine content in the eyes of many consumers. Many are simply unwilling to pay for magazine content anymore when they have plenty of content to choose from online at no charge.

Advertisers are also a very important part of the death of print publishing. Despite the revenue that it would seem to consumers that subscription fees bring in to publishers, the high price of producing a print publication (specifically, printing and delivering it to the reader) means that a large amount of advertising revenue is also necessary for the publication to not only turn a profit, but just to function. And despite consumer sticker shock in recent years at the newsstand prices of magazines, advertising at a financially healthy publication typically makes up over half of the publication’s budget.

One exception to this is the publications from Stampington and Northridge. Those titles are operating under a different business model than traditional newsstand print magazines by charging a very high cover price (around $15 for most titles) which means that they need only extremely limited advertising support. They are, basically, publishing a recurring series of books.

The problem is that advertisers in all industries are fleeing print publications in large numbers, attracted to the lower prices, fine targeting and detailed metrics that they can get on the web. The cost of entry to internet advertising is lower than the price barrier to entering the print advertising market – an important consideration in an industry that is dominated by small businesses that do not have massive marketing budgets. Ads cost a fraction on the web per 1,000 readers of what they cost in print, and web advertising gives advertisers the ability to carefully target  a specific reader segment, diversify their ad buy without blowing their budget, or attach their ads to a specific event on a very specific day.

As a result, recent issues of Scrapbooks Etc and Creating Keepsakes have had ad content ratios less than 20% – whereas a healthy publication needs 40% of its pages to be ad content.

How can the web be so affordable to advertise on compared to a print publication? The answer to this question is the same as the answer to another important question: Why can’t the print publishers just convert to web publications? Many, in this industry and others, have tried, but no one has successfully fully converted to a web publishing operation from a print operation. Different methods have been tried – emagazines, mobile apps, internet paywalls – but consumers have been resistant and adoption has been limited.

The key to the true degree of difficulty in this transformation lies in the difference between the business models of print publishing and web publishing.

Print publishing requires a large organization to support editorial, layout, ad sales, marketing, printing and subscription fulfillment functions. In fact, because of the modern requirement that magazines blog in support of their print issues, print publications are really running two publications – both an online publication and a print publication.

Web publication, in contrast, is a leaner and meaner business model. With no printing and fulfillment to do, these publications don’t have costs associated with those tasks. Layout costs are minimal to none, especially if the publication is run off of a blogging platform – individual articles need no graphic design, just the design of the website needs to be worked on occasionally.

This change is going to keep marching on. New technology changes things. The automobile killed the buggy-making business (or rather transformed it into making cars instead of buggies, an excellent analogy to what is happening to print magazines).  Mobile phones have decimated the pay phone business. And on, and on, and on. It’s no reflection on the people who work in those industries. It’s just progress marching on, replacing old technology with a newer one. Sometimes, you have to lose something to gain something.

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Stephanie’s first post opens discussion on an important topic. As a scrapbooker who participated in the hobby for well over 5 years before the birth of my daughter, I’m very conscious of this industry’s emphasis on child-focused marketing. I hope Stephanie’s post can open a discussion among our community on the topic, and help make industry businesses more aware of what consumers they might be overlooking in their marketing.

I recently wrote an article on my site on child-free scrapbookers, that raised some great discussion. Part of the discussion was over the terminology: should this group be described as childless or child-free? Both are value-laden terms, and both describe people without children by choice (child-free) and by chance (childless). The terminology does not matter nearly as much as the point of the article: people without children scrapbook.

The scrapbook industry does an excellent job zeroing in on the key demographic of new moms as new scrapbookers (and rightly so), but in this quest to convert new moms to scrapbooking, the industry as a whole tends to overlook scrapbookers without children.

The industry needs both groups to continue growing and needs to take care to not alienate either group in the process. Why might the industry need both groups? Scrapbookers without children are:

• More likely to be motivated to scrapbook for reasons other than creating family heirlooms to be passed down to future generations.
• Less likely to be creating scrapbooks to record stories or memories for other people.
• Are more likely to be scrapbooking only for themselves.

Scrapbookers without children are more likely to be intrinsically motivated, which means they will continue scrapbooking as long as they remain intrinsically motivated and feel there is a place for them in the hobby.

People who take up scrapbooking for others (e.g., new moms) may not scrapbook outside of their family responsibilities. This means that once their children grow up or their child’s memories are scrapbooked, they may not continue scrapbooking. The industry hopes that new motherhood serves as an entry point into scrapbooking beyond parenthood, but this does not necessarily happen. In some ways recruiting moms to scrapbooking is somewhat risky because it uses guilt and obligation to motivate scrapbooking rather than intrinsic value.

The industry needs both groups and needs to make sure neither group is alienated. When I interviewed scrapbookers without children who were fairly emeshed in the hobby (i.e., they were aware of the larger industry), they often talked about the magazines with cute kids. They talked of being alienated from the larger industry by this perception that it is moms with kids who scrapbook. They mentioned not fitting in at crops and sometimes even being questioned by other scrapbookers for their participation in the hobby.

The industry needs to work at changing this perception that scrapbooking is just for moms. Many of us (myself included) became scrapbookers way before children were ever considered.

The magazines have a reputation of showcasing cute kids on the covers. Cute kids may sell magazines, but does it sell the hobby? Kids on the covers imply that scrapbooking is a child-centered hobby. As a customer, if I don’t have children and see these magazines, I interpret that to mean that scrapbooking isn’t for me. Other craft magazine covers are not nearly as child-focused. Look at the covers of other craft-magazines: knitting, quilting, or mixed-media.

I don’t suspect the magazines are going to change a whole lot but if you are a business owner, you have the power to make sure both scrapbookers with and without children are welcome in the hobby. When you offer classes, make sure you offer classes that are about children and classes that are about things besides children (e.g., travel, all about me, technique-based). When you promote your business on social media, make sure you include posts to reach both of these markets.

Now might be a good time to do a little brainstorming:

• How are you reaching scrapbookers with children?
• How are you reaching scrapbookers without children?
• What could you do to increase your  business’ reach towards scrapbookers with children?
• What could you do to increase your business’ reach towards scrapbookers without children?

What are your best practices for reaching scrapbookers with and without children? Feel free to leave a comment below.

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As a lifelong crafter, and as someone who has been scrapbooking since the time before rub-ons and Jolee’s Boutique (and when stamps and inks weren’t even a part of my local store), I am something of an old-timer when it comes to scrapbooking. I’ve had a lot of opportunity to use products, and have contact with manufacturers. I have come to be a loyal customer to some companies, and I will tell you that I also boycott some companies. Today I’d like to share what inspires my loyalty, what doesn’t, and what I hope to see in the future for customer relations in our industry.

Being good at customer service and inspiring loyalty isn’t hard – but it does take commitment. About two years ago I had an incident where I contacted a company (which will remain unnamed to protect the guilty) about some defective product that I wanted replaced. I received an email reply that said I wasn’t their customer because they sell only to retailers and not end consumers, so my issue was with the retailer that sold me the product. Outraged, I continued to contact the company until I reached a supervisor who promised to replace the product. They eventually sent me a box of product (that looked like it had been swept off the warehouse floor), but I never did get a replacement for my defective product.

Needless to say, I am no longer a consumer of that brand. Conventional wisdom is that unhappy customers are something like ten times more likely to talk about a brand than happy customers are – so doesn’t it make sense to inspire such bliss in your customers?

Is it truly hard to put a smile on and reply as if you care? Certainly not! As a former brand ambassador for a scrapbook company as well as a customer service representative for a bank, I’ve been through a lot of training and seminars, and read a lot on the subject. It’s simple: treat the customer as you’d like to be treated if the situation were reversed, and always do your best to make them happy and get the situation solved as simply as possible.

So what would inspire a consumer like me to repeatedly buy your products, talk about you, and support your company?

• If I have a problem, fix it and do so quickly.
• Never excuse a defective product or place blame elsewhere, just apologize and replace it.
• Answer your email in a reasonable (within 2 business days) time frame.
• Produce quality products that are useful to me as a crafter.
• Have a website that is easy to navigate and up-to-date.

The bottom line, of course, is that you have to make products I want to buy. How do I find out about you, as someone without a local store to shop in? Years ago local stores were everywhere and blogs were something most people knew nothing about. These days the opposite is true – and more than ever having an online presence is vital to a company’s success in the craft industry. The key is that it needs to be well done. The company’s website, even if it is simple, must be up-to-date and useful.  A blog should have someone in charge of scheduling and content should be posted at a regular interval (whether that is daily, three times a week, etc) that is fairly predictable so that I know how often to check in. Giveaways and exclusive first peeks at new products are always nice, but really I’m after content that is inspiring me to use your products. Tutorials, projects, and bringing in guest designers are all great ways to both show off your product and get me to come back and see you again.

If you do not have a large design team, or if you are hoping to get more of a presence online consider reaching out to crafters who are active and influential as appropriate – feel free to ask them test your products, blog about them, etc – but make sure it’s someone who would be truly interested and that the offer would be beneficial to both of you. For example, do not contact a card maker and ask them to try your new layout building system. Do your homework, and keep your initial email both to the point and friendly.

If a company is going to have a Facebook page and Twitter account (and they should), I expect that I can contact them in that way. If you do not want me connecting to you, don’t join social media. Here are some suggestions I have:

• Do not try to make me help you get followers. Let your following grow organically and stop the “we must hit ___ number and then we will___” insanity please. Appreciate the fans you do have instead of making me feel less important because I’m already a fan and you’re searching for new ones instead.
• If you’re using Twitter, post original content  - not just links to your facebook page.
• Reply when appropriate and join in conversations.
• Share peeks, behind the scenes glimpses, and other relevant info we couldn’t get elsewhere.
• Keep your consumers in mind, and share appropriate material. Political, religious, and other sensitive topics are bad choices to post about unless of course you’re a political or religious craft supply company!
• Keep it honest, interesting, and updated on a regular basis.

As I list out what I like (and dislike) in the online presence of a company (as well as customer service and quality of products in general) three companies stand out in my mind as excelling at all of the above. American Crafts, Pink Paislee, and Studio Calico have great blog content, enthusiastic and influential design teams that are active on-line, amazing service if you ever have need to call or email them, nice websites, and are truly all-around role models for how loyalty can be inspired in consumers like me.

There are a lot of other wonderful companies that I’ve had great experience with as well, and that I see getting into a more active role online, and that continue to put out products I love. I frequently email them to let them know I love what they’re doing and that I’m a fan. As a consumer, I find that it’s just as important to praise and support those who are doing great things as it is to complain about and boycott those companies who are doing badly. In fact – it’s more important! To use that dreaded catch phrase – in this economy, where we spend our dollars and who we support count for everything.

I encourage you to drop a note to your favorite craft company, and if you’re so inclined, please feel free to leave comments sharing your positive experiences with a company and/or who you are really loving these days.

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Salt Lake City-based Overstock.com, an often overlooked player in the crafts retail market, landed in the number 10 spot on the list by posting 23.8% growth from 2009 to 2010. Stores attributes this to the growing portfolio of markets that company has expanded into, including travel (by selling discount hotel rooms). A ranking penalty incurred by the company from Google over accusations it manipulated Google results by embedding links in school websites in return for promised discounts has left Stores skeptical that Overstock can repeat those year-to-year growth results, however.

Both home shopping networks made the list. HSN ranked highest, coming in at number 44 with 9% year-over-year growth. Known for its promotion of lines like Cricut, Anna Griffin and Martha Stewart Crafts with custom created bundles during its on-air craft specials, HSN is definitely a force in the new model of retailing and their growth reflects that. Although nearly twice the size of HSN in total sales, home shopping network QVC was further down the list at number 85 due to experiencing a smaller (but still impressive) amount of year to year sales growth (5%).

Near the bottom of the Stores list we find two craft chain stores. First up is Jo-Ann Stores. That chain placed in 95th on the chart with 4.4% sales growth, on $2.079 billion in retail sales from 751 stores. The other craft chain on the list, Hobby Lobby, came in at number 96, also showing 4.4% sales growth in the surveyed period. Privately-held Hobby Lobby’s sales were reported as $2.093 billion, surpassing Jo-Ann Stores, and with only 497 store locations. Hobby Lobby’s growth numbers were undoubtedly helped by opening of new locations – it experienced store growth in the covered period of 5.7%, while Jo-Ann Stores only expanded their locations by 0.7%.

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It is tempting, as society is taken over by technology, to think that everything can be replaced and even made better by technology. That is not always the case. To learn why that is not the case with a trade show, you have to first consider: What is a trade show?

A trade show is not a shopping mall.

A trade show is not a place for buyers to run through with list in hand, checking off items and getting in and out as fast as possible like a frantic last-minute holiday shopper with presents still to wrap and dinner to cook.

There are many different ways for crafts industry buyers to view and order products: reps, distributors, buying groups, vendor websites. A trade show (in any format) simply isn’t necessary just to facilitate actual commerce transactions like it was 20 years ago. The limited perception of trade-show-as-shopping-mall sets everyone involved up for failure, because it then colors the choices that the participants (both vendors and buyers) make on-site about how to spend their time and how to spend their resources. Ultimately, the tight focus on buying and selling – which all involve recognize can be completed other ways – leaves everyone afterwards feeling unfulfilled and wondering what the point of the event was.

So if the point of a trade show is not buying and selling, what is it?

A trade show is about people, about relationships, about sharing the knowledge that is inside all of the attendees’ heads, and about building on all of that together as a group.

The real value of a trade show is in the conversation struck up with a fellow attendee that leads to learning something unexpected that helps your business, or even leads to a relationship that creates a new business. The value of a trade show is in confidential one-on-one conversations (not ones that are broadcast over the internet and even recorded). The value of a trade show is in the booth you only notice because it has attracted a crowd, or the lunch line chat that sends you somewhere you’d never have made time to go. The value of a trade show is in sitting in a class and turning to the person next to you to see what they are doing when you miss something, or being able to get a helpful prompt from a teacher’s assistant. It’s being able to get a quick replacement for a piece of paper that you mess up using, or for a defective class kit item, so that it doesn’t derail your whole class experience.

I could, literally, go on and on about the value in an on-site trade show. It’s there for the taking…if you reach for it. If you ask the questions, look hard at the samples (and notice details), attend the seminars and demos, and notice the people around you and engage them, you create the value and get out of the show experience what you put into it. The value of a trade show is in…presence. It is spontaneity, interaction, and physically touching items. The value of a trade show is in the unexpected, the unplanned.

And despite my statements about them not being shopping malls, the internet hasn’t made trade shows completely redundant for purchasing craft products. Anyone who has ever shopped online knows that color display on a computer is very inaccurate. Seeing a product in person is the only real way to know its true color, and lots of other details like paper weight and texture don’t convey well online either. Just watching a demo of a tool is very different from having the demonstrator hand it you and say “try it!”. Getting touchy-feely with product definitely has its advantages.

Believe it or not, I learned this value of in-person events in an ironic place that you might least expect: the tech world. While it might seem that the technology industry, where people are quick to adopt and become heavy users of new technologies, would be first to abandon the concept of  ”old school” in-person events, I found the exact opposite to be true. That industry downright treasures the handshake, understanding the value of sitting down over a cup of coffee to bat ideas around or share information, or of a group discussion in a seminar room.

That’s not to say that the tech industry is a trade show dinosaur. Instead, they’ve adapted their events to the new modern era. Their few “old school” style trade shows with aisles of booth displays aren’t put on for buyers as much as for marketing to press, to create word-of-mouth marketing, and to provide education to the industry’s top echelon of participants. In many instances the products on display are prototypes that aren’t even going to be on sale in the near future. (For a comparison in the crafts industry, reference what Craftwell did by exhibiting at several CHA shows before the release of the e-craft machine). The majority of the tech industry’s events are conference-style, focusing on seminars and speeches and roundtable discussions. The focus is on ideas and making connections, not on commerce.

One of my favorite tech events, Photoshop World, is a kind of hybrid of the old and new formats. Staged to educate professional photographers and designers about Adobe’s Photoshop and Lightroom products and help improve their photography skills, the event includes both a vendor floor and a heavy concentration on classroom sessions. However – unlike most such traditional events – the classroom sessions and the vendor floor do not take place at the same time. The classroom sessions take place in the morning and evening, and the vendor floor is open in the afternoon. This way, vendors can attend the sessions themselves, and do not have to compete with the sessions for the attention of the attendees. I’ve found it greatly enhances my event experience to not feel pulled in multiple directions – do I attend this session, or see more of the vendor floor?

Trade-show-as-shopping-mall was the 20th century way of doing business. We all need to start taking on the 21st century perspective on doing business at shows, an emphasis on people. The Craft & Hobby Association has begun to make that shift in its format and offerings this year with the introduction of the conference format, but ultimately, the change in philosophy has to take root in the psyche of the show attendees for it to be successful. We all have to decide what it is that we want out of the experience. Are we willing to settle for a shopping mall? Or do we want the chance to learn, to create opportunity, and work to take our businesses to the next level? Do we want the opportunity to really do business? Or do we want to sit on our couches and shop over the internet?

One last thing…if you think you aren’t interested in “doing business”, that you are content to stay quietly at home and do your shopping and watch a few seminars online, there is something that you need to remember. It is innovation and new ideas and change and cooperation – people – that keep an industry developing and healthy. If everyone stays home, none of those things happen, leading to stagnation and decline in the industry. If people do come together and build something, and you weren’t part of the building of it, you will soon be left behind.

Simply put: Getting a group of people from an industry together in one place to discuss and do business cannot be replaced by a series of video broadcasts. Face-to-face meetings are critical not only to the development of individual businesses, but to the health of the industry as a whole.

Thinking in this new way about trade shows requires stepping outside our comfort zones for most of us. It requires undoing years or even decades of lessons about what a trade show is and how a successful one works. We have to stop thinking about trade shows in terms of dollars of product bought and sold. We have to start judging them in terms of things like the cementing of customer relationships, advancing marketing goals, professional education, and building networks. We need to stop thinking in terms of the quantity of the attendees and focus on the quality of the attendees and the quality of our interactions with them.

Take responsibility for your business’s future and your industry’s future. Don’t do the usual. Challenge yourself to step outside your comfort zone and make your trade show experience something that is productive for you and your business.

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