Below are some of the questions people most frequently ask us. Click on the Q&A next to the question to see the answer.
Q&A: Why do I need a catalog?
Q&A: What if I do not have the ability to export a computer file for you to make a catalog?
Q&A: Can you really get a catalog ready for printing in 24 working days?
Q&A: How long does it take you to enter new products that are not in your database?
Q&A: How do my private label items get into my catalog?
Q&A: Your process is for a merchandise catalog. What if I want equipment?
Q&A: What if I want other custom pages in my catalog?
Q&A: What about manufacturer ads?
Q&A: What if I want to pay for a photographer to do a special cover shot?
Q&A: How much does a catalog cost to print?
Q&A: I know someone who says they can make a catalog for us for less money. Why do you say it takes a year or more to create a catalog using traditional methods?
Q&A: So you can do a new catalog for less than I can, but wouldn't maintaining the catalog myself cost less than your service?
Q&A: Isn't your process really just one big generic layout and you customize it from there?
Q&A: 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?
Q&A: Can we go in with another dealer and share the cost of a catalog layout?
Q&A: Do we get the source layout files after our catalog is printed?
Q&A: Won't my catalog look just like another dealer's catalog you have produced?
Q&A: Why not just buy my own database publishing software so I can do my own catalog?
Q&A: Why not just build my own database so I can do my own catalog?
What if I do not have the ability to export a computer file for you to make a catalog?Then we can provide a file for you to edit that is a complete listing of all the products we have in our database. You can remove the items you do not want in your catalog. You can also add new items that are not in our database like private label items. Our database does not contain prices so you have the option of producing a catalog without prices or adding your prices to our file. Upon request, we can create order numbers for you or you can update our file with your own 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 the 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. We may exchange files back and forth several times. Understandably, this will delay the process. Some clients take months to provide us with their final list. Your list may contain a large number of items that are not in our database like private label items or new products. During the time of exchanging files, 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 of different categories, and ad placement. Even though we have automated much of the process, 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 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. Unfortunately, much time can be wasted just trying to get information from the manufacturers in a timely manner.
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 they can plug it into a wall outlet. If it needs installation by a service technician then we consider it to be large equipment. Large equipment layout requires an artistic eye and must be done manually. We charge our normal hourly rate for large equipment layout.
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?Go right ahead. The Barton-Cyker catalog sample is a fine example 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 $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. It is common for dental dealers to pay for ALL OR MOST of their printing costs with the ad revenue.By definition catalogs have a lot of pages and printing a lot of pages costs money. 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 get 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.If you do not serve a large enough area to justify the printing cost, we have an economical option. We can turn your 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 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, or in a few months, has never done a dental catalog before. One person cannot complete that size of 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.A graphic designer can do a well designed dental catalog at a rate that averages eight hours per page of 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 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 near the end of 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 beginning pages takes away from the time to finish the ending pages. It is a trap that many dental dealers have fallen into, some for years. Their 'cheaper' way of producing a catalog ends up costing them far more in lost sales. We know several dental dealers who have tried the one person method that resulted in unfinished catalogs. It is a hard and expensive lesson to learn.Most surprising are the manufacturers who make it difficult or impossible to get images and information about their products. Too often they will only send a portion of what you have requested along with instructions you are to provide them with a list of products that are missing. Some manufacturers will even repeat this cycle several times. They are busy and just want to get you out of their hair with another delay tactic. This additional reporting and follow up is time consuming, wasteful and frustrating. Many of the images from the manufacturers will require editing to make them useable. 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.Because we have automated the process, our rate is as little as $66/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.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. But, 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 than your service?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 took 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 one or more people for even an average size catalog. Our repeat catalog pricing is an unprecedented bargain.
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. From the time we hit the start button until it finishes about an hour elapses. It is very fast. So fast that it makes any other method impractical.
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 automated process would take. Keep in mind we would need to manually change the prices, order numbers, add products, delete products, re-link the images to the text and then un-link them again, create a new index, change phone numbers, create a new cover, etc., etc. The list goes on. It would take months and we would likely introduce transposition errors which is counterproductive.
Can we go in with another dealer and share the cost of a catalog layout?Not in the manner you suggest. But if you think about it, our entire process is based on sharing. The amount we charge 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 the data many times to different dealers just 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 item until we have resold it many times. In addition, we do not charge you extra for items that are not frequently sold by others. Our whole concept is that it evens out in the end. Even when we charge you extra for your private labels items, you need to do several catalogs with us before we can recover our costs to enter those items. For these reasons, there is no additional return on our investment for us to split the cost between two dealers. Plus, we end up doing almost twice the work anyway.In addition, if we were to create one layout for two dealers it would still have all the disadvantages and compromises that come from sharing a layout. This contradicts our stated purpose of creating this 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 any dealer can afford.
Do we get the source layout files after our catalog is printed?Sorry, no. While we understand why you would want them, the fee you pay for the layout represents only a small fraction of our expense to accumulate the information and the over all value of the layout. In addition, the reality is you could not hire someone to maintain the layout for less cost than what we charge to make a new catalog for you.
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 product mix is the same. This means that starting with the first page, your catalog will contain different products which means the formatting will be different. Additionally, you get to pick your own colors, fonts, borders, cover design, etc. to give your catalog your own unique look and feel. The product images are provided by the manufacturers which means all catalogs contain the same images so there is no difference there. Kit contents are understandably the same. The only similarity a customer may notice would be the product descriptions. Even those will vary because a dealer can choose whether they want S&A's long or short product descriptions. It would take an extremely astute customer to realize that we had produced both catalogs.
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 to lay out dental catalogs we looked at off the shelf database publishing software. What we typically found was a down and dirty approach that got the job done but at the cost of quality and ease of use. Words were repeated over and over which wasted space and the reader's time. Items were in alphabetical order: Large, Medium, Small, X-Large, X-Small; or Coarse, Fine, Medium. They should have been in logical sequence as in: X-Small, Small, Medium, Large, X-Large; or Coarse, Medium, Fine. Unit measures were out of order as in gallon would appear before pint, or a 32 oz. bottle would appear before an 8 oz. bottle. Quantity discounts were often handled in a clumsy fashion with the same numbers repeated over and over. We saw enough irregularities to know that off the shelf software did not give us the professional results demanded by a professional industry. Plus, it is a HUGE undertaking to initially create and constantly maintain the database. See next question.
Why not just build my own database so I can do my own catalog?Building your own database suitable for database publishing is a monumental task. Be prepared to hire people with the following abilities: 1) A copywriter with excellent spelling skills, grammatical skills and familiarity with dental terminology; 2) A data entry person who is meticulously detail oriented, who also has a working knowledge of how computers sort, match, combine and store data; 3) A graphic artist with advanced image editing software experience to review, edit and resize the product images. Be prepared to wait years, not months, before you have a useable database. Realize that your database will never be "done" and you will need to keep these people on staff to constantly update the database.
