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November 3, 2025
Should Walmart Continue its Physical Home Catalog Experiment?
While the catalog had long been a mainstay of the U.S.-Canada retail experience in times past — particularly the holiday catalogs produced by Sears, Neiman Marcus, and JCPenney — it appears that one major retailer is betting big on a return to the physical format: Walmart.
In a breakdown of the blue-and-yellow brand’s most recent August campaign involving the production and delivery of physical catalogs to a variety of customers — new, existing, and lapsed — Modern Retail’s Mitchell Parton made his take clear.
“The catalog, published in August for the fall season, shows off products such as sofas, tables, appliances, rugs, pillows and blankets in the context of bedrooms, bathrooms and kitchens. The pages point readers to Walmart’s website, where they can shop for the pictured items through text and QR codes. It’s indicative of how Walmart is experimenting with new ways to convey its home business moving forward after its merchants have worked to broaden its assortment,” Parton wrote, noting that the aim for the catalog was to prime customers for upcoming holiday spend.
“The publication is a symbol both of the lasting utility of print catalogs as a marketing tool and of Walmart wanting to redefine itself as a retailer for both low- and high-income shoppers that delivers high-quality yet affordable products,” he added.
Walmart’s Physical Home Catalog: A Place for High Style and Quality To Shine in Static Creative
Creighton Kiper, SVP of home for Walmart U.S., spoke to the notion that the home catalog provided a piece of static creative that could be leveraged more broadly as a showpiece — a signal that style and quality were accessible to shoppers of all income demographics.
Further, as Kiper underscored, the execution of this catalog was lightning-fast: The catalog was brainstormed and executed in full this year. And while the exec was cited as saying that impression and engagement figures surrounding Walmart’s holiday-targeting catalog had soundly beaten the retailer’s expectations, it remained unclear whether any further issues would be produced.
“This is very much a strategy around making sure top-of-mind consideration, awareness and reappraisal was being done for our customers — new customers and existing customers. [These include] customers who shop our box for other products, but maybe it’s been a while since they’ve seen our dinner plates or rugs or throws or candles,” Kiper said.
“All customers are looking for some form of inspiration [in] designing, decorating or giving a punch to our room or a space. Our strategy is to democratize style, but it’s also to bring style and joy to every space that our customer has, and to do that affordably and effortlessly,” he added.
Hard copy catalogs may not be as extinct as previously believed, either. Parton quoted Polly Wong, president of marketing firm Belardi Wong, as highlighting that every one of her 300-plus retail clients put forth at least some form of direct-mail presence.
“Whether it’s full-size catalogs or folded pieces or postcards, most retailers recognize at this point that you have to have a marketing mix across online and offline channels to really reach the consumer,” Wong said.
“Because of the algorithms, when it comes to digital targeting, you’ve got about a 20% chance of reaching who you want to when you want to. … You really can’t just rely on digital channels.”
Discussion Questions
Given the stated success of the first issuance of its new home catalog, should Walmart continue with new issues? Why or why not?
How plausible is Wong’s position that most retailers are still at least moderately engaged in direct-mail offerings? What are your thoughts?
Can a physical catalog actually drive appeal cross-generationally? If so, why?
Poll
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Georganne Bender
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Lisa Goller
B2B Content Strategist
Kenneth Leung
Retail and Customer Experience Expert
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There are quite a few reasons why a home furnishings catalog makes sense for Walmart. The first is that within home retail, catalogs are still used extensively for inspiration and information because the category is both visual and technically detailed. The second is that Walmart is trying to build its share in home, so it needs to find creative ways of reaching new customers. Third, the home catalog helps show a more aspirational side of Walmart in a way that is hard to accomplish in stores — even newer ones. So, this hits a lot of different notes.
With the goal of appealing to middle-income customers who look to designer catalogs (ie: Crate and Barrel) for inspiration but cannot afford those luxury offerings, this is a great play. It will serve to highlight not just the breadth of Walmart’s assortment, but also its good-better-best price points, thus allowing the average consumer to decorate with purpose and intent.
There’s a reason retailers keep using old, traditional media…it appears to work. Online marketing has become such an overwhelming litany of messages, it has never been harder to break through. Old-fashioned, traditional marketing, like cataloges and flyers, still deliver store traffic and/or increased in-store conversion. Since online activity is often a pre-cursor to a store visit, online/offline must work together, and the most successful retailers understand this. Ultimately, for Walmart, and any retailer looking to drive traffic opportunities into the store, the trick is to keep experimenting and when you find something that works, keep going until it no longer does.
I believe Walmart’s decision to pilot a physical home-catalog is a savvy move worth extending — provided they adopt a disciplined “test-and-learn” approach. The catalog offers aspirational imagery and tangible inspiration in a category (home furnishings) where print still drives engagement — and according to Walmart’s own leadership, the August issue exceeded expectations for impressions and engagement. Continuing new issues could strengthen top-of-mind consideration among both lapsed and house-rich consumers who may shop less frequently for home goods. Yet the key is cost efficiency, channel attribution (print to online), and learning what formats, frequencies and customer-segments deliver the strongest ROI.
On the question of whether print direct-mail is still meaningful, I find Polly Wong’s assertion that “every one of her 300 plus retail clients” uses some form of direct-mail credible. While digital dominates mindshare, physical media retains value for saturation, offline-only audiences and multi-channel reach—especially where algorithmic digital targeting reaches only ~20 % of the intended audience as Wong notes. The caveat: direct-mail must be measured like any other channel, with digital touchpoints (QR codes, UTM links) embedded to track performance.
Yes — a physical catalog can appeal cross-generationally. Older shoppers often appreciate tangible media; younger consumers may see it as premium, brand-defining inspiration (especially when integrated with QR/AR for interactivity). For home goods, staging real rooms and materials can create emotional pull that scrollable feeds struggle to match. For Walmart, the catalog becomes not just a flyer but an inspiration vehicle. My recommendation: pilot it with a defined subset of ZIP codes (e.g., high-home-ownership, lapsed home shoppers), track lift in web traffic, store visits and sales, then iterate content, size and frequency before committing to full scale.
Walmart’s purpose-built catalog is a strategic validation that, when properly designed and executed, physical catalogs can generate interest and reappraisal in the 2020s. Selecting the home furnishings category addresses Walmart’s underperformance in that category. In general, there is a place for direct-mail offerings, which should be used selectively and executed to drive cross-channel behavior.
The real question, I think is “should WalMart stop calling this an “experiment”, and let it become a part of what they do?” And my answer to that is …well, if it’s working, why not? (Of course the Devil is in the details, and this article is remarkably vague on the specifics of cost, size, distribution, etc….all the things one has to actually consider to give a meaningful answer!)
Ms. Wong is certainly correct, but “some form of…” covers so many bases I don’t think that really tells us much.
Who doesn’t love a catalog? Walmart’s shoppable version with QR codes is like a mini Pinterest that sits on the coffee table, keeping the retailer within easy reach of potential customers.
It’s not just older generations that appreciate catalogs. Amazon’s interactive Holiday Kids Gift Book arrives tomorrow and my grandkid’s can’t wait.
If it works, keep it, especially when you need to break through the electronic spam clutter in today’s world. A well done catalog becomes a table book for aspiration and ideas for the future even if it is not an immediate buy. I am actually surprised the number of people I am seeing in mass transit reading books rather than kindle or audio these days. I think there is a bit of “throwback” to calmer times and trying to get some peace from the digital onslaught in today’s life.
There are plenty of studies with stats showing the percentage of customers who keep, read, and reread the catalogs of the brands they do business with. For the right audience, catalogs work. And if the “experiment” doesn’t work the way Walmart hopes it will, in their usual fashion, they will be quick to end it.
As most retail media touchpoints evolve in digital form, it’s a refreshing change to see Walmart embrace a vibrant, tactile source of inspiration. Offering a physical catalog helps Walmart reach and resonate with customers across age and income demographics who would otherwise miss out on its digital equivalent.
Walmart’s physical catalog experiment is a smart revival of a powerful tool, and my experience in the Toys & Babycare industry strongly affirms its potential. The catalog immediately provides a unique, tangible reason for direct interaction with customers, which no digital ad can fully replicate. Furthermore, we consistently found that a physical catalog generated a far better sales outcome compared to asking customers to download a PDF from our website or portal. The static, curated nature of print successfully highlights high-style and quality items for brand reappraisal. Crucially, pages dedicated to special deals, promotions, or unique product ranges consistently achieved the strongest sales responses because they provide immediate, clear value. This return to print isn’t nostalgia; it’s a strategic move to cut through digital noise and drive high-value, considered purchases by creating an accessible, inspirational shopping journey.
Everything old is new again, especially when modified to support new technology. Catalogs have a lot of staying power when they hit the right customer providing inspiration well beyond an image on a screen. By all means, Walmart should continue with this approach. One can’t draw a meaningful line through one data point.
Everything old is new again – the Sears Catalog was our great grandparent’s Amazon!
A treasure chest!!
Yes, please! Long live catalogs! Physical marketing in support of both physical retailing AND ecomm. Tangible marketing that speaks to me in a way my phone or computer simply cannot. It’s coffee table marketing that I tend to revisit several times over the course of a season. I am drowning in media advertising. Drowning! I avoid it. I click around it. But I welcome a quiet moment with an occasional catalog. Of course it’s working!
Catalog retailers were among the first and most successful omnichannel retailers at the dawn of the dotcom era. Why: They had fulfillment skills baked in while the dot-com upstarts were still in learning to walk. Putting the catalog into a website turned out to be an easily-learned (or outsourced) trick.
Sears, Eddie Bauer, JCPenney, Fingerhut all made rapid inroads ca. 2000. I think hubris and slow delivery times did them in.
Born-for-the-web retailers, especially Amazon, kept pushing the model forward with free and fast delivery, and “endless” aisle assortments. The old cataloguers, clinging to antique business models and high publishing costs, failed to keep pace.
It’s notable that Amazon has distributed its printed holiday toy catalog for many years. I surmise it works for them. Why shouldn’t Walmart test its own targeted versions? It might align nicely with its recent strategy of reaching upward toward a more affluent demographic who have avoided their stores.