Putting Together a Parts Catalog

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Spare parts are life savers for your customers and the life blood of your business. Here are a few tips for creating a great parts catalog.

Organizing Your Products

There are a lot of ways for you to do this depending on what industry your parts catalog is catering to. In some cases, you might want to use categories such as "big sellers" for items that move out the door on a consistent basis and that don't requite a lot of selling. For these, all you really want to do is to make them easy to find. If there are accessories that go along with these items, you may want to include them (and/or blurbs about them) on the same page to increase the sales of those items. If there are items that you want to feature or introduce, you can give them prominent sections and pages as you see fit. While you are putting together a catalog is also a great time to take a good hard look at what has been selling and what is not and will not for whatever reason and get rid of that dead wood. You can put those items in a special clearance section.

Layout and Art

For the most part, a word processing program is under-equipped for handling the job of layout for a high quality parts catalog, so you will have to use a program such as Adobe InDesign or QuarkXPress. You will, of course, want to use as many photos as possible, so do what you can to get high-resolution versions, and leave plenty of space for them in your mockup.

Make sure that you have an order from that includes all the necessary information and that allows for multiple orders, sales tax and shipping calculations, etc. (you'd be surprised how often these things are overlooked).

As far as your cover, if you have a design department, great. If not, you will likely need to find a designer. Take a look around and find some covers that you like and see if your designer can emulate them.

As far as font styles, for consistency's sake, keep it to no more than three, and make sure it is easily readable above all else. Bullets are great, as is the occasional use of bold print.

Copywriting

You will more than likely want to go with a professional here as well. A good copywriter will dig deep into the jargon and vernacular of your target audience and speak to them on a level that they understand, and this can be invaluable especially for a specialized industry. Even if your catalog is not especially technical, your copywriter will know how to write copy that appeals to whatever audience you are aiming at.

Before the copy hits print, you will want to go over it with a fine tooth comb to make sure that there are absolutely no spelling or grammar errors.

Printing and Binding

You will likely want to print your catalog using a four color process, and depending on the volume and expense, send the PDFs to a printer. As far as binding, there are a number of different styles that might work. Plastic comb is common in the auto parts world, but spiral coil might make a good choice as well. If you produce parts catalogs on a regular basis, you will definitely save money even in the short run by having your own binding machine on hand.