This holiday season Amazon is mailing a traditional toy catalog to cash in on some nostalgia and give kids and parents alike something to page through while holiday shopping. We’ve already got our hands on a copy and we love it.
The catalog is already in the mail for many customers and will be delivered to several million by the end of the month. It’s laid out like a traditional toy catalog with bold graphics, photos of children playing with the different toys, and a few digital-age updates you certainly didn’t see in the toy catalogs of your youth.
What kind of updates? First, there are no listed prices. Each item just has a description and, where the price would go, the Amazon item number. It’s a practical way to deal with fluctuating pricing in the age of digital shopping (the days of a LEGO set costing exactly MSRP at every retailer are long gone). Second, each two-page spread of the catalog includes a QR code in the corner, seen below above Mickey’s hat, that takes you to the specific toy category for that page’s spread (like character toys, LEGO kits, Nerf blasters, or what have you). Oh, and did we mention there were stickers?
As adults it’s easy to say stuff like “Why are they mailing a print catalog? What a waste of paper!” because we’re old and years of paying taxes and shouldering responsibilities have turned our hearts into coal. But a print catalog filled with toys, with a wishlist for you to write your most loved toys on, and with stickers to flag the toys too? That’s exactly the kind of thing we would have loved when we were children and today our kids experience with the new catalog shows the shiny pages of a toy catalog hold a timeless allure.
Want to take a peek at the catalog before it arrives in your mailbox? There’s a PDF of it available here.
Source : Amazon’s Mailing A Print Toy Catalog This Holiday Season (And We Love It)
