Hyundai Home Shopping is reviving its paper catalog, which was one of its main sales channels in the past. After several years of transitioning to mobile applications and TV broadcasting, it is returning to offline methods. Hyundai Home Shopping plans to start mailing catalogs as early as the second half of this year.
According to the retail industry on the 29th, Hyundai Home Shopping is resuming its catalog business, which was suspended in 2018, after seven years. Until 2008, Hyundai Home Shopping published 1.5 million copies every month, dominating the circulation figures of women's magazines. However, as the proportion of sales through catalogs decreased due to digital transition, the circulation figures dropped, leading to the suspension of the business in 2018.
At that time, among the four major home shopping companies (CJ O Shopping, GS Shop, Hyundai Home Shopping, Lotte Home Shopping), Hyundai Home Shopping was the first to suspend its catalog sales. Currently, Lotte Home Shopping and NS Home Shopping are the only two Korean home shopping companies that maintain a catalog business.
This decision somewhat contradicts the digital transition trend. While competitors such as CJ OnStyle and GS Shop are focusing on mobile app optimization, artificial intelligence-based recommendation systems, and live commerce technologies, committing fully to online distribution, Hyundai Home Shopping has decided to bring back its catalog.
Hyundai Home Shopping seems to believe that it can appeal to both the MZ generation (those born between 1980 and 2000), who are consuming retro sensibilities, and the senior generation, who are accustomed to physical media. To achieve this, Hyundai Home Shopping plans to fill about half of the products in the catalog with exclusive items that cannot be seen on TV or mobile platforms, aiming for differentiation.
However, some in the industry view this as regressive. At a time when environmental concerns, logistics costs, and precise targeting based on customer data are important, sending out hundreds of thousands of paper catalogs en masse is seen as something that only worked during the heyday of offline sales. A retail industry official said, "Currently, we can compare reviews and the lowest prices in real-time with an app," adding that "reviving paper media is a return to the past."