While the entire industry bets on social commerce and AI-driven targeting, one U.S. plus-size brand has rediscovered growth through the most traditional channel: direct mail. Earlier this year, Torrid relaunched its consumer-facing direct-mail campaign, sending printed catalogs to targeted households and linking them with in-store experiences. Early data shows the strategy has outperformed expectations in both customer acquisition and reactivation.
Why Direct Mail Is Making a Comeback
Torrid's move is not isolated. In North American apparel retail, brands like Abercrombie & Fitch and J.Crew have also resumed or increased direct-mail investments in recent years. Two forces are driving this shift: first, the diminishing returns of digital advertising—Facebook and Google's CPMs have risen over 40% in three years while click-through rates continue to decline; second, the rising quality of direct-mail targeting, enabled by postal data and consumer profiles that allow brands to deliver catalogs to highly relevant households rather than casting a wide net.
For plus-size apparel, a niche category, direct mail offers unique advantages. Plus-size consumers often face sizing and fit challenges online, where details like fabric drape and structure are difficult to convey. A high-quality printed catalog, with real models and accurate color reproduction, provides a tactile experience that e-commerce pages cannot replicate. Torrid's data shows that when catalogs are integrated with store inventory, in-store try-on rates increase by approximately 15%, and add-on purchase rates also rise.
Implications for Supply Chains and Sourcing
The revival of direct mail is reshaping brand expectations for supply chain responsiveness. A typical direct-mail catalog has a lifecycle of 6-8 weeks, requiring brands to commit to styles and order quantities well in advance. This places a premium on suppliers' ability to handle quick reorders. Torrid and similar vertical brands tend to split their assortments: basics are ordered in bulk with longer lead times, while seasonal items rely on flexible capacity from smaller domestic factories to meet demand spikes triggered by catalog drops.
For Chinese fabric and garment suppliers, this signals a potential shift in how North American clients balance "small-batch quick response" with planned orders. Catalog-driven orders typically come with clear style lists and fixed delivery windows, demanding higher stability in quality and delivery than pure e-commerce orders. If brands adopt direct mail as a regular channel, suppliers should reserve capacity windows and strengthen quality control on color fastness, dye consistency, and hand feel—since catalog printing standards will push suppliers to reduce color variation.
Practical Recommendations
For Sourcing Teams - Monitor the launch cycles of North American brands' direct-mail catalogs and engage in their style selection process 3-4 months in advance to secure core fabric orders for catalog items. - Establish separate quality checkpoints for catalog orders, focusing on color consistency, shrinkage rates, and hand feel uniformity to avoid batch-to-batch variations that could disrupt the visual coherence of the printed catalog. - If a client runs both e-commerce and direct-mail channels, propose two inventory plans: one for fast-turnaround e-commerce styles and another for catalog styles emphasizing stability and on-time delivery.
For Export Enterprises - Proactively ask clients about their direct-mail marketing plans during communications. These clients typically require faster sample development and higher sampling accuracy, making them ideal for long-term partnerships. - Offer value-added services like fabric pre-shrinking and finished-goods pre-inspection for catalog orders to help brands reduce return rates and strengthen supply chain loyalty. - Pay attention to the integration of U.S. postal data with demographic tools. As direct-mail targeting becomes more data-driven, suppliers who can provide trend analysis based on historical orders will gain significant bargaining power.
Direct mail is not a relic of the past—it is a piece of the omni-channel puzzle being polished anew. As digital traffic peaks, brands that return to product fundamentals and build trust through touch and sight are using the oldest tools to win back the most discerning consumers.