The Catalogue Audit

The instinct when starting a 3D programme is to begin at the top of the catalogue and work down. It feels systematic and it wastes the budget, because catalogues are rarely uniform. A minority of pieces usually carries the majority of revenue, and a long tail exists mainly for completeness.

An audit answers three questions. Which products are viewed most, which are returned most, and which generate the most pre-purchase questions. The overlap of those three is where visualisation pays for itself: high interest, high uncertainty, high cost of getting it wrong.

Returns data is the most useful and the least used. A piece returned because it was smaller than expected is a piece whose photography failed to convey scale — exactly the problem an interactive asset solves.

Done properly, an audit usually cuts the first phase to a fraction of what was proposed, and moves the rest to a later phase that may never be needed.