Thirty thousand products, two brands, one price guide

Controls and Drive Limited are a specialist distributor of industrial control and automation products. Every other year they produce a printed price guide catalogue, and it goes out twice: once under the CDL brand and once under their secondary company, BPX. The style is one they like and want to keep — but a catalogue that looks identical to the last edition tells customers nothing has moved on.

Working through an Excel document containing more than 30,000 products and placing every one of them into the correct price grid. Sections have images that must be matched to the right grid. Every product has to sit in its correct section with the correct product number and the correct updated price. On a job this size, attention to detail is not a nice-to-have — one transposed figure is a mispriced order.

Keep the style, refresh the detail. The cover image was changed to the updated products, the page footer restyled and the introduction page redesigned — enough to make it feel new without forcing customers to relearn how to use it. The bigger win was process: working section by section, with each one checked by One Creative and then by CDL before moving on. That routine kept amends minimal and meant the sales team were never handed a 400-page proof to check in one go.

Two full catalogue editions, artworked and checked to the product number, on schedule.