The least glamorous document in the business is the one that sells the most
Ask most agencies to work on a wholesale importer, and they will want to talk about the website.
The website is not where an importer sells. The price list is.
Elite Importers is a tile importer. Porcelain and ceramic ranges from European manufacturers, including ABK, Dune Ceramica, Marazzi and Niro Granite, alongside their own Elite ranges, sold to tile retailers across Australia. Their customers are trade buyers who order from a catalogue, on a schedule, at agreed pricing. Those buyers are not browsing a website and adding to cart. They are looking at a document, deciding what to stock, and placing an order.
So the price list is not marketing collateral. It is the single most important sales asset the business produces.
Elite Importers Price List 2025 Ed - Design by Fallon Digital
An honest place to start
Most case studies about a document like this open with a rescue. The catalogue was a mess, nobody could find anything, we swept in and fixed it.
That is not this story. When I took over the Elite price list from their previous designer, it was in good shape. Well structured, properly laid out, already doing its job. Credit where it is due.
Which is exactly why it is worth writing about, because the real problem with trade catalogues is not usually that they look bad. It is that they go stale. Prices move. Ranges launch and retire. Stock icons change. A catalogue produced once a year as a project is out of date within months, and every buyer holding it is quoting from the wrong numbers.
The job was never a rescue. It was a refresh, and then the harder, less visible thing: keeping a live document accurate, edition after edition.
The document
The current price list runs to 144 pages across five brand families and more than sixty ranges, from technical information and delivery schedules through to the full range listings, each with imagery, formats, finishes and trade pricing. It exists in print and as a digital edition, and the two are kept in step. A buyer holding the printed book and a buyer on a screen are looking at the same document.
It is also already in its second edition this year. That is the point. When a new range lands or pricing moves, the catalogue moves with it. As soon as the range lands, the price list needs to be updated so the BDMs can start selling.
The work is keeping it alive
The refresh. The design was slightly tweaked to be more uniform across ranges and include big, impactful imagery, so the document represents the brand, ‘elite’.
A system, not a document. The catalogue is built so that adding a range or updating pricing is routine, not a rebuild. That is what makes multiple editions a year possible without the four week production slog most wholesalers accept as normal.
Email marketing. A catalogue is only as good as the number of buyers who open it. New editions and new ranges go out to the trade list when they ship.
Why it is a retainer
Because a catalogue is not a one-off.
A document like this built as a project is out of date within months, and it quietly reverts to being maintained in a spreadsheet by whoever has time. Elite is on a retainer because the work is continuous by nature. That is not a sales technique. It is just what the job is.
The takeaway for a business like yours
If you are a wholesaler, importer or distributor, your most valuable design asset is probably not your website. It is the document your buyers actually order from.
Maybe yours has never been designed at all, just assembled by different people over several years in whatever software was open. Or maybe, like Elite's, it has been designed, and the real question is who keeps it accurate in March, and in July, and when the next range lands.
That document is doing the selling. It is worth treating like it.
