John Baumann first worked at The Swiss Colony in Monroe when he was a junior in high school. He worked the night shift in the mail room, bagging and sorting catalogs for distribution.

"For me, it was just a job where I got to meet a lot of people and learn some things about life," he said. "I had no expectations at all at that time about ever coming to work for Swiss Colony."

But he kept coming back. In high school, he worked as an inventory controller at the company's data center.

After college, Baumann came back to work full time at The Swiss Colony in 1985.

Now, about 33 years after taking his first job there, Baumann is president of the direct-marketing company, and he's trying to bring the private firm into the 21st century by looking beyond the paper catalog.

Founded in Monroe as a mail-order bulk-cheese service in 1926 by UW-Madison graduate Ray Kubly, The Swiss Colony has grown into a $700 million business that sells seasonal and special-occasion food gifts as well as apparel, exercise equipment, home furnishings, jewelry and electronics through its collection of catalogs and online marketing sites.

The company has 15 facilities in Wisconsin, Illinois, Iowa, Missouri, Nevada and China. In August, the company bought the iconic Montgomery Ward brand, and it plans to begin publishing catalogs under the name next spring.

Its other brands include Seventh Avenue, Midnight Velvet, Ginny's, Country Door, Monroe & Main, Room for Color, Ashro, The Tender Filet, Home Visions and Charles Keath.

Q: The Swiss Colony has changed its focus quite a bit in the last decade. What was the thinking behind recent changes and expansion and what should we look for in the future from the company?

A: With the size of the industry having leveled off, it's become more difficult to launch new catalogs. Really, through the year 2004 virtually all of our growth came organically; we were designing and building catalogs from scratch. But, over time we've seen that become more difficult and expensive to do. So we started to look toward acquisitions.

Another component that's come into play is there are more competitive catalogs available in the marketplace due to struggles in the industry and the current economic downturn.

You've got more struggling catalogers out there now. ... Often these businesses are either held by private individuals or private equity groups that want to get their money out while there's still a business to sell. Hence, a lot of these companies are selling for a much lower price than they would have just a couple years ago. That's another reason we've turned to acquisitions.

Q: What effects have the slumping economy and rising food prices had on The Swiss Colony?

A: We're seeing how the economy has affected consumer confidence. Our sales are off just a tick from what we would have expected. Not a lot, maybe a point or a point and a half down in a couple spots that would normally have held up pretty well.

Fortunately, it's not as bad for us right now as it is for a lot of other companies. But we do think the reality is the consumer is backing off, from a spending standpoint.

There are cost pressures on us, just like on any consumer who goes to the grocery store sees that the cost of chocolate, flour or eggs is up. Those are the same ingredients we use in our bakery. And while we can't pass all that cost on to our end consumer, we have found that we are under pressure to raise our prices some. But we're trying to be careful about it.

Other industry pressures that are making life difficult for us are that we're seeing very substantial increases in the cost of paper, ink and postage, each of which have gone up more than 20 percent over the past year and a half. So anyone who is in the paper and ink business right now is feeling some pain. We are just as they are.

Q: Have these pressures forced you to change the way you operate? Do you foresee layoffs in the company's future?

A: No layoffs. We're like everyone else who's had to face that. It's the last thing we want to have to do.

Fortunately, we're in pretty good shape here. Our sales have held up pretty well, we're still profitable and we've got a pretty strong balance sheet. So, we are probably in better shape than several of our competitors in the industry when it comes to weathering a tough economic storm.

Yet, we're realists. We realize it's tough out there. We're like anyone; when things are tough, we tighten our belts. So, we're looking to knock out any expenditures that aren't absolutely necessary to keep driving the business forward. Hopefully, it doesn't last too much longer, though.

When it comes to keeping our work force busy, that's where we're looking to acquisitions like the Montgomery Ward, Charles Keath and Home Visions brands. We look at bringing them into Monroe and fully integrating them into our current work force to keep these folks busy here.

Q: What is the status of the integration of Montgomery Ward and your other recently acquired brands, and what are your plans for them?

A: The integration has gone pretty smoothly so far. We reopened the Montgomery Ward Web site (www.wards.com) on Sept. 15. ... People are getting orders in and we're getting the products shipped. That was job one.

As we look forward for Montgomery Ward and Charles Keath, we'd like to get printed catalogs back in the mail sometime next year.

We're hoping to get Montgomery Ward back in the mail sometime around February or March. With Charles Keath, we're undecided.

Home Visions had not mailed a catalog in a couple years; it was limited to a Web site. We plan to relaunch that Web site, but we don't have timing nailed down for that yet. It depends a little bit on the market and a little on how smoothly the rest of these projects go in terms of getting them up and running. ...

Q: You've spoken in the past about moving beyond the catalog industry. Are you planning organizational changes to the company?

A: No great organizational changes are in play. We are looking to see what more we can do from a wholesale standpoint. You know, we've got our own food production facility here.

We are also curious to see what we can do in setting up specialized Internet sites. For example, we might find that you could do a small but profitable business with a Web site that caters just to selling chocolate, wine, specialty cheeses, rugs and other types of things that are very searchable on the Internet and we could build a strong brand around.

We are seeing, obviously, that more consumers are going to the Internet. So how do we make that work for us? The difficulty with the Internet is there's just thousands upon thousands of competitors out there, and trying to get your brand to break through the clutter of that marketplace is difficult. But we feel that's an initiative we have to undertake and push.

JOHN BAUMANN

President of The Swiss Colony, Monroe

Age: 49

Hometown: Monroe

Family: Married

Web site: www.swisscolony.com

Employees: 1,200 permanent, 7,000 temporary and seasonal

2007 sales: More than $700 million