I don’t often talk about my own successes, but I really should do so more often.

Last year, in November and December, I edited two catalogs for an outdoor furniture company for which a friend of mine does ecommerce. The catalogs were printed this past March and were a rousing success. I’ve been told that sales are doing very well this quarter.

I don’t want to be conceited, but I like to think I had a hand in it.

I used Adobe Acrobat to edit the catalogs and became more skilled in its use.

One of the catalogs I edited was the retail catalog. It is meant to market the furniture to individual consumers who live in homes. At 119 pages, it is full of beautiful photos of the furniture pieces. The photos are captioned with the names and prices of each piece, and the captioning was where I came in.

I was given a master Excel spreadsheet showing the price of each furniture piece; the spreadsheet was thousands of lines long. I looked up the price of each piece by searching for its name in the Search feature and made sure that the price on the spreadsheet was the same as the price given in the catalog. If they differed, I called it out by making a comment on the catalog page. The spreadsheet, like the customer, was always right.

I was also responsible for making sure there were no typos in the text boxes or the product names. Typos make things look very unprofessional.

The other catalog on which I worked was the trade catalog, and it is meant to market the furniture to institutions, such as colleges, hospitals, and restaurants. It features pieces like benches, café tables, and armchairs. Like the retail catalog, it is 119 pages long and filled with gorgeous photos. Unlike the retail catalog, it also contains diagrams for each furniture piece which show its dimensions in inches.

To edit the trade catalog, I used the company’s website. I made sure that the dimensions given in the catalog matched the dimensions on the website, and verified each SKU number (or item number). Again, I also edited the grammar, spelling, and punctuation in the text boxes and product names.

I wish I could display the catalogs on my blog and on LinkedIn.