For more than a century, images have helped people decide what to buy without seeing the product in person. In 1897, Sears told shoppers its catalog illustrations would let them “order intelligently… as well as if you were in our store selecting the goods from stock.” The picture stood in for the physical visit. By 1916, that visual strategy had scaled to 50 million catalogs a year . Decades later, the Delia’s catalog proved the same rule. At its peak of 55 million mailings a year , photo producer Jim Trzaska noted that teenage girls “would use the book itself as a sales tool to sell their parents on the clothing by showing them a picture.”…
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