Sometimes a company receives an awards nomination because they’re the best executed thing you’ve ever seen. They not only show promise, they ARE the bright and shiny object. Sometimes, the promise is just too great to ignore, even if the execution is a little raw. The latter applies to Zovue, a New Zealand company that has developed a collaborative shopping platform that could either become a shopping social network or a kind of community catalog swap-fest for shopaholic fans of the medium.

Growing up in the mid-West, it was one of those girlish holiday traditions we enjoyed. “The gals” would have a cookie exchange and one of the things we’d do was bring in the piles of catalogs we got during the year and just flip through them, swap them, and tear out pictures or plan fantasy shopping sprees. (Occasionally, the random page might end up under Mom’s coffee the next morning in an envelope that read: “Beth thinks I'd look good in this...What do YOU think?”)

There’s no digital equivalent. Don’t get me wrong – Cyber Monday will be a force of nature this year. But whatever became of that “collaborative shopping” thing that LL Bean tried early on? Other than swapping urls on IM ("see this: what think for Lynn’s kids?"), there’s no real equivalent. Whatever it is that happens between friends in the mall when they either validate each other’s selections, or make tactful re-directs, it’s still clunky online. And yet, businesses can plan a nationwide roll-out of a new sales product or the most complex engineering fix with collaboration software.

What Zovue has done is digitize catalogs (check), and layer that with a social shopping element where people can “share” their desktops as with other business collaboration tools (hmmm... Interesting.) You can circle the items, drop post-its, flip through lists, etc. – or, that is, you could if there were more catalogs available.

It’s the classic chicken-and-the-egg scenario: interesting technology meets marketplace monolith. But the one truly SIMPLE thing direct mail merchandisers could do to make this an immersive reality today is this: let users click and drag whole catalogs onto your own desktop or a shared shopping site like a widget. If you could, a platform like Zovue could begin to approximate those by-gone suger-high, giggle-fests around the kitchen table.

I hear the retailers out there – why would we, who have taken such pains to make our .com site destinations, want OUR digital catalogs to be seen next to BRAND X? Here are just a couple of reasons.

1.     A) Successful, well-branded merchandise holds its own in any environment. You could be benefiting by comparison.

2.     B) Collaborative shopping multiplies the numbers of eyeballs trained on a given item times two or three at the very least. (Think times 10 during school breaks.)

3.     C) Content hyper-syndication is the whole point of the Web; why do you think apps and widgets are all the rage? You love your catalogs anyway – they’re gorgeous and immersive and maybe the best merchandising tool in the shed – why wouldn’t you want users to share them and swap them in an environment where they could fold down the virtual pages and circle their favorite ensembles? (It's user generated content but for products...the key to cool, as anyone will tell you, is in the ensemble.)

4.     D) Many of you are already on Amazon, which is one big brand buzzkill. Why not maintain the brand, while using your biggest fans to co-market for you?

E) It’s the next step beyond recommendations, which have already been found to carry more weight than mere product descriptions.

The two things missing here might be the catalog “container” – what’s the open-source or industry-standard widget for digital catalogues? (Zinio? Olive? Adobe? Kindle?) And, where can people go to swap them and collaboratively shop? Probably no single site would do, and yet, without the modular content, there's no getting started.

Zovue’s got a take on the latter that’s worth a look. Don't be too judgmental -- innovation has to start somewhere. Instead, as you find yourself surrounded by paper shoppers  and catalogues around the family feast on the eve of this most critical of commerce holidays, imagine how far your catalog could go if it could just be detached from the immovable Web.

I’d welcome your comments.