Fingerhut Companies Select the Quadstone System

Quadstone, a leading provider of customer intelligence software and services for customer relationship management, announced that Fingerhut Companies, a wholly owned subsidiary of Federated Department Stores Inc, has selected the Quadstone System to assist in its database marketing initiatives. As one of the nation's largest multi-channel marketers, Fingerhut sells a broad range of products and services through catalogs, direct marketing and the Internet.

"Our current priority is to improve the speed with which we can deliver, verify and deploy our response and lifetime value models," said Michael Sherman, president of Fingerhut Companies Inc. "Quadstone System provides analysts with a highly productive environment, and we will leverage it to keep pace with our more dynamic consumer markets."

Fingerhut's business intelligence team, comprised of marketing and statistical analysts, will leverage the Quadstone System to develop models in support of direct marketing campaigns. The campaigns will support such household brand names as Fingerhut, Figi's, Old Pueblo Traders, Bedford Fair, Willow Ridge, Brownstone Studio, Lew Magram and Popular Club.

"As technology-assisted commerce becomes more widespread and consumers begin to use multiple channels to conduct their business, it is vital that retailers can react quickly and consistently to consumer interactions," said Mark Smith, president of Quadstone. "Quadstone's ability to handle data from all channels, and its interactive processing for quick visual results and virtually seamless deployment, makes it an ideal choice for Fingerhut."

Fingerhut put the Quadstone System through a rigorous proof-of-concept exercise before making a decision to buy. The decision was made based on Quadstone's ability to quickly and accurately analyze massive amounts of data, while integrating with Fingerhut's existing IT infrastructure.

The Quadstone System will be used by Fingerhut to analyze online and direct marketing campaigns, and to make predictions of customer behavior in areas including: responses to promotions; amount of orders; return of orders; preshipment cancel of orders; lifetime value of customers and saturation of promotions.

Fingerhut has a long heritage in the database-marketing arena. For more than 20 years, Fingerhut has been developing and driving successful database marketing campaigns on behalf of its retail entities. The Quadstone System is a new generation of analytical application for customer-oriented analysis across a range of channels to provide a truly holistic view of the customer.

Users of the Quadstone System include industry leaders in the finance, retail, and telecommunications industries, and represent forerunners in online and traditional markets. Representative Quadstone customers and partners include Art Technology Group, Barclays Bank, CVS.com, CustomerLinx and M&I Bank.

About Fingerhut

Fingerhut Companies Inc is a leading database marketing company selling a broad range of products and services direct-to-the-consumer through catalogs, direct marketing and the Internet. The company is a wholly owned subsidiary of Federated Department Stores Inc. Based in Minnetonka, Minn., Fingerhut is the second largest consumer cataloger in the world. Fingerhut can also be found on the Internet at www.fingerhut.com. In addition to the Fingerhut catalog, the company publishes Figi's, Old Pueblo Traders, Bedford Fair, Willow Ridge, Brownstone Studio, Lew Magram and Popular Club.

About Quadstone

Quadstone provides the most powerful customer behavior modeling and predictive marketing software currently available. Quadstone's products allow business and marketing executives to instantly and easily employ predictive modeling techniques to produce sophisticated analyses that visually represent customer behavior from every marketing channel - Web, direct marketing, sales, call centers and operations. Because the Quadstone System can be installed and deployed to produce results within weeks, typically faster and more precisely than any other offering available, executives can quickly measure and influence more profitable customer behavior, while decreasing marketing's reliance on IT or statisticians.

Quadstone's international clients are market leaders in the e-tail/retail, financial services and telecommunications sectors and include Barclays Bank, CVS.com, Eircom, M&I Bank, Sainsbury's, SmarterKids.com, Telenor and Vodafone among others. Quadstone was named best "Small Start-up" of the year at the Financial Times/Cartier/BVCA awards in 1998, and earned Deloitte & Touche's "Fast 50" award in 1998/1999 and 1999/2000. Founded in 1995, Quadstone's European operations are based in London, England, and the company's research and development center is located in Edinburgh, Scotland. Quadstone's North American operations are headquartered in Boston, MA, U.S.A.

Contact Kevin Long, Quadstone, 617-753-7393, kevin.long@quadstone.com or Ben Saukko, Fingerhut Companies Inc, 952-932-3529, ben.saukko@fingerhut.com.