Badge Direct Publication
This is one of the fastest growing divisions of The Badge Group. Founded in 1997 to create a loyalty club system for the publishing world, it contracted "Voetbal International", one of the highest circulated (subscription-based) weekly (football) publications in the Netherlands. Now at their first lustrum, Badge Direct is responsible for more than six-weekly, monthly, or bi-monthly publications, and catalogs in which they offer merchandising and presents to more than 2,000,000 readers per week. In total more than 2,500 products are offered. Mainly based on sport and music, TV, and film properties. All advertisements are created in the "in-house" art and photo studio and sent through the net to the publisher, limiting the time from product development to reader to almost three days.

Customers are able to call in, send in a coupon or order via the various Internet shops (see next page). The call center operates between 9 am to 6 pm in the evening, after which an outside call center covers the nights and weekends. All orders are carried out from their own warehouses in the Netherlands and sent around the world. Badge Direct? expects to grow to the 50,000 shipments per year mark in 2003-2004.

Badge Direct e-commerce
Soon after the introduction of Badge Direct, the various Internet shops were released. Badge Direct owns URLs such as fanshop.com as well as local fanshop and sportsshop URLs. Fanshop.com went "live" in 1998 offering the customers the convenience to order the advertised products also through the Internet shop direct or through the sites of affiliates. The various specialized e-commerce shops of Badge Direct are all brought together in the shopping mall concept of their 247shop.nl site. Ordering via the Internet (which of course offers the whole product line compared to the printed advertisements which only show a few products) has increased dramatically in 2002, sometimes over 200% per month compared to 2001. Badge Direct expects to open four more specialized shops in 2003/2004.

HP Sport shop: the ultimate loyalties site
With the opening of the hpsport.nl, Badge Direct has brought loyalty programs to the next level; dealers selling HP products gaining points which they can spend in the specially built HP sports shop. They are able to see the status of their account and order the products with their points. Including golf and/or tennis clinics with the professionals, visiting a Champions League Final, or just ordering that special yacht.