Crate & Barrel Catalogs Keep Coming? Cut the Co-op Feed

calendar Aug 3, 2026 / · 7 min read · catalog opt out crate and barrel data broker opt out  ·
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Crate & Barrel Catalogs Trace Back to a Shared Co-op Feed, Not Just Your Own Purchases

An address enters the shared marketing co-op that feeds furniture and home-goods catalog prospecting the moment a household completes a purchase with any participating retailer — not necessarily Crate & Barrel itself. That single entry can then be licensed out to any retailer drawing from the same pool, which is why a Crate & Barrel catalog can keep arriving at a home that has never placed a direct order with the brand. Crate & Barrel, the home furnishings retailer founded in Chicago in 1962 by Gordon and Carole Segal and now operating more than 100 stores across North America alongside its Crate & Kids and CB2 sister brands, builds its prospecting mail list from two separate sources: its own house file of customers and prior catalog recipients, and the shared co-op database that furniture and lifestyle catalog companies use to find new buyers outside their own records. Updating an account's mail preferences or asking customer service to stop catalogs addresses only the first source. The second — the co-op feed — keeps supplying fresh prospect lists to any participating retailer, Crate & Barrel included, regardless of what the house file says.

That co-op layer is the Abacus Cooperative, operated by Epsilon. Furniture and home-goods retailers contribute their own customer purchase data into the shared pool, and in exchange they can license targeted audience segments back out of it — households matched by purchase history, income profile, or proximity to a physical store. A transaction at an entirely different home-goods or lifestyle catalog company can be enough to place an address into a segment that Crate & Barrel later licenses for a seasonal prospecting run. This is the structural reason a single opt-out request rarely produces a permanent stop: the house list and the co-op feed operate independently, and only removing yourself from both closes the loop.

The Federal Trade Commission's guidance on stopping junk mail lays out exactly this two-track approach — contacting individual mailers to stop catalogs directly, and separately addressing the marketing lists and data brokers that supply new prospect names to those mailers in the first place. Privacy organizations describe the same split from the broker side. The Privacy Rights Clearinghouse explains that data brokers compile and sell consumer profiles that marketers, catalog retailers among them, use to build prospecting lists, while the Electronic Frontier Foundation has long pointed out that the burden of stopping that flow falls on the consumer filing a separate opt-out with each participant in the chain — not on any single retailer choosing to stop mailing.

How to stop Crate & Barrel catalog mailings: step by step

Work through each of the following in a single session. Each step reaches a different layer of the pipeline, and stopping at only one typically produces a temporary reduction rather than a lasting change.

  1. Update your Crate & Barrel communication preferences. Crate & Barrel's own site lists a Communication Preferences option in its site footer, alongside its privacy policy. Log in to your account at Crate & Barrel or use the standalone preferences link to opt out of catalog and email marketing. This controls the house file — records Crate & Barrel holds from its own customers and prior catalog recipients.

  2. Contact Crate & Barrel customer service directly. Crate & Barrel publishes a customer text line and live chat through its own site, along with a store locator for in-person requests. Ask explicitly to be removed from all physical mailing lists, and provide your full name and every address at which you have received a Crate & Barrel catalog — the house file may still hold records tied to a prior residence. Note the date and any confirmation or reference number given.

  3. File a Do Not Sell or Share request through Crate & Barrel's own privacy tools. Crate & Barrel's footer includes a dedicated Do Not Sell or Share My Personal Information link, alongside its full privacy policy. Submitting this request documents that you do not want your purchase data shared with third parties — including the co-op networks that catalog companies draw prospecting lists from.

  4. Opt out of the Abacus co-op via Epsilon. This is the step that addresses the shared prospecting database, and the one most households skip. Go to the Epsilon Consumer Privacy Request Form and select the "Do not sell my personal information / Opt-out" option. Enter your name and all current and prior mailing addresses. Epsilon marks your record in its marketing databases — including the Abacus Cooperative pool that home-goods catalog companies draw from for prospecting — as "Do Not Share." That flag is designed to persist even when a participating retailer re-uploads its customer file later, which is what makes it more durable than a simple delete. Phone opt-outs are handled through the number published on Epsilon's own consumer information page.

  5. Save every confirmation. Record the date of each submission and any reference number or confirmation email. Give the pipeline time to clear before judging whether volume has actually dropped, and use a timestamped record as your baseline.

What to expect

Removal from Crate & Barrel's own house list typically processes within a few weeks of a confirmed request. But as the FTC's junk mail guidance makes clear, direct mail runs on a production delay: a list already licensed, or a print run already scheduled, before your opt-out was processed will still generate mail while that cycle closes out. Expect a reduction rather than an instant stop.

Re-addition is a normal part of the cycle to plan for. A future purchase from Crate & Barrel re-triggers house-file mailing activity. Co-op data can also be refreshed whenever a participating retailer re-uploads its customer file — though Epsilon's "Do Not Share" flag is designed to survive those re-uploads, which is what makes it structurally more protective than a one-time removal. A practical habit is to re-confirm suppression status annually and to re-file the Crate & Barrel direct opt-out after any new transaction with the brand.

How this stops catalog mail

Crate & Barrel, like most catalog retailers with an established direct-mail program, runs a house list and a prospecting program side by side. The prospecting layer draws on the shared co-op pool: participating home-goods retailers contribute customer purchase histories into the Abacus Cooperative, Epsilon aggregates and models that data into audience segments, and Crate & Barrel or another furniture retailer licenses a segment ahead of its next mailing run. The chain runs in one direction — a purchase somewhere in your history is contributed to the co-op, packaged into a prospect list, licensed by a catalog retailer, and printed onto a label that lands in your mailbox. Your record does not need to exist in Crate & Barrel's own file for this chain to reach you; it only has to exist in the co-op pool the brand draws from.

That structural reality is why both levers matter. Opting out of Crate & Barrel's house list removes your address from records the brand holds directly. Opting out of the Abacus co-op via Epsilon removes your record from the shared upstream pool that any participating retailer — not just Crate & Barrel — can draw from. Working through a broader broker like Acxiom closes another common upstream node feeding the same prospecting cycle. Opting out of the catalog treats the symptom; opting out of the co-op and the brokers feeding it treats the cause.

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