Who sends this catalog
We keep a catalog of the things sold under the Fox Valley Traders family of names. We read the listings, sort them onto pages, and write about them in plain words. The buying itself happens at our retail partner.
What this site actually is
This is a catalog, in the old sense of the word. Somebody sat down with a pile of products, decided what belonged next to what, and wrote a paragraph about each one. There are eight pages of goods here and five names in the family, and every item sits on exactly one page so you can find it twice.
What this site is not is a store. There is no cart on it, no card gets charged on it, and nothing here knows your address. Every button that says you can have the thing sends you to our retail partner, which is where the listing lives, where the price is set, and where the order is taken.
The names in the family
Fox Valley Traders, Miles Kimball, WalterDrake, Gaggleville and a handful of smaller labels all come out of the same building in Oshkosh, Wisconsin. Miles Kimball began mailing a catalog out of that town in the 1930s, and the habit stuck. The labels have different tempers. Miles Kimball leans toward the house and the kitchen, WalterDrake toward the small solvers of small problems, and Gaggleville does nothing at all except dress a concrete goose.
We did not make any of it. We are not going to pretend otherwise on a page about honesty. What we do is know the catalog well enough to tell you which of the five labels a thing came from and why that matters, which is more than a search box will do for you.
How a thing gets onto a page
Everything starts from the listing. We take the title, the bullet points, the price and the photograph, and then we throw out the part that every listing shares, because a paragraph naming all seven sister brands tells you nothing about a pie server. What is left is the thing itself.
Then it gets a page and a shelf. If an item has a stated size, the size goes on the card where you can see it without clicking. If it has a season or an occasion, that goes on too. If a listing has no price, or the seller has run out, it does not go in at all, because a catalog entry you cannot act on is just a tease.
Some things we leave out on purpose. The family also sells health remedies, and we are not equipped to write about those responsibly, so you will not find them here. A short catalog we can stand behind beats a long one we cannot.
Who we picture reading this
Mostly somebody buying for somebody else. A daughter who needs a birthday present for a mother two states away, a neighbor who saw the goose on the porch and finally wants to know where the raincoat came from, a person furnishing a kitchen for a parent who is finding jar lids harder than they used to be.
That changes how we write. We try to tell you what the thing will be like to live with, not how advanced it is, because you are the one deciding and somebody else is the one who has to open the box.
How the site pays for itself
When you follow a link from here and buy something, we may be paid a small amount by our retail partner. It costs you nothing extra and it does not move a price by a cent. The note in the footer of every page says the same thing in the plain required wording.
We mention it here because it explains the shape of the site. Nobody pays us to put an item near the top, and we have no reason to praise a thing we would not buy. The only version of this that works is the one where you trust the page.