Let’s Go

July 31, 2006  by in UnCategorized   

By Home Furnishings Business in on August 2006 Rather than fight the Internet, furniture retailers are finding ways to make the Web work for their business. Even those reluctant to actually sell furniture on the Internet are using it to give consumers ideas for shopping and to display what they view as their particular strengths, be those design assistance, selection or fast delivery.

There still aren’t a lot of consumers willing to plop down hundreds or thousands of dollars on products they’ve never seen or touched, but a particular opportunity for furniture retailers pondering the Web is to make sure their store pops up during the pre-shopping stage a lot of consumers use the Internet for in the early stages of their buying decision.

Dayton Interiors in Harrisonburg, Va., should have its new Web site up and running “any day,” said Grady Jones, president of the middle- to high-price point retailer.

“My take is that if you go to 50 different retail Web sites, their content is basically the same,” he said. “In our case, a Web site is essentially designed to bring more people through the front door.”

Dayton’s Web site highlights the store’s design expertise.

“We highlight the resource we have for consumers from a design standpoint—our designers, Barbara Beam and Grace Florence, have 70 years of interior design experience,” Jones said. “The idea of our Web site is to introduce them to consumers. We want people walking through the door to ask for them by name.”

Jones said it’s not unusual for the retailer’s staff to spend eight hours working with a customer to match product to their needs.

“They’ll sometimes talk people out of buying a piece of furniture if it’s not going to fit their space,” he said. “That just gives the customer a problem later on. The people we compete with aren’t necessarily the furniture store down the street, because we are different.”

Clicks and Mortar

Who is that competition? For traditional furniture stores, it’s no news that one of the biggest threats comes from so-called “lifestyle retailers”—Crate & Barrel, Pottery Barn, Restoration Hardware, for example—who’ve used catalogs and the Internet to make shopping for furniture at home a lot easier for consumers than have most traditional retailers.

And those companies are doing so with a hefty mark-up a lot of consumers don’t seem to mind in exchange for convenience.

Potterybarn.com, for example, offers, as of press time, 54 pieces of case goods, occasional and upholstery under “furniture” alone, complete with price, finish and fabric options. Consumers can order goods for delivery at home if they don’t feel like going to the store.

And furniture is front and center on the retailer’s home page.

Pop over to crateandbarrel.com, and while no furniture is on the home page, a quick search for “furniture” takes consumers to a choice of 839 items in all categories, and again offering consumers the option to purchase online.

Click restorationhardware.com, and the home page promotes 154 fabrics, one- to two-week delivery on in-stock items, and tells consumers up front that they can expect 45-day delivery on other goods.

The most compelling thing about these Web sites is that they aren’t what many in the industry decry as fly-by-night, low-cost operators. They’re firmly meshed with powerful networks of brick-and-mortar stores.

Pottery Barn has almost 200 stores in the United States and six in Canada; Crate & Barrel, more than 145 U.S. locations; and Restoration Hardware, over 100 stores in the United States and Canada.

That kind of market penetration puts most consumers shopping on the Internet within comparatively reasonable reach of an actual Crate & Barrel, Restoration Hardware or Pottery Barn store—which goes a long way toward allaying shoppers’ concerns about recourse if they have a problem with the goods they buy online.



Working the Web

Everyone knows the Internet’s a major vehicle for consumers doing anything from preshopping research to making an actual purchase, but some furniture retailers are at a loss on how they can make the Web work for their business.

Whether it’s for selling furniture online, offering product information only or highlighting a store’s particular strengths in product selection or design assistance, virtually all brick-and-mortar furniture stores fear their Internet presence is an opportunity for competitors to shop their stores, and a way to provide free information to consumers who never plan to set foot on their sales floor.

Fact is, it’s both those things. But like it or not the Internet isn’t going away and, moving forward, will likely play a larger role in the furniture industry, just as it has in so many others.

“A lot of retailers say, ‘I hate the Internet, it just lets everyone shop my store, including my competition,’” said Diane Burley, publisher of Pure Contemporary, an online magazine dedicated to contemporary furnishings and lifestyles. “You’re right, but you still have to deal with the Internet.”

Burley, who grew up in a family that owns a 50-year-old design firm, is a veteran journalist who first put metropolitan daily newspapers on the Internet in 1994, and has extensive experience building products and brands via digital sites. Launched in 2004, Pure Contemporary chalked up almost 90,000 visitors from all U.S. states and 120 countries last month.

She likens the Internet to other disruptive technologies that change consumer behavior and eliminate markets. In a presentation to retailers at the Las Vegas market last month, she gave an example.

“In 1961 a new technological innovation was launched, and within 25 years had gained 50 percent market share, 95 percent to 98 percent by 2006, overturning an existing dominant product and eliminating an entire market of service providers,” she said. “That innovation? The disposable diaper.”

With Internet use doubling worldwide from 2000 through 2005 from 450 million people online to more than 1 billion, it’s impact is growing even faster than her mundane, but pointed, example.

The Internet, she said, already is changing the retail landscape.

“Foot traffic is at its lowest level,” Burney said. “Buying habits have changed: (Consumers) browse online, they research online, confirm buying decisions and research the retailer online. They may buy online, or from a local merchant.”

A key is determining your Web site’s business focus. Is it for selling, to inform or entice, to reduce costs, relay order information, or a combination of the above?

“You have to remember that your Web site is a business venue,” Burney said. “Retailers worry about competitors and unproductive traffic on their Web site, but you’ll invest in a mall where not everyone walking by is interested in what you sell, but you pay because you do want all those eyeballs going by.”

Creating a viable Web strategy is all about recognizing your Web site’s value in supporting, building and spreading the word about your brick-and-mortar location, she said.

“Treat it like a venue to be branded, merchandised and marketed,” Burney said. “Invest in current and relevant content; create lots of inbound and intrasite links, and don’t worry about the rip-off artists.”

When it comes to the Web, it’s a lot later than some retailers think, she said.

“Disposable diapers practically eliminated the cloth diaper and related businesses in less than 45 years,” Burney said. “The Internet is 40-years-old, but the growth in the last five years goes way beyond any of the years leading up to 2000.”

Diapers might be seem and insignificant example to a furniture retailer selling merchandise that ranges from hundreds to thousands of dollars, but don’t laugh.

There were a lot of buggy-whip manufacturers whose world got rocked in the late 19th and early 20th century who probably thought the automobile was a novelty item at best.

The Internet is a vehicle not a product, but still a factor for most companies that want to do business 10 years from now. HFB