Daily News Archive
Brought to you by Home Furnishings Business
July 31,
2006 by in UnCategorized 
By Home Furnishings Business in Customer Service on August 2006
You can’t miss a MINI when you’re out on the road. The car, which got huge play in the film “The Italian Job,” stands out for its compact
proportions in a sea of SUVs. And MINI owners are part of a community along the lines of those who ride Harley Davidson motorcycles.
They’re passionate about the cars, and feel a sense of belonging that’s largely driven and facilitated by the Web site for MINI’s U.S. operation, miniusa.com, a site that serves as an object lesson on how the Web can link a product to a brick-and-mortar retail location and get
consumers excited about the goods they buy.
“We aren’t a car for everyone,” said Kate Alini,
customer experience manager for MINI USA.”We sell 38,000 cars a year, versus, say, Volkswagen, which could be at least 100,000. We’re looking for the MINI mindset.”
What’s the mindset? Modern, free-spirited, active and individualistic, and miniusa.com caters to all those characteristics.
Alini is responsible for all Internet and customer relationship management at MINI USA, and the Web has been a great vehicle for branding the company as the car for hip people who want to tailor a vehicle to their specifications.
“Our Web site has been critical from a prospecting perspective and getting people engaged with the brand and bringing them on through a sale,” said. “You can do that through direct mail, but it’s very costly.”
A System for Reaching Out
The Web also enables MINI USA to automatically reach out to potential and existing customers visiting miniusa.com.
“We have trigger streams we deploy to people who are interested in the product, but not yet ready to buy,” Alini said. “They’re based on what people do or don’t do on the Web site.”
Say a consumer visits MINI USA’s Web site, and wants to receive information about the MINI. They’d receive an e-mail about customer activities in their area, and an invitation to visit miniusa.com’s configuration page, where they can customize a MINI to their specifications, which include an array of color combinations and accents—you want the Union Jack on your MINI’s roof, you’ve got it—and typical add-on features such as CD players and interior options. Consumers can then send their personalized vehicle specifications to their nearest MINI dealer—with that reference also via the Web site.
“One in three people who configure a MINI and send it to a dealer buy a car,” Alini said. “We’re supplying those independent dealers with a qualified lead. If someone configures a car and hasn’t sent it to a dealer by a certain point, we follow up—we try to move them along to a purchase based on what they do or don’t do on the Web site.”
Following Up, Building Repeats
A year after consumers take delivery on their MINI, they get a “happy anniversary” e-mail, and information on MINI activities in their area, as well as an invitation to visit the “Owners Lounge” on the Web site.
“First of all, we want to ensure they’re happy with the purchase,” Alini said. “Second, we want to keep them engaged.”
The Owners Lounge serves as a forum for MINI owners to share experiences and organize for group activities. MINI USA also sponsors events such as a scavenger hunt, where owners compete for prizes. Last year’s first-prize winner received a trip to Italy for the MINI United event (picture the annual motorcycle rally in Sturgis, S.D.); the second-place contestant won a trip to the company’s production facility in Oxford, England.
With MINI USA five years into operation, some vehicle owners are ready for a new car, or might want to add another, and miniusa.com is a key to supplying that repeat business for its dealers. One of the Web site’s messages in that respect: “Tell your friends.”
“We’re trying to get people who own MINIs to be our brand advocates and talk to people they know about buying a MINI,” Alini said. “We have programs set up to get current owners to buy again or spread the word.”
The Lesson for Furniture
Could furniture retailers benefit from a MINI-like approach to Web-based communities and communication? As a furniture shopper herself, Alini’s answer is a definite “Yes.”
“I just bought a piece of furniture from Restoration Hardware, and because of the quick-ship program got it in two weeks,” she said. “When I bought a couch (at retail), it took a lot longer than expected. If the retailer had sent me some sort of communication during that time—an image of a swatch or wood finish—I’d have felt a lot better. I was holding off on painting our home until the piece arrived, and having that information in hand would have been helpful.”
Alini’s also a good example of the way Internet-savvy consumers use the Web for furniture shopping. She got as far as she could online, but wanted to see her prospective purchase in person to check on details such as the wood finish and dovetailed drawers.
“I spent three or four weeks looking for the piece,” she said of the dresser she ended up buying from Restoration Hardware. “I got it down to two pieces I was interested in, but was not about to buy it without seeing it myself. I called a Restoration Hardware store to make sure they had the pieces I was interested in, and my husband and I went to look at them. We went home, slept on it and made a decision.”
Alini did end up ordering from the store on the Web. The reason? Convenience.
“I bought online simply because I didn’t want to have to go back to the store,” she said. HFB
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
July 30,
2006 by in UnCategorized
By Home Furnishings Business in on July 2006
Design services, the retail marketplace, outsourcing, the rise of Internet shopping, and the growth of broadcast and cable television makeover shows have had a profound impact on design industry professionals, according to two surveys conducted by the International Furnishings and Design Association.
“From the results, it’s clear that while we are still learning about where the Internet and the global economy will take us, the next few years are bound to be challenging,” said IFDA President Mark Jeross,
In 2004, IFDA posed a series of questions to member designers at 15 U.S. chapters, and asked the same questions this year—with double the response rate from two years ago.
When asked whether designers would be attracted to the furnishings and designs industry if they were starting their careers now, 51 percent said yes in 2004, with more 87 percent responding positively this year.
Why the increased optimism on designers’ part? Survey responses included: “The whole world seems to have been opened up to design, from the do-it-yourselfers to the continuing growth of the luxury market”; “People [today] are spending more on their residences, second residences and commercial spaces. They want beauty, not just utility”; “With the ever-expanding global markets and manufacturing, the opportunity for designs and the need for designers [are] great.”
When asked, “Have changes in retail outlets had a negative effect on your business?,” 31 percent of 2004 respondents said, yes; that rose to 41 percent in this year’s survey.
This year, one member said that “quality suffers” because of the way discount merchants attract customers; another decried the fact that “product sources have changed”; while a third said, “Mass merchants do not require the value-added collateral materials we design and provide to our clients’ traditional furniture retailers.”
When asked about the effect of those changes on designers, only 19 percent of 2004 respondents indicated they’d altered the way they shop for materials, while that rose to more than 33 percent in 2006. In 2004, 40 percent said their business was affected by what design clients were willing to pay for an item, but this year that percentage approached 59 percent of respondents.
Two years ago the survey asked whether offshore manufacturing will affect designers’ future in the furnishings and design industry. Thirty-one percent said yes, 67 percent, no. While the number of “yes” responses to the question was up slightly to 32 percent in the 2006 survey, only 39 percent gave a definitive “no.”
This year’s comments from designers on offshore production included: “Cheaper and lower-quality products mean smaller margins of profit and wholesale pricing available to the public”; “Competition will spur U.S. furniture manufacturers to become more innovative in production time and methods”; “As we are now more global, eventually the creative design process will also be outsourced to offshore, as manufacturing is now.”
The surveys also queried designers on the effect of the Internet and the proliferation of mail-order catalogs on their business. In 2004, the consensus was that information had become more accessible and research had grown easier, but in 2006, concern was evident amid the praise. Comments included: “The Internet has had a tremendously positive effect! We can advertise and sell our business to anyone in the country, [but] mail order doesn’t help us at all”; “A good portion of the buying public simply doesn’t know what constitutes good quality design, product or service”; “The impact is huge. The Web has given everyone the ability to make their own design selections with less reliance on a designer.”
On a more positive note, another designer said, “Customers doing research on the computer [are] much more knowledgeable about products. This leads to our being able to sell them more expensive items”; another said, “The Internet has demystified the interior design field and created a savvy consumer.”
Others complained, one designer saying that “Internet availability makes our business harder” and insisted that it’s become “harder to make any money when [clients] know what things go for online.”
Taking the middle ground on the Internet, another said, “I [now] charge more for time, ideas and intangibles than for product, which allows me to be supportive when clients want to purchase on their own.”
Thirty-three percent of designer respondents to the 2004 survey said design, home remodeling and extreme-makeover television shows affected the way they did business; that rose to 47 percent this year.
While conceding that “cable TV’s design/home remodeling shows have opened up a world of new ideas,” some IFDA members warned that “people expect ‘design on a dime,’” and “everyone thinks they’re a decorator.” Others groused that clients “have unreal cost and time frames for remodeling and makeovers. [Their] expectations are way out of line.”
Although one member insisted that cable TV shows “give clients just enough knowledge to become dangerous,” another stated, “Every opportunity to focus on the home is a plus.”
“The saturation of media, Internet shopping and the heightened availability of information have had a direct impact,” said IFDA’s Jeross in comparing the results from this year’s and 2004’s survey. “I believe that the people, and businesses, who carve out a special niche for themselves are bound to succeed, but the way they do business will certainly change in the years ahead. These are exciting times for everyone in our industry.”
July 30,
2006 by in UnCategorized
By Home Furnishings Business in Furniture Retailing on July 2006
A new survey shows that almost half of us take work on vacation, not just beach reads or swim suits
A survey by Opinion Research for office-furniture company Steelcase found that almost half (43 percent) of the respondents spent at least some time working during vacation.
This statistic has greatly increased compared to results culled from ten years ago: about 23 percent took work with them on vacation, according to Grand Rapids, Mich.-based Steelcase.
The survey included nearly 700 office workers. The survey showed that only 61 percent of Americans use all of their allotted vacation time in a year.
Blame it on laptops and portable technology? Or perhaps, blame it on a overactive work ethic.
People said they are “committed to the job” (25 percent), had a “pressing assignment that needs to be taken care of” (22 percent) or that they “don’t want to leave it all for when I get back” (12 percent).
Some people said they can’t “relax until things are taken care of” (10 percent).
The survey, which polled nearly 700 office workers, also revealed that only 61 percent of Americans use all of their allotted vacation time in a year.
“This data causes us to question whether job commitment has increased or if the ease of connectivity enables workers to demonstrate their job commitment remotely and persistently,” said Steelcase’s manager of corporate marketing, Chris Congdon, in a release.
July 30,
2006 by in UnCategorized
By Home Furnishings Business in Customer Service on July 2006
Chromcraft Revington, Inc. announced last week that they will restructure their sales force in order to provide better customer service by providing a unified point of contact.
The sales management and representation teams for three of the company’s major brands -- Chromcraft, Peters-Revington and Silver Furniture -- have been streamlined and packaged into one group.
CEO Ben Anderson-Ray said in a release, “This is a major change designed to strengthen our relationships with customers, improve our customer service and enhance our sales effectiveness.” He further stated, “By combining the sales effort for these closely related brands we believe that customers will be provided with a stronger unified point of contact and greater consistency in our overall approach to the market.”
HFB called Anderson-Ray, who said “Quite simply the way it works is, instead of having separately managed organization for each of the three brands, we will now have our reps under one manageable force. What we’re doing is moving from reps that have multiple lines to reps that are more or less exclusive to us by using all three of our brands. What that will do is give out customers a rmore unified point of contact. Our goal is to improve services and improve our sales effectiveness.”
When asked if the new restructuring would mean a loss of jobs for Chromcraft Revington sales staff, Anderson-Ray declined to share the specific numbers of his sales staff or whether they had in fact been reduced.
The company was founded in 1946 and is headquartered in Delphi, Indiana.