Housewares and Home Furnishings:
Loading up the sites

No kidding. Barewalls wrangles its quarter million SKUs with a powerhouse search engine that serves the shopper browsing beach scenes or Minimalist prints as speedily as it serves one on a hunt for Monets—not to mention the shopper who knows only that she wants to fill a spot over the mantel. The engine, built in-house, lets visitors shop by art genre, subject or price.

Supporting the engine is a cataloging system that bridges art history and information science. It’s built on controlled vocabulary, a concept from library science that limits the words used to describe items. “Without that consistency, you get different results over time. You can browse our site associatively, and that’s one of our unique aspects,” says co-founder Dan Spira.

On-target merchandising also helps narrow the collection in a multitude of ways, with features such as an ever-growing number of Top 10 lists. Barewalls spreads its online gallery into the corporate world—its second-biggest customer audience after the first-time apartment dweller or home buyer—by setting up dedicated web sites that let branch offices select wall art from collections pre-approved by headquarters.

It’s a strategy that’s delivered customers. The privately held company reached profitability in 2001 and is looking at sales up 20% year over year, Lieberman says. Barewalls gets 1 million unique visitors per month, and serves up 10 million pages per month.

Significantly, 50% of first-time site visitors now arrive by typing in the URL directly, a reflection, says Lieberman, of the shopper-to-shopper buzz that he considers some of the company’s most important advertising. “The number one way we used to attract customers was Internet marketing,” he says. “But in year five, we’re riding on brand recognition and consumer confidence. Whether you’re searching by your own demographic type or by topic or genre, we want to make it as easy as possible to find it.”

Bellacor
The showroom without walls

Furniture sites have come and gone on the Internet—but, mostly, they’ve gone. That doesn’t include Bellacor.com, however. Though the privately-held online furniture retailer doesn’t disclose numbers, CEO Jan Andersen says sales at the two-and-a-half-year-old company are growing 100% yearly and that it just closed its seventh consecutive profitable quarter.

Bellacor’s success is a model in which its web site offers more than a store environment could ever hope to offer. For while space limits a furniture store’s offering to certain lines and products, Bellacor’s customers have access to more than half a million SKUs and 700 furniture manufacturers.

“There are thousands of home furnishing and lighting vendors and manufacturers, and in a traditional system it’s impossible for customers to be aware of even a small fraction,” Andersen says. “At Bellacor they can access the universe of home furnishings. We are creating a level of connection between customers and suppliers that is not possible offline.”

Though Andersen says the web site does more than replicate a store, he’s adopted a key element from stores in the form of product specialists in retail home furnishing sales. “Customers of home furnishings or lighting often like to have someone with them to make decisions. We have imported that online and found it extremely effective,” he says. The result is a system in which customers can select and buy online unassisted, or they can e-mail, phone or fax a product specialist, who will push through product recommendations, descriptions and images.

Retail consultant Keven Wilder of McMillan/-Doolittle rates attention to customer service among the site’s best features, noting extensive yet easy search functionality and the display of the 800 number on each page. “By asking right on the home page if you want a personal shopper or a price quote they are anticipating your needs, and that’s very helpful,” she says.

Bombay
Bombay blasts off

Classic furniture reproduction retailer The Bombay Company has been around since the late ‘70s, but despite 400 stores and sales of $437 million in 2001, “Bombay” and “Internet” weren’t often used in the same sentence. Today, that’s changed. Bombay is moving aggressively to leverage its brand presence on the web, including a clean-lined redesign of all three Bombay site—BombayCo.com, BombayKids.com, and BombayOutlet.com—aimed squarely at site and channel integration.

Matt Corey, operating vice president of e-commerce, says a new strategy is pushing Bombay onto the Internet. Corey says the sites get 13,000 to 14,000 visitors a day and he projects that 2002’s web sales will double 2001’s and will double again in 2003. Without disclosing numbers, he says Bombay’s sites are profitable. That said, however, he illustrates the web’s greater importance to Bombay with a formula that spells it out clearly.

“If you were to get 20,000 customers a day coming to your web site, and your typical store gets 200 customers a day, your web site is touching as many customers as 100 of your brick-and-mortar stores,” he says. He’s quick to note, however, that Bombay is not just about selling to those customers on the web. In fact, Corey insists he doesn’t care whether customers buy online, research there and then phone the call center or go to a store, “As long as they buy from Bombay.”

That insight is driving a strategy change that’s making a difference at Bombay as it taps into the web’s ability to support sales companywide as well as ring them up online. Formerly, for example, each Bombay site had its own look, feel and navigation. Linkage between the sties was minimal, and the sites displayed only products available online rather than everything available in Bombay’s stores and catalogs.

Today, the sites display all Bombay merchandise to entice shoppers into the stores. New technology lets shoppers use the same cart across all three sites, while standardized layout and navigation make it easy for shoppers to get around all three. And new features such as the section that provides call center hours and number plus links to the store locator, shipping rates and return policy on each product page make it as easy for shoppers to move among channels as among Bombay’s three sites.

“In addition to being a vehicle that generates direct sales, the Internet is a great marketing channel and communications vehicle,” says Corey. “100% of the marketing budget used to be catalog. Though it went to the same great customers year after year, you need new reach vehicles. The Internet is that new reach vehicle.”

Cooking.com
Recipe for success

Cooking.com CEO David Hodess does like to cook, but finds a good business prospect even more tasty. It was an interest in the possibilities of e-commerce that led him to launch the company with partner Tracy Randall in 1998 as one of the web’s earlier retail players.

The retail site is a perfect example of the power of the web. Hodess spied opportunity in the fact that high-end cooking gear wasn’t available everywhere in the brick-and-mortar world. “The distribution of cookware stores around the country is not uniform,” he says. “There are lots of places outside of bigger cities where it’s hard to find better cookware conveniently. If people want Henckels knives or All-Clad pans, we’re one of the attractive ways to get them.”

Part of Cooking.com’s strategy is an enormous selection, about 4,500 products at any time. It attracts serious cooks and gift-givers alike with an assortment that includes virtually every major manufacturer of better cookware as well as niche manufacturers of products that others don’t make—and many other retailers don’t sell. Hodess says Cook-ing.com’s success rate in getting the vendors it wants is 100%. “You should see even a broader assortment by the end of next year, with more breadth in our existing categories and probably some new categories as well,” he says.

The site breaks up its assortment with search by keyword, brand, category and price, as well as by grouping products for browsing under departments such as Gift Ideas and Specialty Foods. Appealing merchandising wraps products in timely ideas such as the recent fall “What’s Stirring” home page feature that grouped products for making soup behind a single link. Theme shops accessible under a home page tab offer more browsing.

The product selection, browsing options and extensive content including recipes could have overloaded the site, but the internally-created design strips away everything superfluous while leaving enough to please the eye and help shoppers navigate. “The senior management team laid out a set of objectives and our designers went to work,” says Hodess. “It’s an evolutionary process, and we watch closely where people click and spend their time.”

Privately-held Cooking.com has annual sales estimated at $25 million to $50 million. Hodess says the company anticipates profitability in the next year. After nearly five years, this dot-com survivor is reaping the benefits of what other starts-ups of the era only dreamed about having: a brand. “We simply provide good service and have built a brand name,” Hodess says. “People trust us, and that stands in our favor.”

Crate and Barrel
Clean, consistent, close to the brand

Talk about carrying an image from one channel to another. No one does it better than Northbrook, Ill.-based Crate & Barrel. The upscale home furnishings retailer has been widely recognized since its web debut in 1999 as a master of replicating the brand online, but the company won’t rest. A re-design a year ago sought to make the channels connect even more tightly. “Our goal was to get closer to the brand,” says Joan King, Internet manager.

Crate & Barrel stores are epitomes of clean design where products stand out against neutral wood tones and minimalist shelving. The web site is much the same. “We minimized the design with not a lot of color in the background so merchandisers could tell the story with products,” King says. Just like in the store. “The Internet merchandisers work closely with the store merchandisers in types of products and timeliness,” she says.

Indeed, consistency of brand is one of Crate & Barrel’s strong points, says Jim Okamura, Chicago-based partner with consultants The J.C Williams Group. “They’re proud of their stores and they have worked hard at achieving brand consistency across channels,” he says.

But it’s not just in the look and feel of the site that Crate & Barrel achieves consistency. It’s in the content as well. Apart from furniture, 95% of store products are available on the web, King says. And furniture is moving there quickly. Already, customers can buy casual furniture online. They can view the whole collection online and that is driving store sales. “A lot of customers come in with pages they’ve printed from the web site,” King says. Crate & Barrel hopes to expand furniture sales online next year.

In addition, the gift registry is tightly integrated into the web, store kiosks and the call center. From 30 minutes previously, registry information is updated in under 1 minute today, no matter where the sale occurs. “The gift registry is truly seamless,” Okamura says.

Crate & Barrel is keen on making the site even more responsive to customers and not just in the merchandise it presents. Another initiative has been to change the site’s architecture so marketers and merchandisers can update products and make other changes without submitting those changes to the IT department. “It’s a manual process now,” King says. “With new administrative tools we will be able to make changes more quickly.”

Keeping up with customers is one of the features that distinguishes Crate & Barrel, observers say, and the web is helping. “People have high expectations of the Crate & Barrel brand,” Okamura says. “They have come a long way in ensuring that the web shopping experience is true to their brand.”

Fortunoff
The web leverages a family legacy

In New York City, where a generation of Baby Boomers grew up seeing actress Lauren Bacall in classy TV pitches for “Fortunoff, the Source,” a retailing family name can go a long way. The home furnishings and jewelry retailer’s Fortunoff.com makes a major contribution to the company’s sales even though Fortunoff does little to promote it.

“It’s wildly profitable,” says David Fortunoff, grandson of founders Max and Clara Fortunoff and the president of Fortunoff.com. “The contribution it makes to the company is amazing.”

The web site, launched in 1996, is doing more than $15 million a year in sales, or about 5% of overall sales, he notes. And that’s without a single employee dedicated to Fortunoff.com, which uses the same merchandising, fulfillment and IT staff as the rest of the company, Fortunoff says. He allocates 10% of his own time for managing the site, a duty that includes making sure every customer e-mail message is answered, leaving the rest of his time to his responsibilities as CIO of the entire company, which includes eight stores and a catalog.

The retailer is known for quality and value in an assortment of products, including uncommon tabletop gifts. It has expanded its number of stores conservatively, declining constant requests from transplanted customers to locate in Florida and other destinations. A major reason for staying put is the success of its web site: About 25% of web sales are to customers outside of the New York area.

And because Fortunoff.com carries all of the retailer’s brands, it offers online shoppers what they might not find in any one particular store. “That works to their advantage and they do a good job,” says Arvin Jawa, manager at retail consultants LakeWest Group.

Fortunoff says he tried marketing Fortunoff.com in major web portals and other venues in the past, spending as much as $100,000 for a single contract. But he has found it more effective to send e-mail promotions to customers and prospects that the company picks up through its other advertising.

Instead of aggressive marketing, Fortunoff.com focuses on customer service, its president says. Although it has offered image zooming for years—it uses TrueSpectra Inc. software to turn product shots into crystal clear high-resolution images—it emphasizes descriptive text over graphics to maximize browsing speed. It responds to customer requests, such as explaining how to check on order status. And like Fortunoff stores, the web site offers free gift-wrapping for all but its bulkiest products. “We’re not your conventional retailer, and we don’t run a conventional web site,” Fortunoff says.