Two niche retailers with sharply different products—La Cense Beef’s grass-fed beef from Montana and home-made sweets from Romanicos Chocolate in Miami—are building on their web presence to produce surprising results both during the holidays and throughout the year, the merchants say.
“Sales are trending up and right where we expected to be,” La Cense Beef CEO Sean Hays tells InternetRetailer.com. And sales at Romanicos Chocolate are running 10 times more than last year, founder Alejandra Bigai says.
When Dillon, MT-based grass-fed cattle operation La Cense Beef LLC decided to sell steaks direct to consumers, it figured the web was the only way to go and is now finding unexpected demand for its more unusual products—like beef bones for pets—as well as reaching a national market for grass-fed beef, Hays says.
La Cense Beef, which operates one showroom store at its headquarters, does virtually all of its sales over the web at LaCenseBeef.com. It does not publish a paper catalog.
Founded in 2000 on the grounds of a continuously operated cattle ranch dating back to 1869 in southwest Montana, La Cense started out targeting the market for grass-fed beef, which the Union of Concerned Scientists says is based on an open-pasture, cattle-raising and -feeding process that produces healthier cattle and leaner, more healthful beef products. In comparison, the more common grain-fed beef available in most supermarkets is relatively fatty and less healthful, the scientists’ group says.
La Cense launched its web site in April on a hosted e-commerce platform from NetSuite Inc., and has since experienced steadily rising demand from shoppers throughout the U.S., Hays says. To promote sales, La Cense engages in paid and natural search efforts, and sends e-mails through ExactTarget as well as directly through NetSuite, Hays says.
“We launched the site to go direct to consumers in places like New York, San Francisco, Seattle and Chicago,” he says. “The demand is there, but the local access to grass-fed beef isn’t as available as here in grass-fed Montana, where the cows outnumber people.”
Hitting the broad national market is also producing some surprises in demand for La Cense’s products, he adds. In addition to experiencing rising sales for its steaks and other beef products, the company is also getting strong demand for beef bones it presented on its site for dogs. “When we first started this, we thought, ‘Who’s going to buy this stuff for their pets?’” Hays says. “But people are doing it.”
After dining on grass-fed beef, diners might want to finish things off with home-made chocolates from Romanicos Chocolate, whose single store sits in front of its candy-making kitchen in Miami. Starting with her grandmother’s recipes from her childhood home in Venezuela, Bigai launched her first retail web site in 2002 and quickly built up a reputation through word-of-mouth, an appearance in the 2006 Chocolate Show in New York, and exposure on the Internet. “All of our chocolates are hand-made just as my grandmother used to do it,” she says.
When the Food Network went looking last year for unique dessert companies to interview in Miami, it found Romanico’s on the web and featured it in a TV program that can still be viewed on Romanicos.com.
Following the retailer’s appearance last year in the Chocolate Show exhibition in New York, Fortune Small Business named Romanicos to its list of 10 best chocolatiers. Next came exposure on CNN, then the Academy Awards presented sweets from Romanicos to each Oscar winner.
Bigai migrated her web site this past October to the NetSuite platform, which has helped to handle its surge of holiday season orders, she says. Romanicos does about 40% of its business during the holiday shopping season, and this year full-year sales are up 10 times over last year, she adds.
The new platform suits her needs to integrate her online and store orders with back-end databases of customer and financial data, Bigai says. “It’s like having a system for a big company, with a platform that we can grow on,” she says.
In addition to offering hand-made sweets, Romanicos also lets online shoppers customize the ingredients in an assorted box of chocolates.
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