Housewares and Home Furnishings:
More than in the store

BedBathandBeyond.com
Hitting the mass market and the niche

Most retailers attempt to appeal either to the mass market or to a niche. At BedBathandBeyond.com, retailer Bed, Bath & Beyond Inc. is doing both: pursuing the mass market with linens and other household items while going after several niche markets. And it manages to satisfy both needs.

Among the online niche efforts are a bridal registry and a wish list for college students. The gift registry allows engaged couples to register in-store or online. Couples can modify registries online any time before the wedding. Gift givers can purchase the items at the web site or the store. Many customers print out the list from the web site and buy from the store while others do all the shopping online with the purchase shipped to the bride or groom. Either way, inventory databases are integrated to make sure the registry reflects purchases in both channels.

And that’s part of the appeal of the site, analysts say. “They do a great job in integrating their multi-channels,” says Lauren Freedman, president of The E-Tailing Group Inc. “They reinforce each other.”

As part of appealing to engaged couples, the site has dozens of tips from suggestions on how to throw a bachelor party to how to choose a photographer and how to write thank you notes. Meanwhile, BedBathandBeyond.com has taken great measures to appeal to college students. Its wish list allows students to register for items to decorate their dorm rooms. Then their parents can go to the site and approve selected purchases and make payment.

As part of the collegiate appeal, BedBathandBe-yond.com has redesigned its college section to include graphics that would appeal to this crowd. It also has a section entitled “Survival 101” that in early November included suggestions for surviving the first holiday visit home and another section “After College Life” that talks about graduate school, a first job and decorating a first apartment.

But whether it is going after niches or pursing the general consumer audience, BedBathandBeyond.com is closely tied to Bed, Bath & Beyond stores. Among features are a return-to-stores policy for items purchased on the web and store circulars so Internet customers can go immediately to an item advertised in that morning’s newspaper and purchase it.

“This is a site that does things right,” says Freedman. “They have good seasonal promotions; they do a good job of educating customers and they provide efficient gift centers. Even customers who order online and pick up items in the store find the process easy and it speeds up the time they need to spend in the store.”

CrateandBarrel.com
Romancing the spatula

When J.C. Williams retail consultant Jim Okamura says, “No one romanticizes the spatula like Crate & Barrel,” it’s high praise. With top-notch merchandising a distinguishing feature of brand presentation throughout all channels, Crate & Barrel excels at capturing sales from what consumers suddenly decide they want in addition to what they need. “The ability to create that demand is one of the hallmarks of great brands,” Okamura says.

Top 500 Guide

The web site is just the latest channel for a brand that after more than 25 years has become the authority on hip housewares and more recently, contemporary home furnishings. After a foray in the furniture category online when it made only its casual furniture available for purchase on the web, Crate & Barrel this year expanded that option to include its entire collection, and it bends over backward to make it easy for customers to buy online. Customers considering furniture purchases can, before checkout, for example, supply a ZIP code to determine whether an item is available for shipment to their area and to get an initial read on shipping charges.

By design, the experience of the customer clicking through the site is very much like that of flipping through the catalog or walking through a Crate & Barrel store. “If you go onto the web site and see the color story and the seasonal theme, you’ll see the same story in their windows if you walk past one of the stores,” says Okamura. And the web’s integration with other channels continues behind the scenes to deliver a consistent customer experience. Gift registry users, for example, report moving seamlessly across channels whether they use the kiosks in the store, the web site or make a call after flipping through a catalog.

While integrating the store, catalog and web offering to the greatest extent possible, Crate & Barrel also exploits the web’s unique strengths. With two primary store concepts—one that carries both housewares and furnishings and one with housewares only—the web’s endless shelf space lets customers access the entire assortment through a single interface. And yet the large offering on the site doesn’t overwhelm but is folded out in a logical, intuitive fashion that draws the visitor in to discover more. In that regard, the site’s design is analogous to that of the clean-looking, simple yet stylish design of the Crate & Barrel stores and the products within. “Crate and Barrel presents so as to provide ideas and be inspirational. That’s what their brand does overall, and the web site is in line with the brand,” Okamura says.

GarnetHill.com
Spinning natural fiber into gold

Why should consumers pop for genuine cotton or silk apparel and home textiles when synthetic will do? Garnet Hill’s brand positioning creates the demand; its web site delivers extra product information to instill confidence in the buying decision. Garnet Hill launched as a mail order operation in the 1970s when its founders decided to make available in the United States the cotton flannel sheets they’d loved on travels abroad. Today, it’s a multi-channel lifestyle brand under privately owned direct marketing company Cornerstone Brands Inc., whose six brands have sales estimated in the range of $500 million.

No polyester or rayon here; the merchandise is constructed exclusively of 100% natural fibers. Though it differentiates itself on this, however, the brand isn’t really after the granola and Birkenstock crowd. The assortment offers stylish, beautifully designed luxury, positioning that’s reflected in its well-designed web site.

“Garnet Hill’s brand was initially indicative of natural fibers, but it’s grown to a trend- setting sense of design,” says director of e-commerce Brenda Royce. Customers can shop via the company’s catalog and two outlet stores, but the web, about 25% of sales, plays a unique role in supporting the brand’s value proposition. “We consider ourselves an outstanding resource not only for purchasing high quality natural fiber home and bedding products, but also for information,” says Royce.

The web easily delivers that content and information. For example, a zoom feature allows shoppers to enlarge product detail so as to better portray texture—critical when the fabric itself is a key selling point. A glossary of more than 100 terms on the site helps customers make educated decisions about the products, as do fiber and bedding guides. A fabric care instruction guide is available only online.

To support the lifestyle positioning, the web site offers both new and archived features on the products, the design inspirations behind them, and information on how product lines can enhance consumers’ lives; such as, how purchasing the right basic bedding items ensures the most comfortable sleeping environment.

Garnet Hill supports the spare yet visually appealing site presentation with fast registration and checkout and features to make shopping easier, such as the ability to provide multiple ship-to addresses within a single order. “The web site allows us more flexibility to highlight the unique aspects of our products in a manner not possible in the limited format of a printed catalog,” Royce says. m

LampsPlus.com
A light bulb moment

Lamps Plus president Dennis Swanson can’t remember every product attribute of the thousands of lamps and fixtures his stores sell, but he doesn’t have to. His web site remembers that for him, and importantly, for his salespeople and customers as well.

Lamps Plus’s experience shows the Internet is the glue that can bind a successful multi-channel strategy together. Swanson launched a site to augment his stores and catalog in 1999, but it wasn’t until last January that the investment started delivering its full potential. That’s when Swanson realized the functionality in his web site could help store customers and associates, too, so he put web-enabled kiosks in his 44 stores.

Central to that functionality is site search based on what Lamps Plus has learned about how consumers shop for lighting: by product attribute. Rather than starting with a brand, lighting shoppers typically narrow the field by features such as color, finish, and size. Experienced salespeople know which questions to ask to help customers find what they are looking for, and the site emulates that process to guide shoppers through some 7,000 products.

Features such as an interactive guide to designing your own ceiling fan walk shoppers through the choice of every separate element in the system from blade to light kit. When they’re done, a screen shows them their choices and the cost of each. With one click the customer can place an order for everything, save it for future consideration, or even e-mail it to a friend. In place for selected ceiling fan models for a year, the build-your-own feature is being expanded to other products.

“You have a wealth of experience in business, but it’s not shared knowledge,” says Swanson. “Going on the Internet has forced us to take what we’ve learned over 30 years, formalize it into a common interactive process, and put it where customers and salespeople can access it any time.”

The web’s share of sales at Lamps Plus is 10%, but the kiosks have had significant impact on store sales. Orders of products not in-store but flagged online at the kiosks as available for quick shipment have doubled, while store cross-sells and upsells are up as kiosks remind associates about related products. Since each associate now has a home page which not only stores sales and customer information but also delivers product updates and other information from management, Lamps Plus gets even more utility from its web-enabled kiosks.

“The web is becoming totally integrated into our business,” says Swanson. “It’s made us a better retail business than we were in so many ways.”

WilliamsSonoma.com
The recipes and the pots

A hostess could pull Grandma’s recipe out of a card file to prepare for Thanksgiving dinner—or she could log onto Williams-Sonoma’s web site and find a dozen recipes, menu ideas, the perfect pot to cook each course in and stylish tableware to serve it on.

“It’s not just about the individual product,” says Williams-Sonoma’s e-commerce vice president Paul Miller. “It’s about solving customers’ cooking and entertaining needs.” Indeed, delivering solutions plus product is a basic tenet that stretches across not just the Williams-Sonoma brand but across the multiple channels of its various properties including Pottery Barn, West Elm and others.

The web site wraps extended information and deep content around products. Leveraging the web in just that way has helped the company sell more. Companywide Q2 online sales, for example, were up 55% over the previous year. The 4-year-old WilliamsSonoma.com enhances what was already a well-established brand through its catalog and stores, so ongoing improvements are subtle. “A lot of the focus has been on enriching the content we deliver,” Miller says. In the past year, Williams-Sonoma has not only made the site more than two times as fast as last year, but more than doubled its recipe database and added PDF versions of all brochures distributed through the brand, expanding tips and techniques on how to use the products to do everything from manufacture pasta to truss a turkey.

Part of what makes WilliamsSonoma.com a winner is its clean-looking aesthetic, a singular feat for an online marketer that must present not only product photos and text, but also lots of complementary content in different formats. The key is organizing the site so that different types of customers can be quickly identified and sent down the appropriate path, with the bridal registry customer, for example, taking a very different route from the catalog quick shopper, though they may wind up on the same product page.

As to the rest of Williams-Sonoma’s success online, the famously channel-agnostic brand has infused into the web experience much of the same experience customers have with its catalog or in the stores. “You walk into a Williams-Sonoma store, and it’s a lovely experience with the smell of cookies baking. It’s beautifully rich in its presentation, just like the catalog,” says Jupiter Research analyst Patti Freeman Evans. “The online experience tries to mirror that as much as possible with an assortment that is as big as, if not bigger, than the stores and catalog, and with contextual selling features that help bring to life both the product and the lifestyle they are selling.”