Housewares/Home/Furnishings
Sharing with stores and reaching new audiences, the web helps to furnish the home

Internet Retailer Best of the Web 2006

Furniture.com
Waterford.com/WedgwoodUSA.com
Wisteria.com

The web presents challenges for any retailer, including retailers of housewares and home furnishings. When shoppers can’t sit on a chair or feel the heft of a crystal goblet, some measures of what communicates product quality are missing from the shopping equation.

The category’s smart online retailers navigate such issues, while leveraging the channel for what it can uniquely contribute. The web sites of Waterford/Wedgwood are helping to deliver the message that the two venerable brands are upping their relevance to the contemporary home with new designs and product lines. Waterford shares the growth it’s driving online with a strategy that drives customers online for some products and to retailers for others.

Furniture.com also shares growth with retailers, providing its expertise online to the retail partners who stock in store the same items shoppers can research and buy on its site. The cooperation improves both the online experience and fulfillment for customers. At Wisteria.com, the web provides a broader reach and a different customer for the company’s distinctive home décor products, while preserving the unique voice that distinguishes the catalog.

The category abounds with retail sites that offer the beautiful and the useful. But as this year’s category winners demonstrate, the formula for online success involves strategy as well as style.

Recognizing that most online furniture retailers are struggling with how to promptly fulfill orders, Furniture.com has overhauled its business model to ensure delivery within days, as opposed to weeks. In doing so, the retailer has reinvented itself, and subsequently put greater distance between itself and its competitors in the online furniture category.

The new plan centers around partnerships with leading furniture retailers that ship direct to customers making purchases through Furniture.com, thus solving a fulfillment problem the company faced early in its existence.

Launched in 1998, Furniture.com went dark in 2000 despite hitting $80 million in annual sales, when a slowing economy severely impacted all furniture retailers. At the time, it looked as though the online furniture category might never rise from the ashes unless it could serve customers better.

Within a year, a group of former employees had found a solution and relaunched Furniture.com. Today, the retailer has relationships with such major furniture stores as Levitz Furniture, which has locations in 11 states, and the RoomStore, with locations in six states. Each retail partner stocks the same items available through Furniture.com. In return, Furniture.com shares its web platform with its retail partners, providing them with their expertise in site design and online merchandising.

“In our first life, we built a great web experience for the customer, but did not provide as good a fulfillment experience,” says Carl Prindle, president and CEO. “We are now leveraging our web expertise to build a distribution channel that is too bulky for us to create alone.”

Furniture.com’s web experience includes a room planner where shoppers can place items in a room based on their dimensions, such as a sofa, love seat, area rug, and entertainment center in a 10’ x 15’ living room. Once the items are chosen, shoppers can adjust the width and depth of each piece and position it around the room to see how the furniture will look and fit in the designated space.

“Furniture.com’s model allows for the sharing of resources in a business where each partner is stretched thin when it comes the resources the other has to offer,” says Jim Okamura, a senior partner with J.C. Williams Group. “It’s quite admirable.”

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For many consumers, the Waterford and Wedgwood brands are associated with wedding gifts and Thanksgiving table adornments. But Waterford Wedgwood USA is transitioning its brands into something bigger, and its web sites are playing a pivotal role in delivering that message.

“We’ve added a lot of brand extensions and ways to make Waterford more relevant to the home on a regular basis,” says director of Internet marketing Jennifer Korch, noting the recent addition of silver, flatware, bed and table linens. While a selection of the brand’s 1,500 SKUs is available at its retailer partners, it’s virtually all available at the expanded Waterford.com. Thought the web now represents about 2% of sales, Korch says the brand sees the web as “a way to introduce those extensions to consumers.”

And to widen its reach to core buyers of its traditional products as well. Waterford Collector’s Society pieces, formerly available only through designated retailers, are this year available to members on the site, too. “Whereas all of the relationship building had come from the stores, now we are taking a greater role in that,” says Korch.

The strategy shares the growth it’s driving with authorized retailers under a system that sends shoppers to the stores for certain products and to the web for others. The cross channel approach stands to benefit both the brand and stores with more ways to keep the brand top of mind among consumers.

The goals of deepening the direct relationship and broadening exposure of both traditional and new products also are behind the September launch of WedgwoodUSA.com. With its own look and feel, the site leverages Waterford.com’s back-end structure. “The site is the best way to communicate that the Wedgwood brand has expanded, but that we have the same quality and tradition in each of those products,” Korch says.

“Increasingly, manufacturers will be using the web to try new things, and see what receptivity is to new lines, brand extensions and new products,” notes Mary Brett Whitfield, senior vice president, Retail Forward Inc. “They have designs by Vera Wang, Emeril, and products that are more contemporary than the Waterford and Wedgwood we may have grown up with. The web is a way to let customers know.”

Once upon a time a newly married couple looked for, but couldn’t find, beautiful antiques and decorative objects to furnish their first home—at least, not at a price they could afford. So they got the idea of starting a catalog to offer such merchandise, which became a web site, and, in classic Internet start-up style from its earliest origins at a kitchen table, Wisteria.com was born.

Two year-old Wisteria.com marries high-touch sensibilities that distinguish its catalog to the high-tech sales medium of the web. Behind both are president Andrew Newsom and wife and co-founder Shannon. Newsom, who writes most of the catalog copy that also goes on the site, brings a distinctive first-person voice to the company that offers a tip of the hat to the early Banana Republic and J. Peterman catalogs in its ability to not just sell, but romance a product.

Inventory is sourced from around the world. By finding small, local suppliers in Third World countries, Newsom has found a way to keep prices lower than for comparable goods produced elsewhere, while offering the unusual and unique in a spare, clean-looking and easy to navigate site.

“Pottery Barn sells great products, but given the measure of their business, they have to be standardized in what they sell,” he says. “We are small enough that we can find and sell 200 to 400 units. A huge company couldn’t do that.”

The artful photography that characterizes the catalog loses nothing in its translation to the web site, and the web medium makes contributes of its own: incremental sales and a younger customer. Market research had determined that Wisteria’s core customer contains a large group of those in their 50s. “That catalog buyer has both disposable income and time,” says Newsom. “My sense is our Internet audience has disposable income, is decorating their first home, but doesn’t have a lot of time. They get online at night after they put their kids to bed and they shop then, because it’s more convenient.”

Internet sales are increasing in dollar volume and as a percentage of overall sales, Newsom says. “There’s an opportunity here to go deeper than our catalog in telling more about the products and the story of the brand.”