Thralow eyes new e-commerce opportunities beyond binoculars and telescopes
Thralow Inc., which operates Binoculars.com, Telescopes.com and several other e-commerce sites, is on track to increase its web sales to about $20 million in 2005, an increase of 55% from $12.9 million in 2004.
But as the next year approaches, Thralow, No. 260 in the Internet Retailer Top 400 Guide to Retail Web Sites is looking more closely at expanding into other online shopping segments with potentially higher margins such as cooking and outdoor leisure, such as hammocks where the company already has a presence on the web, says director of marketing and technology Jonathan Thralow.
In 2005, Telescopes.com is the fastest growing Thralow e-commerce site with sales expected to be around $7 million, an increase of about 150% from $2.8 million in 2004. “We figured out how to sell to the professionals in this space who tend to be men in their 50s and 60s with a doctoral degree,” Thralow says. “The category is wide open for the web because selling telescopes used to be primarily a mail order business.”
Binoculars.com, the company’s main e-commerce site, is on track to do more than $10 million in web sales in 2005, he says. But the online telescope and binoculars retail space can be a low-margin business. As a result, Thralow, which also operates Peepers.com, Optics4Hunting.com, Pans.com and SimplyHammocks.com, is looking to expand and diversify.
“Now is the opportunity to look for other higher margin segments,” he says.
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