Growing from a small gift shop to grow step by step on the web, GiftCollector.com has learned how to expand its business to build a customer base way beyond its home in Charlottesville, VA., president and founder Sara Blakewood Norment tells Internet Retailer.
In 1987, Norment left a career as a director of pharmacy at a hospital in Washington, D.C., to buy the Chimney Corner, a gift shop with sales of $150,000 in Charlottesville, Va. The business did OK, but Norment was looking for growth opportunities. And so, despite the doubts of friends and family, she pushed her business into the online world.
She hasn’t looked back since. "I’ve been surprised every year at what we could accomplish," she says, "and now some of the big competitors we once had are not here anymore."
In addition to spotting the power of the web early on, Norment also recognized some of the new ways the web would allow her to compete. For instance, she quickly understood the power of online gift registries. National brands such as Macys.com were allowing brides to register online and Norment’s customers were noticing it and requesting the same functionality from her web site. "I realized I had to do the gift registry online to keep that business," she says. "Mothers would come into Chimney Corner to register their daughters for their weddings, but the daughters would say they wanted to register online."
Norment’s IT consultant, Mike Wright, built an interface from GiftCollector.com to the Chimney Corner’s registry database. "We made a tool to update and keep track of customers’ registries," Norment says.
Now, in addition to retaining the business of local brides who want to register online, the gift registry is allowing Norment to expand her registry business outside of her immediate market. "Now we get registries from people we don’t know, who find us while searching the web for gifts," she says.
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