E-retailer Smarter Marketing expects to double sales this year, CEO says

It’s only been two years since husband-and-wife team Jennifer and Brad Fallon launched MyWeddingFavors.com in their basement, but this year their web site operating company, Smarter Marketing Inc., expects to nearly double sales over 2005 to $15 million. The company sells through several sites that sell products ranging from electric scooters to cigars to baby gifts, CEO Brad Fallon tells InternetRetailer.com.

Smarter Marketing expects to do about $10 million this year evenly divided through MyWeddingFavors.com and its sister wholesale site, KateAspen.com, and another $5 million through several niche sites, including CornerStorkBabyGifts.com, Electric-Scooters-Galore.com and Lucky Cigars.com, Fallon says.

The Fallons launched MyWeddingFavors.com on a Yahoo Stores platform, but have since developed their own e-commerce platform to which they’re migrating all of their sites. The platform is better suited to handling heavy traffic without experiencing high shopping cart abandonment, Fallon says. “The Yahoo Stores platform has a high shopping cart abandonment rate when it gets busy, and we have higher conversion rates on our own platform,” he says.

MyWeddingFavors launched in 2004 on a hunch by Jennifer Fallon that she could sell wedding favors to a broad audience, her husband says. The site did $11,000 its first month, $80,000 in its third month and $1.2 million in its first full year.

The company has since grown to about 50 employees, including two buyers in China. It maintains its own 20,000-square-foot warehouse but also arranges drop-shipping for both its retail and wholesale customers, says Fallon, a former software entrepreneur who before entering retailing had authored the book “Creating Customers Out of Thin Air: Secrets of Online Marketing for Offline Businesses.”