The Past is Prologue

Considering that in the last several years Stephen Antisdel has switched from selling furniture to work clothes over the Internet, it may seem surprising to hear him say: “Successful Internet sales ventures are built by people who really know their products and the industry in which they are selling.”

But Antisdel, co-founder of FurnitureFind.com and currently an investor in and COO of WorkingPerson.com, knows of what he speaks. At FurnitureFind.com, Antisdel had years of experience in the furniture industry before he and his partners took what had originally been a brochureware site for a furniture store in the South Bend, Ind., area and turned it into a nationwide Internet sales channel. Now at WorkingPerson.com, Antisdel relies on Eric Deniger, CEO, to know all about work clothes while Antisdel brings the Internet experience.

The unknown future

Deniger was running a family-owned local clothing company when he hired Antisdel last year as a consultant to help him turn his regional web site into a national sales channel. Within a year of coming on board as a consultant, Antisdel liked what he saw at WorkingPerson.com, invested in the company and became involved in the day-to-day operations.

But while knowing all about the latest in Internet technology and marketing techniques is important, it’s the product knowledge that Antisdel thinks is critical to success. “FurnitureFind.com survived the Internet bust when many of our competitors folded because we understood the product and what customers want in furniture,” Antisdel says. “We could explain the difference to a customer between buying a $1,000 dining room set and a $10,000 set. It’s the same now at WorkingPerson. Eric understands the product. He knows the vendors and he knows what his customers want and how to explain the product features in a way that is meaningful to them.”

Antisdel didn’t really know what he was getting into in 1996 when he set up a brochureware site for a Niles, Mich., furniture store that was founded by his uncles in the 1950s. He had planned for the site to be a means for local customers to view product offerings before they came to the store to buy. But even though he didn’t pay for referrals or use sophisticated search engines to bring customers to his virtual door, shoppers found him anyway. Shortly after opening the site, Antisdel started receiving e-mails and phone calls from customers outside of Michigan and Indiana who wanted to buy.

Selling out

So in 1997, he began selling furniture nationally via the Internet. To fund his venture, he received financing from Venture Capital of Austin, Texas. As the company grew, Antisdel found that starting it up and getting it off the ground were more interesting then running a mature company. So in 2003, he sold his interest in FurnitureFind.com to Venture Capital and he, his brother and another partner formed North Main Ventures to invest in other Internet-related companies, using the proceeds from the sale of FurnitureFind.com.

Then last year, Antisdel was hired as a consultant by the family that runs WorkingPerson.com. What was once a family-owned, one-store retailer had begun selling its products over the Internet, but had limited most sales to a 350-mile radius in Northeast Indiana and Western Michigan. But it wanted to go national.

WorkingPerson sells specialty clothing to working personnel, primarily construction workers, factory workers, utility linemen and health care professionals. The company estimates online sales last year of $2 million out of total sales of $3.3 million. The company has been experiencing rapid growth—in fact, online sales in 2005 were up nearly fivefold from 2004’s $430,000 while total sales were up 78% from $1.85 million. Antisdel says 2005 sales would have been stronger except for supply chain problems which forced the company to fulfill some December orders in January, delaying recognizing that revenue until 2006.

Uniforms are a small percentage of the sales with most of the sales coming from such apparel as jeans with special loops to hang tools, fire resistant clothing for welders and steel-toed shoes. “Any time a worker needs special clothing that is tailored for specific job-related functionality, we can provide it,” says Antisdel.

From the shoemobile to the web

“We have a broader selection than what you could find in a uniform shop, but more narrow and tighter focused than what you would find in a online sporting goods or tractor supply store.”

WorkingPerson has 60 employees across all sales channels. Taking such a business national would present new challenges to a company whose prior experience as a multi-channel retailer is selling work shoes off the back of a truck—known as the shoemobile—which sold in the parking lots of factories.

But moving a company from shoemobile sales to Internet sales is where Antisdel fits in. He brings a strong background in financing an Internet start-up and has an MBA from Leicester University in the United Kingdom. “He has a strong financial background and understands the important issues associated with financing an Internet venture,” says Eric Deniger.

And Deniger adds Antisdel has brought more than just financial knowledge—as a result of his experience with FurnitureFind.com. “He’s been invaluable in keeping us focused on what we need to be doing in the early stages,” Deniger says. “He keeps us focused on first things first and not getting too far ahead of ourselves. It has been a big help to partner with someone who has already been down this path.”

Additionally, Deniger says Antisdel already knows which software and other Internet services are most effective in getting the service running. “He knows what software to select so we don’t have to spend so much time checking out the various options and he has important relationships already established with all the important vendors,” Deniger says.

Still, there were things Antisdel had to learn about selling work clothes online. One is the importance of product descriptions. “We probably spend more time on product descriptions than other online retailers do,” he says. “We’re constantly working to explain our products’ functionality better because work clothes need more description than other clothes.”

Lots of description

Where other apparel may rely more on the picture to sell the product, work clothes need a lot of description in terms of durability, material and construction quality and the functionality of the apparel, Antisdel explains.

Also important to selling work clothes is the call center. “Our call center is critical because customers often have a lot of questions about the clothes and we need a call center staff that understands the product and can address the customer’s questions while respecting their intelligence,” he says.

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Use of such techniques as search to bring consumers to the site falls largely in the hands of Steve Antisdel’s brother Jeff. Jeff had worked in the technology industry as a partner and leading research analyst for a biotechnology hedge fund company. He later joined Steve in getting FurnitureFind.com off the ground, focusing on the marketing side.

But while the sales of furniture and work clothes may have their differences, there are a lot of similarities, Antisdel says. “It dawned on me after we introduced our FurnitureFind.com web site that the Internet would be for the 1990s what catalogues were for rural consumers in the 19th century,” he says. “There, you had a growing consumer base who had limited access to merchandise from stores. Today, you have time-strapped customers who don’t have time to drive all over to view merchandise and receive a wide selection of merchandise presented to them in a way they can understand.”

With FurnitureFind, Antisdel found the customer base to be “a lot of soccer moms and busy professionals who wanted to view a wide selection, but didn’t have the time to drive to four or five different stores, which are typically not located near each other. And they need someone who understands the product well enough to help them with their selection. You have to be able explain to them the difference between the high-end brands and the lower-end ones and help them sort through the brands.”

The distribution conundrum

Additionally, Antisdel found customers like viewing furniture without the pressure to buy. “Most times in furniture stores you either get commissioned sales reps who pounce on you trying to get you to buy, or you get uninformed sales clerks who just take the orders and could care less whether you buy or not. We offered trained online sales personnel who understand the market but were not under pressure to sell.”

While Antisdel is not able to reveal the exact size of the business he grew at FurnitureFind.com, he did say it was “north of $10 million and still growing.”

One of the obstacles to selling furniture—and one that Antisdel’s successors are still struggling with—is distribution. “We’re still trying to find the best model for delivering furniture direct from the manufacturer,” says Ken Kwit, current president of FurnitureFind.com whose primary prior Internet experience was selling wine online. “You don’t want a retail store as an intermediary and when we went from delivering from a central location to delivering directly from the manufacturer there were a lot of problems we needed to overcome.”

Antisdel explains the original shipping model was to consolidate most of the furniture into a central warehouse and then aggregate orders and ship to consumers within a region.

“This was a build-to-order business model with very little inventory stocked in advance but it meant it took longer to fulfill our customers’ orders,” Antisdel says. He concedes that the current direct-from-manufacturer model looks promising. “It would appear that Ken’s new method will result in faster delivery times; and that’s a good thing.”

Distribution aside, Kwit accredits Antisdel for being “a great visionary” for believing that furniture could be sold over the Internet at a time when most retailers believed consumers wouldn’t want to buy that way. “Steve has a lot of insight into what consumers want and can foresee how things will shake,” Kwit says. “He also has a great understanding of technology and has a strong marketing sense.”

Word of mouth

But if distribution is a major struggle for online furniture sales, it is less an obstacle for work clothes, which are easier to store and ship from a centralized warehouse. “We stock 60,000 line items for immediate shipment to our customers,” says Antisdel. “While this involves the usual inventory management challenges, it allows us to fulfill customer orders very quickly. Fortunately, Eric has a deep understanding of our customers and a great deal of experience managing the merchandising and buying cycles so inventory problems have been almost non-existent.”

With distribution not such a major challenge then, Antisdel and WorkingPerson.com management plan to expand fulfillment and distribution systems this year and to integrate systems.

They also will focus on the concept of getting workers to think Internet when they buy their work clothes. While much of WorkingPerson.com’s traffic comes via word of mouth or even referrals from the shoemobile, the site also advertises via search engines such as Google, Yahoo and MSN, Antisdel explains. And while the site’s prime customers typically do not have online access during work as professionals who work in office environments might, they still generally have access to a home computer or have spouses who can shop for them from work computers.

Also, while just a few years ago, WorkingPerson’s customer base would not have consisted of a lot of active online shoppers, Antisdel says that is changing. “Our analysis shows that while our target market is not made up of early adopters, we’re at an inflection point now where these folks are also discovering the Internet as a convenient shopping channel. We find our customers to be generally web savvy.”

The right time

In fact, Antisdel says, the company scaled back its search engine marketing in November and December to allow its fulfillment staff to keep up with orders. The company has shipped as many as 600 orders a day from its Lakeville, Ind. (population: 350) store.

Antisdel believes that means that the time is right to promote the idea of selling work clothes online—and the time for the company to act on its online ambitions. “We’re still real early in the growth plan at WorkingPerson.com,” he says. “Internet sales are still a small portion of the company’s total sales, but I think we can turn this into becoming a major player in the online sales world.”

Lauri Giesen is a Libertyville, Ill.-based freelance business writer.