One back end powers many online faces for Home Décor Products

Home Décor Products is the parent company of HomeClick.com, an online seller of upscale kitchen and bath fixtures and other home gear that provides an Internet presence for a number of high-end manufacturers in the category. It’s also the parent of AbsoluteHome.com, which aims at the mass market. And since last September, it also operates Barbecues.com, a highly focused site that sells only grills and barbecue tools and equipment.

The outdoor grills themselves were part of the offering at HomeClick.com and AbsoluteHome.com, but “we found customers didn’t just want to buy a grill; they wanted to buy tools to use with it," says CEO Mike Golden. “On Barbecues.com, you will find all the products you will find in the outdoor living section of HomeClick.com and AbsoluteHome.com, but you find it gathered in one place. We found that for different customers, that’s the right solution.”

That’s three different sites that offer some of the same products to varying degrees, targeting different types of customers—but all of them operate off the same back end. “We had already built the platform, and build it in a scalable way that would let us run multiple sites if we wanted to,” says Golden, who found success with that model as co-founder and former chief operating officer of GSI Commerce. The company’s business model, he adds, allows it to keep leveraging its investment in technology and people to go after more and different market segments.

Under that strategy, Home Décor Products launched KnobsandThings.com last month. The site expands on the selection of decorative hardware available on HomeClick.com and AbsoluteHome.com, but doesn’t offer anything outside of that category. “It’s exactly what we did with Barbecues.com, only in the decorative hardware market,” says Golden.

Home Décor Products plans to continue to leverage its commerce platform by going deeper into the home products category and also building out new niche sites where it makes sense. “We also feel there is a lot of ability for us to leverage the infrastructure we’ve built to help manufacturers sell their products directly to customers,” he adds. Golden says the company did more than $50 million in sales last year.