|
|
 |
The Furniture Find Story: How a company that knows what it is about can build connections with others around a shared purpose and overlapping business ideas.
|
The Furniture Find Story: How a company that knows what it is about can build connections with others around a shared purpose and overlapping business ideas.
|
50 years ago, when Bob and Ray Bookout opened their tiny storefront in Niles, Michigan, they probably couldn’t have anticipated that Bookout Furniture Inc., would grow to become southwest Michigan’s largest furniture source.
They certainly couldn’t have foreseen that this success would be, in large part, due to the invention of the Internet.
From humble beginnings, Bookout Furniture Inc., has launched Furniturefind.com, one of the leaders of online sales in the furniture category.
Although furniture isn’t generally considered a traditional holiday gift, furniture benefited from a record-breaking online holiday shopping season. Jupiter Media Metrix recently ranked furniture sites #1 for increased site traffic over the holiday season.
Steve Antisdel, chief executive officer of Furniturefind, wasn’t surprised. Furniture sales at his site "have been very strong, beyond our expectations." Over a quarter of a million people a day are going online to a furniture-related site, and this traffic increase puts FurnitureFind´s share of the market in the double digits.
What an opportunity to gather intelligence from your customers. Just tracking their footprints around the site can be highly informative.
Finding ways to get customers to post a message, answer a question or share their thinking could create a considerable competitive advantage.
The fact that this information comes from the industry leading site, lets Steve further capitalize on an advantage that competitors can only dream of. This is exactly the advantage that John Boyd talked about in our conversations about the Boyd Cycle.
Before your competition can even copy this move you’re into the next cycle and in a position to go for the kill, figuratively speaking, of course.
Steve Antisdel began working for the family company in 1968, while still in school. Having nearly thirty years of furniture retail management and executive experience at Bookout Furniture, Inc., gave him a practical frame of reference when FurnitureFind was launched in 1996.
Stephen and company worked through numerous supply chain, fulfillment, marketing and channel conflict issues while growing the online division of the bricks and mortar retail operation.
"The whole genesis of this started out when we built a brochure site for our store. It gave a map to the store, it told about our brands, it gave a virtual tour of the store, it talked about our history and policies, and that was it! It said nothing about buying furniture."
"But back in 1996, there was so little in the way of furniture content online, that people were using search engines and coming into our site and asking `How do I buy from you? ´
At first we said, `You can’t buy furniture online!´ but they kept calling and emailing, so we realized that the market was trying to tell us something. And that’s what lead to the development of FurnitureFind.com in late 1996."
Here is the real genesis of their talking with the customers, even if the customers had to practically knock him down in order to get their attention at first!
This underscores the point that ideas don’t have to be exotic strategies that can only be employed by Fortune 500 companies. You may already be having conversations with your customers. Imagine if you were doing it in a focused, deliberate way.
"Since then, we’ve always had this understanding that search engine positioning was important, being where people can find you. And that’s why we’ve done considerable work on optimizing our sites for search engines."
They’ve also extended their reach by creating a strong affiliate program and adding a Strategic Online Marketing division to the company. To date, FurnitureFind.com has 23,000 affiliate partners.
These affiliates are all family-friendly sites, hand-picked by the Strategic Online Marketing division, that display a FurnitureFind.com banner in exchange for revenue shares.
Steve’s brothers, Jeff, Ed, and cousin, Alan Rosenhagen, are responsible for managing these relationships. While they represent the 2nd generation in the business, they are the senior generation when it comes to online business.
Here is a marvelous example of creating alliances with suppliers, vendors and others in the broad marketplace were a win/win outcome can be created by sharing a common vision, generating an impact for both firms and maintaining a two way flow of information about the joint efforts.
These partnerships then allow FurnitureFind to continue to evolve their business idea, based on new dynamics that they’ve created through partnering.
| |
