Despite September’s tragedies and a recessed economy, John’s restoration business has continued to blossom, and his web traffic shows this trend is not a fluke. From December to January, for example, his site traffic increased 47%.

The numbers held steady in February, but March has shown still more growth. If anything, he says, it’s the sales of new appliances that have been sluggish. There has certainly been an element of serendipity to John’s success. A visit to the site’s online showroom shows a variety of brightly painted refrigerators in red, yellow, and blue—not traditional colors for large appliances.

John admits that the reason for choosing these bold colors was not based on period style or artistic whimsy. They had been created as pieces for the online showroom simply because plain white refrigerators didn’t show up very well on the web site! Meahwhile, these colorful pieces have become hot items.

Although John was skittish about his initial investment of a few hundred dollars to create his first site, he now feels that it is undoubtedly responsible for the success of his restoration business:

"I depend on the Internet. Without the Internet, I wouldn’t have the antique business."

"If I were trying to market these items in a 100-mile radius, there simply aren’t enough potential clients that want these products or have the money to spend to make it a viable business. 98% of the business I do with the vintage appliances comes from the Internet."

John has certainly extended the reach of his business via the Internet beyond a 100-mile radius. His refurnished stoves and refrigerators have found homes all across the country and beyond.

"Very few of our clients are in our general area. We keep a map up in the office and we peg every city that we go to or ship to, and when you look at the map, the bulk of the clients have been in the New England states. Although we’ve shipped something to almost every state in the Union at this point, the Midwest and the Northeast have been our biggest demand areas."

"Recently, we did our first International order. We shipped 2 refrigerators to a public relations firm in Riga, Latvia. They are being used in a national ad campaign for the Phillip Morris-Latvia Corporation. The refrigerators are the grand prizes. They contacted us about a month ago after showing their clients our web site."

He believes that much of his success, both online and off, stems from the fact that he is offering a truly unique service. Antique Appliances is the only company in the US that specializes in the restoration of vintage refrigerators, and one of only a small number who restores vintage electric stoves

While it is true that John is offering a unique service, he is doing a lot of other things as well that indicate he and his people have thought long and hard about their value proposition and have evolved the idea to keep pace with the shopping desires of a global clientele.

Many companies are restoring gas stoves in the US because a gas stove is rather simple to repair and restore—no wiring, no moving parts, no chemicals involved. Electric stoves, however, are more complicated—a thorough knowledge of electrical systems is needed.

Refurbishing a refrigerator requires even more expertise: in addition to the electrical aspect, special certification is needed to handle the refrigerants and to clean the systems. Most appliance restorers don’t have the required know-how or certification. But because Jowers TV & Appliances was already in the business of selling new appliances, John had a pre-assembled team of qualified servicemen and technicians.

John has no plans to take his new appliance sales online. While Internet sales for niche items like vintage appliances are skyrocketing, the competition to move new inventory is stiff. He knows he would likely only lose money trying to compete for online sales with a large outlet like Sears.com or JCPenney.com.

He does, however, believe that his new appliance sales will be helped as more and more manufacturers begin adding search engines that allow customers to find authorized dealers in their geographic area. He has seen a few sales locally that have come to him via GE.com, and feels that this allows smaller dealers to profit without investing in building a site.

John’s dad still works two days a week at the company he started. He enjoys working on the appliances just like he did in ´55. Marvin saw the value in Cyberspace when John showed him the check from his first sale.

John acknowledges that, when he left for college, the last thing he thought he’d do was to come back to a small town and work in the family business. But his work experience while in college made him realize that he really enjoyed taking full responsibility for customer satisfaction, something that is vital to a family business, but often of secondary importance to larger stores.

"As a teenager, when I went out on deliveries with the other guys and there was a problem, believe me, the customer would address ME with their concerns because they knew I was my father’s son!"

"In college, I went to work part time in a local home improvement center. During my first week there, I saw my boss, the store’s assistant manager; make a woman mad over a can of red paint.

I went into his office and I said, `you may fire me for saying this, but you’ve done the worst thing you could have done. If you had given her another can of paint, she would have walked out of the store satisfied, and never said a word about it.

But mark my words, you’ve made her mad, you didn’t give her another can of paint, and now she’s going to walk out of here and tell everyone in her bridge club and her church group, and you’ve probably lost 12 customers over a can of paint. ´"

"I went home that night and asked myself what I wanted to do with my life, if I could really be happy somewhere climbing the corporate ladder but having no say-so about customer satisfaction, where you’ll always have to hand it off to another person.

Suddenly, the family business seemed like the right choice."

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