FurnitureFind.com: More than a survivor
By Brian Carroll -- Furniture Today, February 17, 2003
Buchanan, Mich. — A fresh infusion of venture capital, a new chief financial officer, and improved information systems have FurnitureFind.com, furniture's leading e-commerce vendor, poised to double sales in 2003 for the second straight year.
The bustle of activity in this sleepy town in southern Michigan stands out in an Internet space grown eerily quiet. Long gone are Living.com and the original Furniture.com, although the latter was rehatched at Seaman's-Levitz. Gone too are a raft of business-to-business Internet companies promising to revolutionize the industry's supply chain.
Plodding along through boom and bust has been FurnitureFind.com, an idea hatched in 1996 out of the brains of Stephen Antisdel, brother Jeff and son Shane. From a newspaper ad posted on the Internet, FurnitureFind.com has mushroomed into a $15 million-plus e-commerce enterprise dwarfing its brick-and-mortar division, the half-century-old store Bookouts Furniture.
The dot-com has survived in a landscape littered with more richly endowed failures by getting the basics right: achieving tangible operational efficiencies; selling at healthy, industry-normal margins; and networking online through savvy partnership and affiliate deals.
FurnitureFind.com has evolved from a simple Web site that started seven years ago with an online posting of Bookouts Furniture's Sunday newspaper ad.
The store's phones started ringing, with calls from all over the world.
"We realized the consumer was looking for another channel," said Alan Rosenhagen, a partner with the Antisdels in Bookouts. "But we didn't know how to ship the stuff. It's not a commodity. All we could tell them was, 'Come on down to Niles, Michigan'," where Bookouts was located.
In the site's first month, Bookouts sold and shipped one sectional sofa. The next month it was four more sales. Rosenhagen, general manager of the store, knew they were on to something.
That something has turned into 60 employees housed in a 32,000-square-foot former hospital building, where FurnitureFind moved at the beginning of this year.
Not that there haven't been zigs and zags along the way. FurnitureFind was sold to Goodhome.com in 1998, then bought back by the Antisdel family in late 1999.
Steve Antisdel, now chairman and chief executive officer, uses the buyback date as the starting point for tracking the company's performance. Prior to the buyback, FurnitureFind.com was part of a Hearst Publications-led Internet strategy that included TV buys, sophisticated imaging software and — oh, by the way — selling furniture on the Web.
"We realized after Goodhome that (online retailing) is basically catalog retailing," Antisdel said. "We just don't have print catalogs. Before Goodhome, we were in mainly a defensive posture, content with basically Bookouts.com rather than engaging in a whole new business."
The new business caters to consumers who are convenience-driven. Antisdel essentially divides furniture consumers into two categories — those who need the tactile experience of touching, feeling and sitting in the sofa, and those who don't want to go to the store. The latter usually have high-speed Web access at work.
"We learned that this category is not discount-driven," Antisdel said. "We have normal margins on middle-range product. We're retailers who see technology as an enabler, not a technology company trying to learn retailing."
As a long-time furniture retailer with a 33,000-square-foot store on one of the main roads connecting Indiana and Michigan, FurnitureFind knew the importance of location, location, location. It focused on landing prime real estate online.
"We defined the Net as a place, a big, poorly organized city with really bad maps — the search engines," Antisdel said. "If there are rolling hills, mountains and valleys, where do you need to be and where do your signs need to be? Where are the main streets and how much traffic is on those streets? These were the types of questions we were asking."
To improve its cyberspace location, the company embarked on a now-six-year-old campaign to achieve first-page results on search engines whenever they are queried using key words such as furniture and home furnishings.
A search for "furniture" these days brings up FurnitureFind.com on the first pages of such search engines as Google, Altavista, HotBot, and MSN. But the algorithms used by the engines constantly change, so FurnitureFind keeps moving too, with Jeff Antisdel and a full-time team of five working to make sure the company pops up on all online furniture searches.
Another way location has been achieved is through an aggressive affiliate program now totaling more than 15,000 partners. These affiliates range in sophistication from Amazon.com to primitively designed billboard sites with a FurnitureFind.com banner on the home page.
With about a million visitors a month, the traffic is there. But as important as technology has been, particularly in attracting "eyeballs," the company's executives emphasize that it still is a people business, and you still have to make the sale.
In 1998, Antisdel brought in Pam Durkin, now FurnitureFind's president, from Art Van Furniture and charged her with developing the Certified Home Furnishings Advisor program to train company employees to deal with online shoppers. Today, it's an accredited, 200-hour course at a nearby university.
A human connection is essential for consumers shopping for furniture online, Durkin said. Sales tickets average $1,400 at FurnitureFind.com and more than 90% of transactions involve at least one phone call.
"We started the training program because we were hiring so many at a time," she said. "Given the size of the online universe, it's as important for our people to know what we don't have as well as what we do offer."
The CHFAs send fabric swatches and wood samples to those consumers who need tactile reassurance, a practice that has helped to keep returns to below 3%, according to Antisdel.
"We're not ASID certified," he said. "We're helpful."
Selling midpriced, no-nonsense lines such as Keller, Johnston-Tombigbee and Berkline, FurnitureFind doesn't need the fancy imaging and rendering software in which Goodhome.com specialized. But with some 10,000 items from about 100 vendors, good search functionality and crisp presentations are a priority.
Kurt Mergener, FurnitureFind's IT director, said his team is working on more efficient intrasite search technology and toward Amazon.com-like personalization. If a consumer is searching for a contemporary table in wood and not glass, Mergener wants the site to consistently present precisely the table sought. More sophisticated database-driven search programs are the answer.
This type of functionality is helping the company become more valuable to its vendors, who more frequently are referring consumer inquiries to FurnitureFind, particularly when they come from regions where the vendor has no dealer.
Antisdel said Johnston-Tombigbee, for example, believes that interest generated by FurnitureFind.com sparks people to shop for the brand at local stores. And where Johnston-Tombigbee doesn't have stores, FurnitureFind.com fills the gap.
"The customer gets a fair price and good service, and Johnston-Tombigbee gets a sale where they wouldn't otherwise," Antisdel said. "Sounds like a win-win to me. One way or another, I think it's going to be a 'clicks-and-mortar' world, and we're going to be a big part of those clicks."
