More furniture, mattress sellers using smart technology
New phones, computers help close deals
Heath E Combs -- Furniture Today, August 16, 2010
HIGH POINT — Where speed and information meet, sales result.  Krista Kozlik, left, and Marj Stewart, employees of furniture retailer Century House in Madison, Wis., show how they use an iPad to aid in the sales process. |
That's the hope of many in the furniture industry who have begun using mobile computing devices like smartphones and tablet computers to help them do their jobs and connect with customers.
Retailers and manufacturers are using the new technology to enhance sales presentations and help customers make a decision on the sales floor. Those who use the devices say they show promise in making the sales process quicker and more fun.
One early adopter of new technology is bedding major Simmons. This spring, the company introduced QR tags on its 2010 Beautyrest mattress line. The tags are small barcode-like labels that can be read by smartphones like the iPhone, Droid or BlackBerry to quickly access product information online.
Consumers must use their smartphones to download a Microsoft Tag Reader application to be able to "read" the tags. They can then access a website that has a three dimensional cutaway of the bed, a video showing how items are built, and other information.
Tim Oakhill, executive vice president of marketing for Simmons, said the QR tags give consumers what they want: quick and easy content, bite-size chunks of information they can absorb and understand.
Gratifying a consumer's information need while they're standing in front of the product is important, considering that most purchase decisions are made at the point of sale, Oakhill said.
"What's happening in this whole world of electronics and information is your phone has become more and more robust in its capabilities. Where a year ago 19% of consumers had a smartphone, today that number is 30%," Oakhill said.
Century House furniture owner Jacob Harlow is an early adopter who picked up the iPad tablet computer in April and is now using it in his Madison, Wis.-based modern and Scandinavian retail store as a sales tool.
When questions arise on custom options - like what finishes or fabrics are available - the sales associates can immediately show images of the choices on an iPad rather than searching through paper catalogs. That helps customers envision items in a different color, or a different format, like a sectional when a store only has a sofa, he said.
The salesperson can then e-mail those images to the consumer along with a price quote.
"We're a small store and a custom order store to a large extent, so our folks are used to really trying to demonstrate the possibilities off of one piece. We want to be able to sell many different versions. All this does is give us a very portable, quick, easy access to a lot of these options," Harlow said.
In the store, he is experimenting with ways to take payments and process transactions. While the iPad isn't a full fledged computer - it's more of a media portal, rather than running all the software of a laptop or desktop - it allows users to control a computer from it using a virtual computer. But that is still a slow and cumbersome process, he said.
Harlow said he'd like to see point-of-sale software that allows sales associates to pull up inventory, complete a sale and answer most of a consumer's questions from the floor.
Beyond the retail sales floor, the iPads also are in use at the wholesale level. At the recent NeoCon contract furniture show in Chicago, Harlow noticed that a lot of iPads were used in display areas to help showcase product. Lifestyle Enterprise used iPads at its recent Forbidden City furniture show in Beijing.
At the High Point Market in April, Ed Tashjian, chief marketing officer for furniture source Home Meridian International, parent company of Pulaski and SLF, could be seen roaming the showroom with his new iPad.
For an image-intensive industry, the iPad works well, Tashjian said. It shows crisp photos that often are better than those in catalogs, he said. And he has noticed a benefit in the way the device is used to share images and information.
"By the very nature of the screen, the floor salesperson has to stand close to (the customer) and they develop a stronger interpersonal bond - just because of the sociology of the proximity of people," Tashjian said.
See Furniture/Today's Aug. 16 print issue for a longer version of this story, and a related story about retailer Arhaus Furniture using iPads on delivery trucks.
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