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Online high-end dining specialist eyes other niches

Jay McIntosh -- Furniture Today, October 5, 2010

AntiquePurveyor.com sets up a portion of its New Jersey warehouse as a showroom to photograph products for its website, and to show local customers who want to see the items in person.CARLSTEDT, N.J. - See that fancy mahogany dining set on the TV show "Gossip Girl"? It came from Donald Timpanaro's warehouse and showroom here.
     Renting to television productions is a small part of Timpanaro's furniture retail business, AntiquePurveyor. com, but it's one that he hopes will grow.
     Meanwhile, his eight-year- old company remains mainly an online seller that follows a few simple principles: Specialize in one product niche, buy from trusted sources that consider you an important customer, and have a dependable and error- free delivery system.
     AntiquePurveyor.com's current niche is not, as you might guess, antiques. It's new high-end dining tables, mainly in antique styling and mostly in mahogany and mahogany veneers. Timpanaro also shows a line of bedroom, office and accents furniture on his website, but "90% of what I sell is dining," he says.
     He didn't start out as a furniture retailer, spending his first six years after college as a stock trader. A market dive in 2000 convinced him that wasn't where the money was.
     Around that time, the town where he was living, Hoboken, N.J., had its spring festival. Timpanaro and his wife set up an estate sale, using signs to draw traffic, and sold $3,000 worth of old furniture. Bitten by the sales bug, he trolled garage sales for furniture and kept reselling it at estate sales.
     Eventually he opened a warehouse and began selling on eBay under the AntiquePurveyor name.
     Today the business has morphed into its own website. And instead of hunting through garage sales, he get his products from a network of workshops in the South, mainly North Carolina, and from a 35,000-square-foot plant in Indonesia. AntiquePurveyor is the main customer of the plant, which is owned by a longtime colleague of Timpanaro's.
     He recently moved into a larger, 5,000-square-foot warehouse in New Jersey, and a partner has a satellite warehouse in Pennsylvania. The New Jersey space holds a lot of furniture - tables are stored with the legs off.
Timpanaro     "Walk down an aisle of 30 feet and you'll have 25 tables on the left and 25 tables on the right," says Timpanaro.
     He claims he can sell his product for half what it would cost in a typical furniture store. He said his average ticket for a table is $2,800 and prices range up to $7,900. Dining chairs range from $300 to $650. And sales are good this year. Timpanaro expects to do about $1 million, up from $650,000 in each of the past two years.
     He adds that he has learned that in his price range, choosing the right dining room furniture often is a key decision for home buyers. A formal dining room is an important public space.
     "When people buy their homes, it seems like the first thing they do is set up their dining rooms. A lot of people even commit to a dining room while their house is being built," he said.
      Timpanaro also has worked to build a delivery system using a few carriers, all of whom deliver to consumers from his warehouse without using third-party carriers, so he knows who is in control of the product at all times. He uses UPS about 5% of the time for customers who need something fast.
     Most of his customers find him via the Internet. When he started out eight years ago, he was selling a broad line of antiques using eBay as a main advertising tool. Hence the AntiquePurveyor name. But when eBay endorsed a pay-per-click ad program he learned that it was impossible for him to advertise a broad product line.
     "There were too many keywords, and an ordinary advertising budget couldn't be cost-effective. It was quite overwhelming," Timpanaro said.
     "I decided if I was ever going to compete in the Internet world, which I truly believed in, I would have to find a niche. That's when we started our focus on dining room furniture," he said.
     Today, AntiquePurveyor. com comes up in the first couple pages of Web searches for terms like "large mahogany dining tables" and "Duncan Phyfe dining tables."
     He does expect to branch out from Internet advertising as he pursues the rental business more aggressively.
     "We will soon pound the pavement for this new market, as we feel no one is willing to risk renting costly furniture," said Timpanaro.
     "We have the inventory and shipping experience to do this. I believe direct mailings are in our near future."

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