Use your store as an experimental think tank

Using your store as an experimental think tank instead of a place where you sell furniture sheds a different light when you come into work. Over the years my partner and husband, Kirk, have always tried to listen to what the customer was asking for. Since we are small, it gave us the ability to design and work with small manufacturers, such as Jerod of Mortise and Tenon, where he also owns his own small wood shop (partner in YourFurnitureLink.com) and is also designing and developing when not sleeping! Having smaller independently owned stores has given us very much an edge to change quickly…..and then change quickly again in the not distant future. Our secret is listening to end users and then responding to what they are in a deep search for and can’t seem to get at the mainstream store or online.

It is fascinating to watch on YourFurnitureLink.com what the consumer is gravitating towards in the way of vendors and products. Collecting and studying information has never been so exciting!

We want our vendors on YourFurnitureLink.com to have this Valuable information to better understand statistically, what seems to get a lot of traffic and what is weak within the products they feature. For instance, on www.yourfurniturelink.com if you are an upholstery company and have 20 or 30 images on your listing, you can view how many people visit you each day and specifically which images they hit most frequently. This may not seem important, but it is! Especially from a product development stand point. Listing an image on our website, needn’t mean you are in full production.

We have vendors who are savvy and photographing their prototypes and listing them on our site. This gives them an added edge to understand whether it is worth it to bring to a show, put into production or if there is a lack of response there…cut it loose! Kathy Ireland asks her Twitter followers which color ways they like, what a time and money saver to hear what your customers think and like! The beauty of good information is that it does save money and time and we all like that.

In our recent “Eating and Seating” design challenge with Harrington School of Design, Peter Klick, instructor, has asked that a survey get passed around so we can better understand how people eat their meals. Do they sit at a table? On the sofa? Are they reading, watching TV, or with their family at dinnertime? Here is the survey, (we would love to understand your experience, so please fill it out if possible…it just takes a moment)

http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?sm=Rsl0K_2bVNNr445pqDI_2bNw3A_3d_3d

Think about it. What a brilliant way to develop seating for dining. Especially when you understand what people are doing when eating. Clearly there are different design approaches when sitting at a dining table versus hanging out on the sofa. It will be very interesting to see the results of the survey and how the students will use this information when designing for the challenge.

Using information helps design become more practical and methodical. There is nothing wrong with aiming carefully rather than just shooting from the hip and hoping a design be well received by market buyers. Being in retail for 15 years buying just what YOU like or what YOU think is a winner isn’t often the most focused approach. I know when purchasing, nothing was better than finding products that were well received, but under the radar. A tricky balancing act, although a good one.

For those of you whether you are in retail or manufacturing I encourage you to extract as much information as possible before you take a business step in whichever tool is available to you. It sheds a new light on things and helps with a better understanding of what end users are looking for.

www.yourfurniturelink.com
www.migandtig.com
www.mortisetenon.com