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"The Crossroads of the Gourmet Community” |
Sponsored by:
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Newsletter #17 | December 15, 2010 |
Retail Snapshot
Faraday's website drives traffic to its brick and mortar store.
Cutlery is the first category featured in the Faraday's online store.
Faraday's mascot, Tony the Knife Guy, could get an animated makeover in the New Year.
| Retailer: |
Faraday's Kitchen Store |
| Location: |
Austin, Texas |
| Owner: |
Tony and Melissa Curtis-Wellings |
| Founded: |
July, 2005 |
| Details: |
4,200-sq ft, wide selection of kid's cooking products |
| Special Features: |
On-line shopping, kid's cooking school and camp; down-home Texas hospitality
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| Advertising/ promotions strategy: |
Newspapers, radio, coffee-table holiday catalog; expanding into social media via blogging, webpage and Twitter
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| Website: |
www.faradayskitchenstore.com |
When Faraday's Kitchen Store revamped its website to start selling online last month, owner Tony Curtis-Wellings didn't expect the new Internet business to spur sales at his brick-and-mortar store.
But that is what happened.
Enticed by the assortment of cutlery Faraday's offers online, Internet browsers came into the store to buy.
"Some drove from 80 miles away,” Curtis-Wellings says. "The biggest success of our website re-launch is that people could see we had great depth of product assortment.”
Already, he says the online site has generated enough in-store sales to cover its operating costs, which are fairly minimal: the store's current POS company supplies an integrated e-commerce solution as well, so inventory was easily uploaded on to the web server.
"We didn't have to go out and hire another provider for that process,” Curtis-Wellings says, adding most other web upgrade tasks are being handled in house by the retailer's own staff, who hold regular web strategy meetings.
In one decision, staffers opted to list Texas cities in key word searches, building a regional, rather than national Internet presence with search engines like Google.
"We felt Texans like to shop local,” he says. The upshot for on-line shoppers? Faraday's website turns up at the top of the list in a Google search for Texas kitchenware stores.
The website revamp and move into online shopping was fueled in part by the success of the store's blog, which debuted at the beginning of this year.
The chatty, informative posts quickly proved popular with locals, and helped build Faraday's presence within the community both as expert resource and friendly neighbor.
For example, the store's 100th blog post kicked off Black Friday last month, with an invitation for shoppers to join the staff for fresh hot coffee and store-baked scones. The move drew a crowd, Curtis-Wellings says, and cost the store about $50, far less than slashing the store's already low profit margin through wildly low prices.
"The growth of social media is amazing,” he says. He started pondering how best to use social media to drive traffic to his store when he noticed tech-savvy customers using an i-Phone app to scan Faraday's prices and then compare them with those offered by competing retailers.
To that end, one of Curtis-Wellings' goals for 2011 is to increase the social media interaction between the brick-and-mortar store, the e-store and his customers.
As part of that plan, he envisions morphing the e-store's mascot, Tony the Knife Guy—now a cheerful squiggle—to an animated salesman more along the lines of Tony the Tiger, as a way to make the online store informative and fun.
Social media, he notes, is rapidly changing his approach to business: he says the retailer's two-month old Twitter account is already bringing in customers.
And as a newly-minted Twitter fanatic, Curtis-Wellings understands his customers' enthusiasm for adopting new technology into their lives.
"I'm tweeting all the time,” he admits. "It is so much better than getting email.”
