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Thread: Buying on the Internet, Ordering, Shipping and Repairs

  1. #1
    Join Date
    Dec 2009
    Posts
    35

    Default Buying on the Internet, Ordering, Shipping and Repairs

    As I mentioned in one of my earlier posts, over the years I've bought several truckloads of furniture for my houses and offices. Even 25 and 30 years ago, I bought some of my furniture from out-of-state dealers, including those in NC with showrooms only a few miles from where the furniture was made.

    Overall I've had more success with the furniture I bought from out-of-state than with the stuff I've bought from local dealers. I'm not sure why that has been the case, but I haven't gotten any better service from the locals than I have gotten from the out-of-state dealers, but I have paid the locals more money.

    Today, with the huge presence of the internet, buying from dealers in other states is now a real possibility for more and more consumers everyday. When I first started buying out of state, it was more difficult. Sometimes I had to fly to the large warehouse showrooms, and every time I ordered I had to make sure I had the correct manufacturers numbers, color codes and other data. Local dealers often used tags that misrepresented the correct codes to prevent price comparisons or ordering from other dealers. When I bought over the phone from furniture brokers that I knew and were willing to put my faith in, it was a little scary at times, but it has all worked out well.

    Duane is one guy I don't worry about. He is one of the best leather furniture and reproduction period piece hard goods dealers I know. Anyone who has bought furniture from Duane understands what I am saying. I hope everyone who has been a customer of Duane's will use the internet to post positive recommendations for him and The Keeping Room. Duane is one of the few dealers who gets the internet and the impact it is having on the furniture business. Talk about a business that's stuck in the past.

    Try getting anything repaired in a timely manner from a furniture company. Try getting it back in just weeks instead of months. This is a business stuck in the past with no orientation toward customers, or should I say the final buyers of the furniture.

    The furniture industry needs to wake up. They're still thinking and living in medieval times. No wonder so many furniture stores have closed. No wonder the industry has had some really poor years lately. China didn't kill the industry. The industry killed itself with complacency. Yeah, I know it's complicated. I spent 30 years running companies that had to compete with everyone everywhere in the world. But if you don't start moving until you smell smoke, it may be way too late to save your butt much less the building!

    Duane is one of the few people in the business using the internet effectively to improve his sales. Duane could do more if his suppliers didn't do things to hinder his progress. But what he has been able to do is impressive.

    Duane's competitors sit around pissing and moaning about dealer and territory exclusivity. I know because I used to hear the same crap. Territorial exclusivity is another name for lazy, non-competitive bridge trolls.

    Why am I recommending Duane? Was my experience with Hancock and Moore perfect? No! There were a couple of minor problems.

    Duane stepped up and did what he could to help. He gets it. He's a one man band who runs his ship like his family's economic lives depended on it, and they do.

    My father owned a small hardware store when I was a boy. One day when a customer came in I didn’t wait on them fast enough, or perhaps I looked as though stopping what I was doing to pay attention to them was annoying. After the customer left, my father said to me, “There’s only two things you need to know about customers. They decide what we have for dinner tonight and what you get for Christmas. Outside of that, they don’t matter much!”

    My father’s store was in a very poor part of town. Some of the kids that lived there couldn’t afford to replace the tires on their bicycles when the tires wore out, so they would ride on flat tires, and sometimes just the rims. One day one of those kids came into the store with enough money to buy two new tires and two new tubes. He was beaming.

    Later in the day, I looked out of the window in the front of store and saw the boy ride by with the tires on his bike completely flat. When I pointed him out to my father, he stepped outside and called the kid over. He took the tires off the bike, repaired the tubes, pumped up the tires and sent the kid on his way. I looked at my father and asked him why he had fixed the tires.

    He said, “When one of the kids puts a new tube into a tire, they often use a screw driver to push them in, and it punches holes in tubes. I know I’m not responsible for their damaged tubes, but when they ride their bikes down the street with the tires flat, everyone in the neighborhood knows where they bought those tires.”

    Now with the internet, my neighborhood just got bigger. I can tell a million people where I bought my flat tires! Very little goes unreported upon these days. Apparently the furniture companies don't get that either. (There are a lot of American industries that need a major change in management because they don't care about the customer either. It's not just the furniture business.)

    Duane and my father understood many of the same things. Duane will survive in the shrinking furniture business.

    He doesn't have a marketing department, or an engineering group, but he does have grateful customers who can accomplish the same thing as the world's best marketing department. Get on the internet and talk up The Keeping Room.

    Duane's helped you. Please promote The Keeping Room and My Furniture Forum.

    It's that simple.

    PS No, Duane didn't ask me to post this. I only know Duane from buying furniture from him, so if you don't like my post, blame it on me.
    Last edited by JackOlso; 06-16-2010 at 04:27 PM.

  2. #2
    Join Date
    Jul 2008
    Location
    Alexandria VA
    Posts
    15,890

    Default Re: Buying on the Internet, Ordering, Shipping and Repairs

    That's a great story about your company, and I agree 100%. The furniture industry as a whole is stuck in 'old school' mode. I make recommendations to various companies all the time how to improve their businesses from what I see at the dealer end of things and most the time I simply get "Well...ahhh....we've never done that, and it would cost some money do implement" and that's the end of it. I even figured out a way to save one company some money the other day, called them up and told the head people how to do it, and nothing came of it. You can lead a horse to water.....

    The furniture business does a terrible job of educating end consumers, which is why I started participating on Garden Web several years ago (until I got tired of them suspending me for being 'too commercial' and started this forum). It was to help people make good decisions, armed with as much good information as I could share with them. I never really intended for my sharing of knowledge to be a marketing tool, and I was quite surprised as orders came rolling in from around the country because of it. I certainly appreciated it, too....the long distance internet orders were the only thing that kept my business alive in 2009, my local business was bust.

    There are things I can do long distance, and things I can't do. I'll always try hard to work on behalf of the customer in advising them, checking orders, fixing issues to the best of my ability and most of all - not ignoring you when you call or write and burying your concerns on the back burner. But I can't come to your house to see an ill-fitting cushion when you are 500 miles away, or make a delivery service move faster or deliver to your schedule. I don't always agree with the way suppliers and delivery services work, and they know it .... but at the end of the day I can't make them run their businesses the way you and I want them to operate. I can only run my business the way I think it should be run, with respect and patience for the customer and trying to get it right the first time. I've got a pretty loyal customer base, and only get cussed out a couple times a year >G<.

    I think furniture sales reps are lazy. They don't try to help me sell product or market differently, they are only interested in selling ME something to put on my floor, even if that 'sure fire' order they sold me last time is still here collecting dust. Most would rather have a root canal than come by and update my fabrics and samples, and forget about trying to get them involved in something like helping out here on the forum with advice - their eyes glaze over and I get "I don't do computers"..... I'd like to just be done with all of them and have the 5% they get of every order as an advertising allowance - now there's a novel idea! (Reps reading this, you know exactly what I'm saying).

    Most of all though, I have to believe in the product I sell. If I don't have faith in it, then why would I ever want to lie to someone spending their hard-earned money on something that falls apart? I'm hard on my suppliers to maintain a standard, and many think I'm a PITA for a little store owner. But its the right way to do business, at the end of a career a man might have money (or not) - but its his reputation as being a decent person that really counts. That's pretty much what I strive for.

    Thanks for an honest review, Jim. And I do appreciate your business!
    Duane Collie
    Straight answers from thirty-six years in the business.
    My Private Messages are Disabled - Please ask questions here in the forum.

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