Fish buys its youth furniture from Stanley and Moosehead — companies who specialize in classic designs and quality furniture built to last.Fish Furniture does not try to fill kids bedrooms with cute, trendy stuff that is either out of style or worn out in just a few years. Both of the company’s youth furniture vendors specialize in classic designs that are built to last. “What parents don’t want is to buy toddler furniture that the child is going to outgrow and want to replace when they’re 8 or 9,” Dan Geller said. “We show them young adult furniture that will easily last them through high school.”
Youth is not an item business; at least it isn’t if a store shows a substantial selection and the salespeople take the time to help the parents get what they want. As with any furniture category, consumers start the process cautiously, afraid of making an expensive mistake that they’ll have to live with for years. For a store like Fish Furniture, which is accustomed to selling custom upholstery and other special orders, this type of consultative selling comes naturally.
“Every mom is nervous about getting her baby out of their crib to the twin bed, and that’s usually when we are working with them,” Geller said. “A lot of them are confused, and we help them do it. A lot of moms think they should leave the crib up. The best way is to make a clean break and tell the child they are moving to a big boy or a big girl bed.”
At the same time, this child will be getting the study and storage pieces they need to create a coordinated look. Geller wants to sell as many of those pieces as possible, which is why the store generally displays comprehensive selections of each collection rather than attempting to sell from catalog pages.
“We show every shape and every configuration,” he said. “We don’t just show a four-piece youth bedroom and say this is it for $999. A youth bedroom sale should not be just a bed and a couple of cases.”
That’s why he considers it essential to display the full breadth of each collection. Geller wants youth shoppers to see how trundle drawers fit under all the beds. He wants them to know that when they come back in a few years he will have the true full headboard -- not a queen headboard with holes drilled for a full but a true full.
In addition to exposing them to this extensive selection, Geller, through his salespeople, wants his customers to know that the styles they see today will still be available a few years from now when the child’s needs have changed. He wants that customer to come back, not just when her child has grown and needs more furniture but also when there are more kids in the house.
“If we get the sale on child one, we know we’re going to get the sale on child two and child three,” he said. “You can’t say that about a dinette group.”
“We load it up and give each room a theme,” he said. “One room is about sports, and another is set up for girls. The people want to see it totally loaded to the gills.” Fish offers pictures from Creative Images, beanbags from Artist Colony and lamps from Inmon. The company also uses a lot of props, old pieces with character that Geller picks up on Saturday mornings, like the bicycle hanging from the ceiling. “It’s easy to accessorize a youth gallery,” he said. “Just go to a few garage sales.”
The accessories serve to animate the furniture and give it life, providing decorating ideas to the parents while giving a suggestion of cool to the kids. However, other than mattresses, they don’t represent a significant add-on to the typical sale, Geller said.
Kids furniture is a competitive business, but as the leading youth retailer in Ohio for both Moosehead and Stanley, Fish Furniture has managed to build some awareness in the extended Cleveland market.
“After more than 10 years, customers know to come in here to shop us,” Geller said. “It’s an easy setting to advertise because you show a picture of a bedroom group with a bunk bed.” The Fish Furniture advertising budget is about evenly split between newspaper, television and direct mail.
In all media, Geller focuses on quality, selection and service. “We do not promote it by price,” he said. “I can’t fight the guy who says $99 for this or $199 for that. We promote it with our selection, our quality and our style. We’re competitive in our pricing, but we’re not going to win that war.”
But then, he’s also not convinced it’s a war worth fighting: “I don’t think the consumer is as price sensitive when shopping for children’s furniture because they are more concerned with the quality and the style.”
For quality and style, Geller believes he’s allied with the right manufacturers. As a Stanley Young America retailer, he gets the full retinue of marketing and display support provided by Stanley. “Stanley has excellent point-of-purchase literature that shows every piece and configuration, with good planning tools on the tear sheet,” he said. “What’s good about Stanley is they have 15 collections, each with about 30 pieces to choose from and they have uniform SKUs as you move from collection to collection. That makes it real easy to sell and to manage.”
The youth lines at Fish Furniture are often displayed in vignettes that are not overly juvenile, so customers can see how the furniture can last for years.Stanley is broadly distributed, though, and that does contribute to more competitive pricing with tighter margins. Geller can’t afford to lose sales because he has some key items, like a bunk bed, priced 20% higher than another store within driving distance. That’s an easy choice for the shopper.
As a Memory Lane account for Moosehead, Fish Furniture has exclusive distribution in Cleveland, and that will always enhance a retailer’s gross margins. But Geller says the store likes Moosehead for much more than territorial protection.
The company has a 10-year guarantee on open stock, meaning that Moosehead promises that it will still be selling this collection 10 years from now so the parents can order new pieces when they need them. “Parents like it when you tell them that,” Geller said.
Moosehead also has a follow-up marketing program that keeps in contact with past customers at no cost to the store. Moosehead’s Memory Lane program sends birthday greetings to past customers, promising a gift for the child if they visit the store. “They’re the only manufacturer we know of that has a program to stay in touch with the consumer,” Geller said. “It costs us nothing, it’s classy and it does bring the customer back in the store.”
Excellent vendors, strong sales skills, appealing displays and consistent marketing. All of that helps, but Geller knows that no single aspect of youth furniture determines success with the category. In the final analysis, Fish Furniture needs all those things plus an intangible commitment to making the family happy with their purchase: “It’s just hard work and taking care of the customer.”
The rewards, direct and indirect, for doing so are considerable. With an average sale of nearly $2,000, well above the store’s average for all categories, the direct benefits of the youth category probably don’t need to be explained. However, and this may be most important, Fish Furniture establishes relationships with young adults through their kids. “When a young family buys a house, the kid’s room is one of their first priorities in spending their money,” Geller said. “They want their kids to have good furniture. It just makes sense to go after that category.”
