Kelley Hall-Barr did not realize she was a direct marketer until recently. Actually, she only reluctantly acknowledges being a retailer, despite owning and operating a storefront in St. Louis. She thinks of her company, K. Hall Designs (www.khalldesigns.com), as a wholesale business. This is a lady in one serious state of denial.
K. Hall Designs specializes in the lotions and potions of bath and beauty products, as well as scented candles and scent diffusion reeds for the home. From the beginning Hall-Barr tried to create products that had what she felt was the right mix of efficacy and aesthetics, products she didn’t find existing in the market.
“Something smelled good, but didn’t work well. Or it worked well, but didn’t smell that good. Or it smelled good, but the package wasn’t great,” Hall-Barr says.
She sold her products at crafts shops and farmers’ markets for more than a decade, but didn’t establish K. Hall Designs formally until 1998. Four years later, her husband, John Barr, joined the firm.
What had been a wholesale operation soon developed an unequivocal retail face. The Barrs moved back to St. Louis, where they bought and renovated an abandoned early twentieth century gas station. The result was as much offices and a lab as it was a retail shop.
“For us, Christmas starts Aug. 15, when we start shipping our wholesale orders,” she says, adding that as the last wholesale order is shipped out, “the Christmas season starts in the shop.”
“People don’t buy our products online unless they know our company,” Hall-Barr notes.
By that, she means people who have purchased her products at one or another of the boutiques across the country that carry her line. She spurns retail advertising, though occasional magazine articles will spike traffic to her Web site.
She gets between 10 and 20 orders a day, usually for two or three items, sometimes seven or eight. Scent diffusion reeds are both one of the most expensive items ($42) as well as one of the most popular. Most of the items in the line are priced at either $19 or $22. The most popular scent is pomegranate.
Customers are split 60% female, 40% male, Hall-Barr said, but noted that around Christmas it’s mainly men.
Network
