Jazz is in part the art of improvisation—the art of the inspired riff and the lucky break.
When David “Jake” Jacobs opted to lay aside his career as an acclaimed jazz bass player and take up a more 9-to-5 gig, he was inspired to ring some changes on his father’s job selling used office furniture. Jacobs and his brother partnered to offer classic and retro office chairs, desks and tables from the ‘40s, ‘50s and ‘60s. Two Jakes Furniture opened its doors in a funky Brooklyn storefront in 1997. Pretty soon, the company was attracting Manhattan architects and designers looking for accent pieces to add a little style to the office suites they were designing.
By 2000, the Web was in full swing, and the Jacobses chimed in with a Web site designed by one of their few employees. The site was essentially a digital ad for the business; there was no real need to enable it for e-commerce with a shopping cart, catalog or site search.
“Initially we viewed it as a brochure,” Jacobs says. “We were selling mostly used furniture, so we weren’t expecting to sell a lot of it online. With secondhand stuff there’s a lot of subjectivity about condition. Also, the inventory was a lot of onesies and twosies, and that seemed a painstaking way to sell it.”
That arrangement changed in 2003, when the brothers decided to expand their customer base by offering new office items by well-known designers as well as the vintage stuff. All of a sudden, e-commerce became a viable option—in fact, a necessity, since in many cases Two Jakes was simply taking orders for items that were then drop-shipped at the customer’s door by the factory. (Two Jakes does keep some stock on hand and ships some orders itself.)
The newly revamped Two Jakes Web site was up and selling by early 2004. Selling over the Web was a good way to increase traffic, Jacobs says. But investing more effort and resources in making the Web site fully transactional also had some beneficial side effects on average customer sales.
“With the Web, we found that customers tended to come looking for one thing and then find something else they wanted,” he says. And the new Web site also gave a boost to offline sales.
“While it’s nice when you open your e-mail in the morning and find out that people have dropped money on you over the Web, we also began getting a lot of people who came to the site, looked around, and then following up with purchases over the phone,” Jacobs says.
One problem with selling new office furniture is that the manufacturers keep a fairly tight rein on advertised prices; that eliminates discounts as a major incentive to shoppers. Even incentives like free shipping are controlled at least in part by the factory. To compensate for that lack of marketing leeway, Two Jakes tries to differentiate itself by keeping a moderate amount of stock on some popular designer items in its own warehouse. The new Web site reflects this; buyers can see, alongside a thumbnail picture of the item and a pull-down list of available colors, a notice that says the piece is currently in stock and ready for shipment.
But maintaining that inventory data on the Web site is a manual job, tough to keep up with in a company that only has six full-time employees. The web designer works three days a week, and the person who tends to the e-commerce back end is basically an outside consultant on call. So Two Jakes fudges a little bit.
“We don’t say we have 40 of anything; we say it’s ‘in stock’,” Jacobs says. “We have had times when someone order eight of an item and we were only able to ship four, and had to go to drop shipping for the rest.”
One of Jacobs’ local competitors makes customer service a point of differentiation—to the point of featuring testimonials on their home Web page—so when a customer issue like out-of-stock items crops up, Jacobs swings into action.
“Within eight hours, I’m e-mailing them or calling them on the phone, letting them know there’s a problem and what we’re doing about it,” he says. “Most of the time, people are so appreciative that they’ll follow through with the sale.”
All in all, e-commerce has hit the right note for Two Jakes. Online sales amounted to about 6% to 7% of total revenues in 2004 and should do better this year. Jacobs and his team are now talking about re-designing the back end of the Web site to incorporate a more robust platform and add some e-commerce features that weren’t readily available in off-the-shelf software just two years ago: things like customer wish lists, gift certificates product recommendations and customer reviews.
Navigation is also an issue on the current Web site. Right now, users can search the new office furniture by manufacturer, pulling up a page that lists all the items from that designer: chairs, tables, desks, etc. Jacobs wants to introduce a more flexible navigation system that will let visitors pull up only chairs from all producers, for example. He’d also like customers to be able to search his inventory by rooms.
Any new version of the Web site will be built at the same time that Two Jakes is opening a second business down the street, this one selling children’s furniture, toys and accessories “with a modern aesthetic”. (Think big colorful blocky tables and lots of wooden rocking horses.) The plan is to combine those two projects, the Web rebuild and the store opening: Jacobs and company will probably design the e-commerce site they want for the kid’s store, then clone that back end onto the original site once they have it working to their satisfaction.
Promotion has been done at a fairly slow tempo, by choice. “We’re small and haven’t had a big budget to work with,” Jacobs says. “So we’ve done some print advertising, and we’re doing search engine marketing on Google. Some people might go out and get a big bank loan and do whatever it took, and that might be a good strategy, but it’s not the way we’ve preferred to work. We’ve tried not to go into debt, to stay within our means and grow slowly.” Two Jakes runs a moderate permission-based e-mail campaign for past customers, sending them communications two or three times a year, and has also done some postcard mailings.
But this is New York, where promotional opportunities don’t always come in the expected channels. The biggest PR break Two Jakes has gotten to date was the arrival on their doorstep of Thomas Filicia, the interior designer from the “Queer Eye for the Straight Guy” TV series, who took a quick run through to find some vintage club chairs for a makeover living room. That five minutes of national cable television exposure translated into both a small immediate sales boost and a large and ongoing traffic jump for the Two Jakes Web site.
“It had legs,” Jacobs said of the amazing PR opportunity. “They keep replaying the show, and we’re listed among the retailers they’ve visited on the show Web site. I still get customers in every week who refer to it.”
That kind of promotion may not have been part of the plan, but as they say, it’s close enough for jazz.
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