Web Marketing Is Cozy Fit for Warm Biscuit

About nine years ago, Vicki Bodwell started hearing complaints from her new mom friends that there were no children’s bedding products available that weren’t plastered with commercial licensed characters. This gave the Conde Nast ad sales rep an idea for a starting up a business.

In 1999, she founded Warm Biscuit (http://www.warmbiscuit.com), a $1.2 million-a-year cataloger and online marketer of children’s bedding products designed in what she terms the “vintage” style.

At present, the New York City-based firm sends out six catalog mailings per year and e-mails once a week.

Bodwell got the idea to start a catalog after surveying mall shoppers both locally and nationally.

“There was an overwhelming response across the country,” she says. “People really couldn’t find bedding that was vintage-inspired and something they would want to have.

“And then we went to a couple of trade shows to see what’s out there and there weren’t a lot of people doing the vintage-inspired look. The boutique market was also very fragmented no one was selling to the big department stores,” she continues. “So we saw an opportunity to do something outside the boutiques and outside the department stores with a catalog.”

At first, Warm Biscuit rented names from Martha Stewart and other lists, which brought some moderate success with response rates in the 0.5% to 1% range. “But we got a lot of PR and that helped,” she recalls.

But Bodwell concedes she got a break around that time when Pottery Barn started up its PBKids catalog.

“Thankfully, they kind of defined the marketplace,” she says.

By 2004, the company started up its Web site and by last year began buying Google AdWords as part of an online marketing and search engine optimization strategy, says Bodwell.

Well-performing keywords include “children’s bedding” and “kid’s curtains, she says. A spot check earlier this week ranked warmbuscuit.com at number 19 on Yahoo’s listings. Just the same, Bodwell asserts the company does most of its prospecting online and that online marketing overall is “extremely profitable.”

“We still do a catalog,” she says but notes Warm Biscuit sees much more online marketing in its future. The principal reason? Paper and postage price hikes.

“It becomes really difficult for smaller mailers to mail and prospect,” she says, noting that “we do most of our prospecting online and we mail basically to our buyers and to co-op lists that are kind of our tried and true.”

Warmbiscuit.com’s customers tend to be professional women ages 30 and above with fairly conservative tastes.

Going forward, Warmbiscuit.com isn’t averse to finding a venture capitalist backer or merging with a similar company though she says no such moves are in the works right now.

Barring that, Warmbiscuit.com, which is backed largely by friends and family, plans to grow slowly.

“We’re not doubling our business anymore,” she says. “I think that next year we’ll probably be at $1.5 million and then $1. 7 million.

“In the beginning we were just growing by leaps and bounds because it was just actually less crowded because slow and steady wins the race,” she adds. “Maybe in 10 years, we’ll be an $8 to 9 million business.”