Retail Observer

RETAILOBSERVER.COM DECEMBER 2022 58 B y its very nature, the roughly $100 billion U.S. furniture industry is a fractured marketplace filled with tens of thousands of retailers, manufacturers, importers, factories, brands, categories … and, of course, products. Add in the diversity of custom colors, accents and finishes for a single piece, and you can begin to understand the overwhelming task that independent furniture dealers face in cataloging their assortments and building a marketplace presence. Enter AVB and its BrandSource-powered furniture solution, FTS (Furniture Technology Source). Over the past decade, the buying group has built a formidable arsenal of e-commerce, digital marketing and retail operational tools, designed initially for appliance dealers. Now, under the direction of AVB's senior leadership team, those assets are being deployed within the furniture business by FTS, which is becoming a force to be reckoned with in home furnishings. Leading the charge is AVB's home furnishings general manager Michael Posa, who sees FTS's mission as "providing a turnkey platform of retail solutions that are laser-focused on the independent furniture dealer." That means bringing to bear all of the skills, talents and resources of the $24 billion buying group, which has established a long track record of market share growth in home goods, through good times and bad. For FTS, those assets are divided into three core areas, or "pillars": retail solutions, marketing and technology. The first, retail solutions, can be considered table stakes for an effective buying organization and includes such fundamental services as competitive vendor merchandising programs, credit card processing, and consumer and wholesale finance. But BrandSource, a not-for-profit, member-owned cooperative, takes its commitment further with comprehensive programs for its members' service operations (ServiceSource) and HR functions (HRSource). As with FTS, these specialty services are supported with tactical guides, industry partnerships and dedicated town halls and newsletters to keep members ahead of the curve. BrandSource further distances itself from the pack through marketing, as provided by AVB Marketing (AVBM), the group's world-class, member-owned ad agency. A leader in advertising, e-commerce and digital marketing, AVBM has developed a hyper- effective, omnichannel array of advertising programs and social media messaging that can be customized for furniture dealers to cut through the marketplace clutter. Moreover, as a Google Premier Partner – an exclusive designation for a select number of digital agencies worldwide – AVB Marketing receives Google's best resources and insights, and its members- only clients are first in line for the company's beta programs and innovations. Perhaps the greatest point of differentiation within home furnishings, however, is the proprietary technology that AVBM brings to the table. It begins with the group's state-of-the-art e-commerce platform, which achieved record transactions, order counts and online conversions for BrandSource's furniture members over the past two years and is positioned to continue outperforming their big-box and independent rivals. Tailored to the unique needs of furniture dealers, the websites are faster, more Google-friendly and easier to shop than the competition, and are continuously updated by AVBM's in-house developers and marketers, who input hundreds of thousands of SKUs, specs, images and reviews to populate web pages and drive traffic. BrandSource furniture dealers can enhance their in-store shopping experience as well with the use of AVB KIOSQs, digital price tags and LINQ. The KIOSQs are freestanding touchscreen displays, configured specifically for home furnishings, that customers can use to browse hundreds of brands and catalogs, filter choices, build packages and create shopping carts, Lindblom said, while the SES- imagotag price tags provide product information and up-to-the- minute pricing that's pushed through by LINQ, which feeds dealers' entire product catalogs to their websites. All told, Posa said, "Our goal is to provide furniture dealers with solutions through the digital platforms and technology we offer." B U Y I N G G R O U P N E W S RO BRANDSOURCE CHARTING THE FUTURE OF FURNITURE RETAIL FTS is out to tame the home furnishings frontier Alan Wolf is Senior Communications Specialist at AVB BrandSource, the nation's leading merchandising and marketing co-op for independent appliance, home furnishings and consumer tech dealers.

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