You’d think a company called Weekends Only Furniture & Mattress would have a hard time bridging the gap between store business and e-commerce business. Think about it: The main premise of Weekends Only is to build that sense of excitement for deals offered at a store open just three days a week. If you’re a consumer, you have to plan for it. You work around it. But once you see the great deals, you’ll know it was worth the wait and the trip.
I recall the retailer’s very short TV commercials from a few years ago. They start with a black screen, then CEO Tom Phillips pulls the chain on a hanging light bulb and says, “It’s Tuesday, we’re closed, “or “It’s Thursday. One more day,” then he pulls the light off again. You get the idea. He’s building excitement for a frenzied short weekend-only business cycle.
E-commerce, on the other hand, is all about shopping 24-7, ordering today, maybe even getting it today. Boring and convenient. No need to trample your neighbor for the last three-power recliner or counter-height dinette. In this new reality, where consumers don’t want to wait for anything, where they don’t have to wait for anything, you could see why a Weekends Only format might struggle.
Only it doesn’t, or at least, it didn’t during the Black Friday post-holiday period. As Phillips told Furniture Today, the St. Louis-based retailer won Black Friday in just about every way you can imagine. Single best sales day in company history. Single best three-day weekend. What’s more, 10% of the business came from online.
Phillips later told me 82% of that online business came from new customers, and they spent $572 on average, a little less than the $633 average spent by existing customers.
Somehow, a business you might rush to define by physical stores only — and stores with abbreviated operating hours, no less — is finding a way to capture more business online. This hasn’t been by accident. Phillips said it’s working hard on its e-commerce presence, making the website more customer friendly and searchable. It’s working to adapt to changing consumer shopping and buying habits. In short, it’s creating online experiences to better engage these shoppers inclined to buy online.
“For Black Friday in particular, we worked really hard on getting some easy items that people can pick up and go, especially holiday gift items,” he said. “But some of these items were pretty big (too). Motion was our biggest category.” Also, those Black Friday deals available in-store at 8 a.m. could be had online starting at midnight.
In the past, Weekends Only’s doorbuster deals weren’t stocked very deep because the company didn’t necessarily want to sell a ton of them. “This time, we said we’re going to carry more depth, create the traffic to the website,” he said. “They’ll spend more, then come into the store and spend more. And we rode that wave of that kind of customer behavior.”
Phillips points out that its unusual model is actually an advantage when competing against the pure-plays with no store overhead. Shorter hours for Weekends Only means lower cost structure, which means it can offer lower prices in-store as well as online every day.
“This is the true differentiator that Weekends Only has,” he said. “The customer gets that our prices have to be lower. We just have to make sure we are staying relevant with the customer as to what they are looking for. Sometimes we pass on a closeout because it’s last season’s color or a style that’s no longer relevant.”
Like an ever growing number of brick-and-mortar retailers, Weekends Only is using its real estate not only as showrooms to touch and feel and buy product but as fulfillment centers.
Phillips said store traffic over the weekend wasn’t really up that much from the year before — only about 1% — but the close ratio in-store and conversions online were up about 9%.
Buy-online-pick-up-in-store isn’t a brand-new concept. Nor is Weekends Only brand new to the e-commerce game. (A while back, it added another light bulb spot in which Phillips says, “We’re closed, but our website is open 24-7.”) But the company’s ability to take its greatest strengths and sell them online without muddying its brand message is a lesson in execution that offers hope to others trying to meet the online consumer somewhere in the middle, where they can easily find the item they want without closing a store door to more business.
