American Furniture Warehouse, based in Englewood, Colo., said sales were up 5% over the holiday period.
HIGH POINT — While the world’s largest retail trade association showed increases in holiday sales to close out 2020, for some home furnishings retailers in the U.S. and Canada, shelter-in-place orders caused problems during this key shopping season.
According to the National Retail Federation, November retail sales showed the sixth consecutive monthly year-over-year gain, setting the stage for a healthy holiday shopping season despite the pandemic.
Furniture and home furnishings stores were up 0.4% unadjusted year-over-year. The NRF, which defines the holiday season as Nov. 1 through Dec. 31, forecasted that holiday sales would increase between 3.6% and 5.2% for total retail sales of between $755.3 billion and $766.7 billion.
Lockdown lows and
e-commerce highs
In spite of the rosy outlook, there were some hiccups.
“December marked the first month that we saw a decline in month-over-month business since the start of the pandemic in March,” said Bobby Watson, co-owner of Hoot Judkins, based in Redwood City, Calif. “Year-over-year, December also showed a decline in sales, another first since July. Both declines were in the double digits.”
Watson said it appears that demand remains high since website traffic was up over both previous month and previous year numbers. But, he added that the vast majority of customers want to see and touch the furniture prior to purchase, a demand complicated by California’s recent lockdown renewals.
“We are open for business, at 20% max occupancy,” Watson added. “I am still upbeat for the year ahead. We have a tremendous backlog of orders we need to fulfill, it’s never been higher. We’ve never had so many products on order for customers; we just need to get it from our suppliers.”
Now that the holidays are over and the vaccine has been released, Watson said he’s counting on people to start returning to the store.
“We’re also in total store lockdown in all our markets in Canada,” said Andrew Tepperman, president of Tepperman’s, based in Ontario. “On Dec. 14, the government forced two of our six markets to close. Then on Dec. 26, the busiest day and week in Canada for retail, they ordered a total lockdown. This would have been similar to the U.S. stores all having to close on Black Friday for the whole week.”
During this time, Tepperman’s reverted back to offer online, chat and phone call experiences for customers. The company upgraded its website earlier in the year, which allowed it to capitalize on the online growth. “E-commerce has been taking triple- digit increases and in-store sales had consistently seen double-digit increases while we were open,” Tepperman added.
The addition of a chat app allowed the retailer to convert online questions into in-person phone calls and videos with the sales team. Each store has a triage system to determine where the call goes and it offers video appointments, which are normally fully booked each day, according to Tepperman.
“This is also when the science of supply chain comes into play,” he said. “You have to carefully balance this unusual surge with in-stock inventory and capacity planning.”
New buying behaviors
At Fort Mill, S.C.-based Broad River Retail’s locations across the U.S. South, November and December showed a slowdown similar to that reported by many home furnishings retailers, although stores remained open and the year continued to be a record breaking one overall.
“Sales stayed robust through Q3, but once Q4 started, as some benefits expired, election noise kicked up and the pandemic continued, October and November were rocky,” said Charlie Malouf, president and CEO of Broad River Retail. “It was a slowdown from a record breaking quarter.”
Black Friday is usually the retailer’s top holiday, and Christmas and New Year’s holiday sales fall into the bottom end of its Top Six holiday sales list. This year though, Black Friday and the Thanksgiving holiday was not as strong as they had been in the past.
In Malouf’s eyes, predicting holiday sales trends this year came down more to paying attention to pandemic aid and infection statistics instead of traditional indicators. Memorial Day, for example, blew the company out of the water because of the pent-up demand caused by stay-at-home orders and the extra cash that COVID-19 stimulus checks left many Americans with.
More recently, at the end of December 2020, as the next set of stimulus checks were set and vaccines began rolling out across the country, sales were reacting positively.
“Now we’re back into New Years and Christmas, and the stimulus check is hitting, and we’re crushing those numbers again like last year,” Malouf said, referencing Broad River Retail’s strong January start at the beginning of 2020. “I think it all has more to do with what’s happening with the stimulus, the coronavirus, rather than a strategy around retail holidays.”
But, the stimulus checks were not the only thing that could have impacted Black Friday totals. Malouf said the store mixed up its opening hours, opting to close Thanksgiving day and night for the first time in six or seven years. Traditionally, the company stays open for a few hours on Thanksgiving night as a “trade” for having Christmas Eve off, but this year it was closed for Thanksgiving, Christmas Eve and Christmas Day.
“We just opted to shut the company down. It’s been a tough year, and we’re still trying to promote social distancing and things like that,” explained Malouf.
As part of its preparation for being closed on more holidays than normal this year, Malouf said the retailer also worked harder to pull traffic into other non-holiday days, which could have also contributed to slower sales on the actual holidays.
Focus on the customer
Robert Van Hoose, CEO of Big Sandy Superstore, a retail chain with stores in Ohio, West Virginia, Kentucky, Michigan, Indiana and Missouri, said customers are still looking for a deal at his stores, but the pandemic has created new challenges in reaching them and keeping product moving along.
“Nobody likes to wait, but they know don’t have many other choices,” said Van Hoose. “But it’s all making for a tougher selling environment.”
To combat that, the retailer switched things up in the past few months of 2020 to keep customers coming in and feeling safe. In stores, sales on the day of Black Friday itself suffered because stores ran promotions across the entire month to avoid crowding, resulting in below average comps on the day itself but ultimately leaving the month up year-over-year.
Spreading out holidays was something that Big Sandy really focused on doing for Black Friday because it is specific to one day, unlike other retail holidays that tend to naturally spread out over several days.
To promote those longer sale periods, Van Hoose said Big Sandy honed in on digital marketing, opting not to change its message dramatically and instead update its delivery method. Canceling its circulars, the company focused in on digital marketing, specifically through Facebook and over-the-top, or OTT, ads delivered directly to viewers over the Internet through streaming video services or devices.
“It’s saved us money on our bottom line,” noted Van Hoose. “And it’s keeping us up-to-date.”
Retailer Lamps Plus, based in Los Angeles, also shifted its holiday marketing campaigns to accommodate customer shopping that took place earlier, due to expected supply chain uncertainty.
“For this 2020 holiday season, we shifted our top- and mid-funnel campaigns,” said Angela Hsu, Lamps Plus senior vice president of marketing and e-commerce. “On days during the holiday season with higher-than-expected sales volume, we optimized our paid advertising channels further and only focused on the most profitable campaigns to make sure that we were able to ship products as promised to our customers on the website.”
Hsu said that overall, Lamps Plus kept a closer eye on traffic, conversion rate, advertising return and supply chain capacity to make sure that business remained on track.
Lamps Plus had the best single-day e-commerce sales volume ever for the company on Cyber Monday 2020. And the company saw stronger e-commerce year-over-year comp sales on Black Friday than Cyber Monday due to the shift of purchases from offline-to-online on Black Friday.
Holiday sales at American Furniture Warehouse, based in Englewood, Colo., ended up on the high end of the NRF predictions this year with some imported furniture finally coming in after a slow down due to the pandemic.
“Sales are up 5%,” said Jake Jabs, company president and CEO. “We have a fleet of trucks picking up furniture at factories across the U.S., and we have furniture in stock.”
January 19, 2021 at 06:53PM
https://ift.tt/3qzTPDv
Holiday sales mixed bag depending on location, stimulus status - Furniture Today
https://ift.tt/2QoXNjh
Holiday
No comments:
Post a Comment