Has this retailer achieved perfection?

Michael Baker
May 3, 2013
The Age

Iconic US brand opens Aussie flagship

Retail is a hard business and it is difficult to get a few things, even one thing, exactly right. So when a retailer nails everything at once it’s a brilliant achievement.

American home furnishings retailer Williams-Sonoma has done exactly that in its store that opened Thursday morning on a pedestrian mall in Bondi Junction in Sydney. The store, which is the company’s first outside of North America save a lone franchised unit in Kuwait, houses Williams-Sonoma’s four flagship brands side by side under one roof.

The four brands are all strongly differentiated. West Elm is a contemporary home furnishings brand for the design-conscious but budget-constrained aspirational shopper. Pottery Barn and Pottery Barn Kids are for the more established households with a bit more money in the bank. Williams-Sonoma is an upscale cookware concept.

For small retailers and large domestic chains alike there is much to be learned from the way Williams-Sonoma goes about its business. The first thing is that being a retailer in the 21st century is not about selling stuff and making a quick killing. Customer engagement is the name of the game. Theatre, creative design, corporate responsibility, education, service and quality are the delivery vehicles. If you grasp these principles and are able to implement them then the rest will take care of itself.

Williams-Sonoma ‘gets’ customer engagement as though it had invented the concept. A cooking school goes full-tilt at the rear of the Bondi Junction store, headed up by amiable chief chef Vladimir Niza. Five-hour intensive courses are offered from opening time to 2:30pm daily, covering topics like breadmaking and vegetarian cooking. Three-hour ‘themed’ classes are run throughout the day that cover skills ranging from knife skills to gluten-free cooking.

Meanwhile, West Elm offers one-on-one interior design assistance at workstations in the store. The merchandise is displayed in sumptuous, cosy lifestyle settings. The cold open spaces so typical of home furniture big box stores are nowhere to be found here. Neither is the ‘take care of yourself’ attitude to service that pervades home goods retailing.

West Elm also specialises in collaborations with designers in developing countries. This helps to burnish the brand’s social responsibility credentials and provide unique merchandise at the same time. While many retailers – particularly department stores – are struggling in vain to remain relevant to picky millennials, West Elm shows how it is done through a combination of interior design wizardry, sharp pricing, smiling service and merchandise that isn’t numbingly familiar.

The second big thing to learn from Williams-Sonoma is that even in a highly commoditised category like home furnishings there is still room for maneuvre on price if you can get the other retailing basics right. Even in the age of e-commerce and ‘showrooming’ retail is not simply a race to the bottom on price. Shoppers will pay more for the experience of being cared for.

Bondi Junction is just the first of what will probably be a number of stores and a huge e-commerce effort by the company. But although Williams-Sonoma is brilliant at what it does, being brilliant for a long time is very hard even for the best retailers. There’s no guarantee that Williams-Sonoma can go the distance in an Australian retail market that can be very tough on American brands.

One thing is for sure though. If the e-commerce business Williams-Sonoma has done over the past couple of years is anything to go by, the retailer is settling in for a long stay.

Michael Baker is principal of Baker Consulting and can be reached at michael@mbaker-retail.com and www.mbaker-retail.com.

Read more: