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FEATURE:
Leading the Way
And The Winners Are
RETAILER FOCUS:
Rabbit & Company
HAVE FUN! |
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Merchandising Tips:
Peter Braley, WMF USA vice president, sales and marketing |
• Making a brand statement is important, Braley says, especially when presenting a company like WMF that features so many different products. That’s why the company offers a range of merchandising solutions. “Item by item is very challenging for a retailer to represent,” he says.
• He recommends grouping brand assortments by a lifestyle collection. For example teaming coffee creamers with stove top espresso makers.
• Lifestyle marketing “creates desire,” he says. “Some retailers want to present all the whisks in the world in one group, but we’ve demonstrated strong success by presenting all WMF products together as one classification.”
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| HAVE FUN!! |
While you are at the Gourmet Housewares Show in May, plan some time to really visit Orlando, Florida, a city the New York Times recently described as, “A microcosm of cosmopolitanism with Europeans and Latin Americans joining New Yorkers in the condo population.” If that doesn’t get you interested, I don’t know what will!
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 Don’t forget to enroll in our many seminars during the Gourmet Housewares Show including: Designed to Sell, which focuses on the power of visual merchandising to drive sales, and is led by Steve Kaufman, Editor of Visual Merchandising and Store Design. The panel, comprised of the best designers in the country for large scale gourmet food and specialty stores, will discuss trends, merchandising strategies and the future of store design for the gourmet retailer.
We look forward to seeing you there,
Susan Corwin
vp and show manager
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| FEATURE: Leading the Way |
Upscale fixtures are the merchandising wave of the future for smaller retailers, with the European firms WMF and Rosle leading the way by outfitting stores with high-end cabinetry that showcases equally high-end product lines.
Such cabinetry helps stores sell a wide variety of products by presenting a lifestyle image and at the same time showing the range of the brand.
For Peter Braley, vice president of sales and marketing for WMF, USA the fixturing allows WMF to present a unified fashion concept.
“We put together everything from flatware to wine and bar accessories,” he says. “Many retailers have been surprised by the extra business generated by layering on extra programs.”
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| And the Winners Are: |
The Gourmet Housewares Show team met with retailers and reps during a recent gathering of the Gourmet Catalog Company. At that time a prize drawing was held for retailers who will be attending the Gourmet Housewares Show this May, in Orlando. Kelly Bock, of Rolling Pin Emporium, won two tickets to Walt Disney World. Among the other lucky winners were Paul Fricke of Cincinnati, Ohio’s Cooks Wares, who has won two tickets to SeaWorld; Marian Howard who is manager of the Hobnob Gourmet in Hartsville, South Carolina who has won two tickets to Universal Studios; and Stephen Havalek, of Sign of the Bear in Sonoma, California who won one round trip ticket to the Show and two hotel nights. |
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| RETAILER FOCUS: Kitchenware Outfitters |
David Freeman, vice president of Savannah, Georgia-based Kitchenware Outfitters is among those retailers who are taking advantage of high-end cabinetry to better merchandise product in his stores.
“When I put in the new larger fixtures from WMF, sales of pressure cookers doubled,” he says, saying that the lighting in the cabinets helped showcase the cookers. Freeman likens the upscale fixtures to what one might find in a high-end department store, highlighting designer names in fashion. “They are a store within a store,” he says of the cabinet look.
In another, but more technical, visual merchandising turn, Freeman and his wife Barbara, a former executive of an upscale cookware company, have opted to advertise on the local television edition of the Food Network, as opposed to newspaper advertising. The television deal he garnered in Savannah was a good one, he says. “I used to take full page ads in newspapers and it would cost me $1,000 for one spot. For $1,000 on the Food Network I got 80 spots that run from early morning until midnight.”
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What issues do you care about? Let us know by giving me a call at 207-799-3473 or e-mailing me at thyra_porter@glmshows.com
Thyra Porter, editor, Gourmet 365.
The Gourmet Housewares Show runs May 8-10, 2007. For complete show information, please visit: www.thegourmetshow.com. |
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