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HerDesign's client featured in local newspaper...
Internet division helps firm weather change
By MATTHEW McCORMICK
Bulletin Staff Writer
As many area businesses have done in the past decade, Jay Edelen has moved his company beyond the borders of Henry County and Martinsville.
But unlike many of the others, Edelen did not take his business offshore. He took it online.
Since doing so, Edelen, the vice president of J.G. Edelen Co., a Baltimore-based supplier of furniture hardware, and general manager of its Internet division, coolknobsandpulls.com, said J.G. Edelen has doubled its sales of decorative products, moving more than 1,000 cabinet knobs, drawer pulls and furniture wheels, or casters each day to locations across the country and the world.
"That success represents an example of what the Internet can do for small businesses of all kinds in Henry County and Martinsville," said Tom Harned, the Martinsville-Henry County Economic Development Corp.'s (EDC) vice president for community development and existing industry.
J.G. Edelen Co. "is an excellent case study of how businesses can grow and prosper here," Harned said. Using the Internet, "they can do business nationally -- and internationally, for that matter -- from right here in Martinsville and Henry County."
Trouble ahead
J.G. Edelen Co. came to the area in the 1950's, when Edelen's father, John Fenwick "Finney" Edelen Sr., moved here as a sales representative who marketed the company's wares to local furniture manufacturers.
For nearly 50 years, the company thrived to the point where a warehouse was needed in 1996 to better serve customers such as Stanley Furniture and American of Martinsville.
But as demand for American-made furniture began to dry up in the wake of China's emergence as a source of high-quality, low-cost products, J.G. Edelen Co.'s clients began to disappear.
"Major (American) furniture manufacturers have closed at the rate of one per week since 2000," Edelen said. "Fifty to 60 percent of U.S. wood manufacturers have closed in the last five years. That's our customer base."
While the poor economic climate never may have been bad enough to threaten the company's existence, Edelen said its opportunities for growth had all but vanished -- until, that is, he had an idea.
"Maybe it had been stewing in the back of my mind but, really, I woke up one day and decided I wanted to try selling furniture hardware on the Internet," he said.
The timing proved to be auspicious. Edelen's revelation coincided not only with the rise and mainstreaming of e-commerce but also with a national craze for do-it-yourself home decorating and renovation projects, he said.
But at the time, Edelen was unaware of just how successful his new venture would be.
"We set a budget that we were willing to lose completely," he said. "If it failed, we were going to drop it.
There were low expectations, but high hopes."
Hardware to housewives
In September 2002, Edelen set about developing his Web site. The first step -- naming the site -- came relatively easy.
"I wanted something catchy and would make people want to look at our Web site," he said. "Of course, knobs and pulls is what we sell, so we needed that in the URL."
But while the name may have been of his own creation, Edelen delegated much of the actual development of www.coolknobsandpulls.com to his more computer- and Internet-savvy wife, Masha, who has since opened her own Web site design and development company, HerDesign Inc.
Masha Edelen said she began the creation process by determining who the site's visitors would be and developing a strategy to appeal to them. Since the majority of consumers interested in remodeling their kitchen are women, for instance, Edelen chose a color scheme that included pink and teal hues.
In addition, she said the site had to showcase the company's products.
"Photography makes a big impact," Edelen said. "There were many pieces of hardware that were photographed and re-photographed and re-photographed."
Also, part of the strategy, said Jay Edelen, was compiling an inventory to appeal to the nation's burgeoning do-it-yourself market.
From the basic, inexpensive decorative hardware sold to large manufacturing clients, Edelen expanded J.G. Edelen's product line to include basic pulls costing 55 cents each to high-end solid brass knobs selling for $20 and everything in between: colored glass knobs, pewter knobs shaped like animals, colorful clown-faced knobs for kids' rooms, sleek silver pulls, solid pulls made of granite, spotted ceramic pulls, switch covers, metal cabinet legs -- nearly 1,600 items in all.
"It was the same business but with some new products and a different customer base," Edelen said. "Instead of selling to big manufacturers, we started selling to housewives."
Yahoooooo!
Though the site was created and the inventory stocked before Edelen's Web site could open for business, it still needed one key ingredient -- marketing.
For that, he largely relied upon Internet search engines such as Google and Yahoo! which, for a fee, placed the company high up on the lists resulting from searches of "knobs" or "pulls."
The exposure gained from such advertising has allowed Edelen's small company to compete with home improvement giants such as Lowe's and Home Depot, Edelen said.
In fact, he estimated that about 95 percent of the site's orders have been generated through search engine advertising.
Not only have those orders been geographically diverse -- Edelen now regularly ships products to California, Alaska and Hawaii and even shipped a package to Norway to fill an order received from a cruise ship off the coast of Spain -- they have been numerous. Early next year, Edelen expects the company will surpass 1 million pieces sold since the Web site was launched in August 2003. Edelen declined to give sales figures.
To deal with that volume, he said the company probably will move from its facility in the Bowles Industrial Park to a larger one in the Henry County-Martinsville area within two or three years.
"In the end, it has been a lot of fun," Edelen said. "Instead of waking up every day and wondering how we will stay in business, we wake up and wonder how we will handle all the business that we have."
Potential
Just as the Internet helped J.G. Edelen Co. expand during difficult economic times, so can it help other area businesses flourish, said many local business development professionals.
"One of the things I strongly encourage someone who asks for business assistance to do is look beyond the local market," said Lisa Fultz of the West Piedmont Business Development Center. "The Internet is an easy, inexpensive way to do that."
Indeed, while Edelen estimated his Web site cost between $15,000 and $20,000 to set up, including design and marketing, Web site packages can be bought for as little as $200, said Fultz.
But a mere presence on the Internet often is not enough, she said. Businesses not only need a Web site that will impress consumers, they need one that, like www.coolknobsandpulls.com, can be found easily.
For that, Futz said companies often need professional assistance.
But Richard Ephgrave, executive director of the Longwood University Small Business Development Center, cautioned that not every business is suited to sell products online.
While products such as furniture hardware or paper products, which consumers can "fall in love with on the screen," may sell well over the Internet, those that consumers need to touch, see and try on, such as wigs, do not do well as e-commerce, he said.
That does not mean that such businesses cannot benefit from a Web site. That is especially true for the tourist industry, said Fultz.
"There is a lot of opportunity with our new tourism promotion," she said. "The Web is a very cost-effective way to market their services. It can be as simple or as complicated as a business owner would like."
EDC director of tourism David Rotenizer agreed.
"There is a huge need to get ourselves on the Internet as much as possible," he said. "That is where tourists are going to get information. Even if it's just a one-page Web site, there is huge potential for us."