I am not the target audience of Simplicity Sofas.
In my dictionary, hammer is the name of a rap star and a screwdriver is a cocktail. My toothbrush is my most valuable tool.
More business news
After years of economic decline, a new boom in Japan
Under “Abenomics,” the prime minister’s radical economic policy plan, Japan sees signs of a revival.
IMF chief returns to court for second day of interrogation
Inquiry could result in malfeasance charges involving $520 million arbitration settlement.
Health care overhaul faces backlash from labor unions
Once-supportive labor unions have grown frustrated and angry about what they say are unexpected consequences of the new law.
Simplicity is the assemble-it-yourself, online furniture company founded by owner/President Jeff Frank of Bethesda. Simplicity ships your furniture in modular parts. You — the customer — put it together.
The marketing pitch — with a video to back it up — is that it’s so easy a child can do it in as little as three minutes and 52 seconds.
The six-year-old Simplicity has found a market. This year, Frank expects to sell $1 million worth of furniture online and reap a modest profit.
Frank, 60, is a resourceful sort who has furniture sales in his DNA. His unique start-up turns the traditional model of a furniture store on its head. The buyer actually has to put the furniture together. He sells his sofas and beds mostly online. And his showrooms, save for one, are his customers’ homes. He follows each sale with a call or an e-mail, asking, “Is anything wrong?”
It all is aimed at a more upscale buyer than the type of people who made Ikea the world’s largest furniture company. He even has made a virtue of putting the stuff together — that way his customers can easily maneuver their purchases into small apartments or rooms at the top of narrow stairs.
He sums up his business gifts thusly: “I am not a good salesman. But I have ideas of how to do things differently than they were done in the past.”
People complain all the time about boring jobs or bad bosses. But Frank is refreshing because he loves selling furniture and loves his company. He can wax for hours on the finer points of selling love seats.
His inventiveness has been on display since he graduated from Washington University in St. Louis in 1974 with a degree in history.
The first breakthrough came in 1974 as a $12,000 “assistant manager” in a two-person furniture department at the old Woolco department store in Forestville, Md. He sold a sofa, love seat and chair set for $199.
The furniture wasn’t moving because customers had to wait a month for delivery. They wanted them NOW. Frank drove to the Philadelphia distributor’s warehouse on his day off and persuaded the owner to dump a truckload of furniture at the Woolco. Frank sold everything in a few hours the next weekend. He soon became the top-selling furniture salesperson in the now-defunct Woolco chain.
He had similar “value adds” as a furniture buyer for Marlo and when he worked for a local government contract consulting firm. He was so successful at helping companies sell furniture to the U.S. government that the consulting firm made him a partner and paid him more than $100,000 a year, not a small sum for a furniture salesman in the 1980s.
Now he has found a way to sell it on the Internet.
Simplicity, which started in November 2007, has made 2,000 deliveries to every state but Hawaii. The company shipped 600 orders last year at an average of $1,800 per order.
The District is its third biggest market after New York City and North Carolina, where his only showroom is located. Frank constantly commutes between Bethesda and North Carolina.
Loading...
Comments