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The Family Living Boutique |
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By Steven Feldman
Dallas—
Manny Llerena, vice president of retail marketing,
Mohawk Industries, asked Floorscapes retailers, “What are you doing today to prepare your businesses for tomorrow?” As such, after eight years of focusing on merchandising and the full integration of hard surface selling systems, the recent Mohawk Floorscapes convention took on a more business-like approach with an eye toward maximizing each members overall profitability.
Instead of just providing a landscape for product and program rollouts, the convention offered a series of intensive business operations workshops on key fundamentals—conceived in conjunction with world famous business and brand management consultant group Kanter International—which serves as the framework of this next phase of Floorscapes’ evolution. As well, Mohawk announced the formation of an aligned program field operational team, designed to assist members with key issues relevant to their indivdual business.
“This is the natural growth of the program as you start seeing some dealers struggling or going out of business,” Llerena said. “Times haven’t been great. So rather than just selling more product, Mohawk realized its true success lies in the dealer becoming more profitable through sound business principles.” He added that Mohawk needs to offer all the tools and assistance it can to achieve that success. “Our mission is to help dealers get more out of their businesses without investing more in them.”
This phase was a year-and-a- half in the making, Llerena said. Much of it was derived from biannual advisory council meetings. “As the council members talked about their businesses, everyone would pick up the best practices of what we all were doing,” he said. “It became obvious we could compile this resource of best business practices and put it in a format where all members have an opportunity to learn and execute. It just became more clear what our goal has to be.”
Dealers were prescheduled for their training classes, content of which was a collaboration of Kanter,
Mohawk University and the advisory council. The goal was twofold, Llerena said: Mohawk wanted to develop something that didn’t already exist in the marketplace, and it wanted it to be workshop-based. Classes were less philosophical, more practical and interactive, and at the end of each session, Floorscapes retailers were asked to jot down the action items they plan to do when they returned to their stores. “The dealers must return home and execute what they learn here,” Llerena said. “Education without execution is just entertainment.”
The four seminars included:
1. Owning the future, which discussed exit strategies. “What do you want your business to be worth when you walk away?” was the focus. To that end, the workshop focused on helping retailers reach their long-term goals through short-term plans.
2. The ABCs of a flooring P&L. Here there were two main goals: The first was to ensure the dealer understands key business elements, like cash flow statements, profit and loss statements, etc. The second was to develop a common language on how Floorscapes dealers look at key metrics. Mohawk hopes to establish a database base whereby one Floorscapes dealer can compare his performance record to another in a common language.
3. Your business through your consumers’ eyes. This session addressed whether the messaging of retailers’ stores was in fact what they want it to be. For example, a high-end dealer can’t have everything slashed 70% or have base-grade materials throughout the store.
4. Measuring your business from the inside out. Retailers learned about the best practices, strategies and tools to help gain efficiencies and drive better performance. Examples would include staffing strategies and inventory turns. “How large a staff should you have based on your volume and when should they be here?” Or, “How much inventory should you maintain and what type of turns should you be getting?
To ensure the path to enhanced profitability continues well into the future, an aligned dealer support team is being formed to follow up with Mohawk Floorscapes dealers to make sure they have implemented changes and are seeing positive results. Mohawk is hiring close to 60 marketing managers and specialists to help its aligned dealers with day-to-day business issues. They will also ensure the regular sales team is focusing on the right things and hold quarterly business planning meetings with dealers to discuss what’s selling and what’s not.
What’s new
While profitability was the focus of this Mohawk Floorscapes convention, products and programs were also introduced. “The message is continuous concept renewal,” Llerena said. “We want to make sure we are constantly improving the merchandising and assortment in these stores with the goal of providing the ultimate retail showroom.”
As examples: The Family Living Boutique, which capitalizes on the strengths of Mohawk’s polyester assortment, offers value while meeting the needs of the ecological-conscious consumer. The boutique is broken up into three assortments: the Family Living EverStrand collection, which is comprised of 30 products featuring PET recycling; the Family Living SmartStrand collection featuring 13 products of SmartStrand PTT; and Family Living SmartStrand featuring DuPont Sorona Polymer. The latter will be comprised of 40% corn sugars by third quarter 2007. DuPont is calling this new fiber the most significant fiber invention in the last six decades. “It will offer inherent stain resistance combined with the durability of nylon; a soft, natural feel; color clarity and a bio story,” Llerena said.
The new Ceramic Showcase was designed to help the consumer understand floor tile selections, shows her matching wall tiles to the floor tiles selections and finishes off with a level of beautiful accent pieces. At the end of the display is the “Tile With Style” book, which broadens selection and applications and answers most of the questions she may have about the selection process. A magazine version will be found in all Barnes & Noble book stores, with a back cover directing consumers to a Web site and dealer locator.
A new laminate display was also introduced. Mohawk developed a merchandising boutique for Floorscapes dealers after researching “every laminate display in the marketplace,” Llerena said. “So we believe it’s the best laminate shopping experience that can be found anywhere in the country.”