Hardware boutique seeks more pull with designers
Store's owner gets advice on helping Top Drawer Hardware, a seller of high-end handles and other items, to become profitable.
You won't find hammers or nails at Top Drawer Hardware Inc. in Santa Monica.
Instead, owner Cristi Page stocks $75 mother-of-pearl drawer pulls, $200 brass appliance handles and other specialty hardware for a growing clientele of designers and builders.
Her hardware boutique, modeled after upscale shops in Paris and her native Madrid, showcases its reproduction black-glass, oil-rubbed bronze and sleekly modern doorknobs and drawer ware mounted on painted canvases to emphasize their artistic appeal.
Sales at the 2-year-old shop will double this year to $100,000, says Page, who previously was a financial management consultant at IBM Business Consulting Services.
Still, at an average of $8,400 a month, sales don't yet cover costs as high as $12,000 a month.
She's dabbled in advertising in local newspapers and magazines, direct mail and pay-per-click ads online to increase sales. But Page is unsure how best to spend her $30,000 marketing budget.
"I don't want to fritter it away," says the 30-year-old who first fell under the spell of decorative hardware in her early 20s when she worked at B&M Hardware, a wholesaler in Oceanside, Calif.
First step: focus marketing efforts where the fish are biting, says expert Amber Bryan, a team leader at Phelps Group, an integrated marketing company in Santa Monica.
Designers account for about 60% of Top Drawer Hardware's business, so that's the group she needs to attract.
"She really needs to drill down on her target, the designer, and reach the designer on a one-to-one level as opposed to advertising to the mass market," Bryan says.
To jump-start her efforts, Page was invited to Phelps' weekly "BrainBanger's Ball," a lunchtime brainstorming and focus group session. Everyone at the agency, including the receptionist and its chief creative officer, talks about ideas for campaigns and reviews work in progress. They spend eight minutes each on four or five topics.
Page came away with a list of 50 ideas to grab a potential buyer's attention and boost sales in three categories: local store traffic, designer sales and online, which accounts for about 20% of sales.
Like any good brainstorming session, some ideas were zany: Create a knob-mobile -- a vehicle covered in knob samples.
