Return Engagement
Former e-tailer back with CuddleWorks
By Cliff Annicelli -- Gifts and Dec, 3/1/2010 12:00:00 AM
It's hard to remember now, but there was a time not so long ago when most toy retailers weren't online with full-fledged e-commerce sites, Facebook fan pages and Twitter feeds tapping out the deal of the day to a self-appointed audience 140 characters at a time. Jim Richardson, founder of Portland, Ore.-based online plush retailer CuddleWorks does. And looking back at Internet retailing's early days, it's kind of a wonder any online commerce got done at all.
“Back then everything was basically hand-coded, so we didn't have off-the-shelf online shopping carts,” Richardson remembers. “In 1999 and 2000 we were manually entering every order. Really, we didn't have much ability at all the first time around to do a lot of things that people take for granted now, like something as simple as a coupon—it was pretty sad.”
Today's CuddleWorks isn't that business. Richardson sold that first site, a small, family-owned operation, and then spent five years away thanks to a non-compete agreement that was part of the deal. The current site kicked off to consumers in late 2007 (so late, in fact, that they missed the bulk of the holiday sales season). The return found Richardson armed with many lessons learned and a new world of online retailing resources to put into action.
“The concept's the same,” Richardson says of the new site, “just teddy bears and stuffed animals, but what my business partner and I set out to do with CuddleWorks is look at what didn't work with the first business and figure out how to make this new effort easier on us, and more adaptable to what we want to do.
“So, we set out with certain criteria, like being able to insert product wherever we wanted into the website, the ability to create coupons, have people be able to check their shipping on the fly without having to go all the way through the checkout process, and control our own search engine optimization (SEO). These are all things that we felt we had to have in order to streamline the process since we expected that the new site would grow a lot faster than the old business since today, e-commerce is much more widely accepted by consumers than it was 10 years ago.”
After researching “a bunch” of different providers, CuddleWorks went with e-commerce software tools from Volusion, an Austin, Texas-based company, specifically because of elements like the tools' marketing-friendly SEO features and a customer-friendly one-page checkout process, according to Richardson.
Noticeable differences
Beyond what Volusion brings to the party, CuddleWorks also strives to set itself apart in how it presents products. Each of its items is professionally photographed (for quality and consistency) and, starting in 2009, is being filmed in high definition video for a feature on the site that allows potential purchasers to view products from all 360 degrees. (The videos are also on YouTube.)
By the end of 2009 the site was offering nearly 400 plush products, most of them proprietary designs that customers could personalize with a “Build Bear” feature that lets people choose clothing options for several styles of 12-inch teddy bears and various forest critters. It has also begun offering plush from three outside manufacturers—Gund, Purr-fection by MJC and Wild Republic—with plans for 2010 calling for the addition of at least three more externally branded plush lines to the product mix.
The additions, Richardson says, not only offer more choices on the site, but also drive traffic as fans of those brands are attracted by their presence. And those new fans are something CuddleWorks will need to continue to attract in order to meet some pretty aggressive sales goals.
“From 2008 to 2009 we doubled our gross sales and my rule is that we'll continue to try to double gross sales each year for the first five years,” Richardson explains. “Obviously, it'll be harder each year but that's the goal. To achieve it we're going to come up with new, innovative ideas. For 2009, the high definition video of the products was the big idea—I'm not sure how many of our competitors offer that for every product they sell; I haven't found one yet—and we'll continue to come up with additional ones. Plus, expanding our lines will help contribute to our sales immensely. The broader the inventory we can offer, the wider the net we have to attract additional customers.”
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