Pottery Barn — home coming
It’s hard to envision Pottery Barn as a single stand-alone furniture store in downtown Manhattan, but that’s how this mega-brand got started back in the late 1940s. Today, you can’t stumble into any major stateside shopping mall without entering into proximity of the noveau Americana couches, dining rooms, rugs and other domestic accessories within their four walls.
Acquired and groomed for mass consumption by Williams-Sonoma, Inc. back in 1986, Pottery Barn is the largest brand under the Williams-Sonoma umbrella, representing nearly 50 percent of the company’s revenue. A lot has changed since its mom and pop shop days, but one common element remains true to brand—Pottery Barn’s commitment to offering consumers a clean, modern spin on American classic furniture with a certain quality consumers can rely on.
Last year, the president of Williams-Sonoma expressed a need to revitalize the Pottery Barn brand in a Home Textiles Today article. In summation of its future endeavors, she described marketing efforts that underline its position as a purveyor of style, and a wider scope of entry-level price point offerings at retail. So we took a peek at their virtual retail space to see if it reflects these marching orders.
Retail isn’t the only revenue stream for this brand—with a distribution of approximately 150 million catalogs each year, Pottery Barn’s considerable direct mail business is no joke either.
Understanding how instrumental catalogs were in getting its brand message across to the masses, Pottery Barn has always produced a fairly immaculate print product, and its website is a stealth online representation that incorporates the same aethetics. The homepage is treated as a cover, and featured items in the latest prints are offered prime real estate. Designed for maximum efficiency, the site architecture adroitly funnels each page, product photo and description to a point of purchase. Another perfect example is the Shop By Room feature. All users have to do is click any part of each sumptuous catalog page to be led to a sub-category page with an item-by-item breakdown that takes you right to a purchase page.
Peel away the layers and you’ll find there’s not a lot here that goes much deeper, save for the fantastic Design Tips section. With the Where I Live section, esteemed designers present personal video tours of their homes, boosting their positions as design authorities and providing informative advice for consumers. Another component of the page features a co-branded seasonal color palette with Benjamin Moore, complete with downloadable brochures and an instant request window for a palette fan deck. The page also provides a handy virtual Room Designer tool, a design your own sectional widget and a Pillow Design tool that directly addresses the president of Willams-Sonoma’s missive—more featured offerings at a price point that’s easy for people to buy, buy, buy.
It’s always wise for retail chains of this magnitude to provide online users with the opportunity to reach out and touch customer service representatives with ease, and Pottery Barn’s digits are prominently displayed throughout the site. Wedding and gift registries are a rather considerable part of the Pottery Barn experience, and it strives to make it easier on consumers with an FAQ and downloadable purchasing guides.
They’ve also wisely presented a Business Sales section to drive corporate consumers to the site—a nice chunk of sales from channels like bulk gift card sales and office furniture.
All in all, PotteryBarn.com is a comprehensive online experience that succeeds in being true to brand with its elegant simplicity and no-nonsense sales-driven architecture. Sure, it’s completely devoid of exciting features like dancing can-can girls, but that’s not what we look for when buying a living room set at the mall.