Joybird, a furniture designer and direct-to-consumer retailer, has expanded from e-commerce to brick-and-mortar locations in recent years, including this Los Angeles showroom.
Los Angeles – The Joybird Company, part of the La-Z-Boy family of brands, develops both online and in-person retail game development.
The eight-year-old brand has four stores with more to come, and has included automation as part of its online strategy.
“There has been a focus on making sure we stay true to our roots in digital formatting,” Joybird General Manager Gerardo Ornelas told Furniture Today, “using automation and making sure we reach our customers wherever they are on social media platforms and Google.” The future strategy focuses on reaching to new customers, and a lot of that has to do with the new channels we’re entering around retail.
“We have a retail expansion strategy in place, and we are slowly moving into new markets,” he continued. “The second pillar is creating brand awareness, and ensuring new customers know the brand. When they do that, we find that we have great brand champions within our customer segment.”
To date, Joybird has opened four major metro stores in New York, Washington, D.C., Chicago, and Los Angeles, with more cities to come, and also has designated spaces at Nebraska Furniture Mart stores in Dallas and Kansas City.
“We are excited to expand into new markets in San Francisco, Seattle and Austin this year,” Ornelas said. “These cities are vibrant cultural hubs, and we can’t be thrilled to become a larger part of their communities.”
Ornelas said the stores helped introduce Joybird to a wider audience, which is part of the company’s plan for growth.
While officials note that most consumers first try Joybird online, the ability to interact with the products offers more opportunities to create brand awareness.
“It has been a great experience so far. We have taken a slow approach to our expansion into smaller scale showrooms with a heavy focus on delivering a multi-channel experience.” Most of our customers are still testing Joybird for the first time online.
“To be able to offer the touch and feel, sitting testing for our customers in the store is another opportunity for us to create more brand experience and market awareness for new customers who might not have considered buying online,” he added.
Help from the team
Having the experience of seasoned retailers like those at La-Z-Boy has helped Joybird fine-tune its approach to working with bricks and mortar. It has also been useful in other areas as well.
“In terms of retail, merchandising, and the company as a whole, there are a lot of resources we were able to tap into,” said Jeffy Walker, Joybird’s Director of Marketing and Supply. “They have a well-established and networked team in terms of supply chain and procurement. We have always been very skinny and sometimes got in our way. But now we can count on them, and they can guide us in these ways. He has been very helpful.”
The product assortment includes wood and upholstered furniture for every room, outdoor products and many more home décor categories, with more in the works. Walker, who has been with Joybird since the beginning, said it’s important for the brand to have a placement in as many categories as possible, where each customer presents a unique sales opportunity.
“We started outdoors a few years ago, and it’s been a huge success, so we’re really in the process of expanding that category. We’re also very focused on upholstery, but we’re getting closer to more office, dining, and other smaller categories,” Walker said. “We have a strong focus on décor because people often buy expensive items from us and come back for a finish, like a rug. Or maybe they’re not ready to buy the sofa but just need a rug or a footstool.
“We’re also browsing through the stories we can tell through the existing categories,” Walker continued. “How do we educate and educate people about our intentional focus on sustainability and weave that into our brand story? Social responsibility is important to our customers. We also have collaborations between brands and designers, so there is a lot of exciting things in the pipeline.”
smart shopping
On the online side, Joybird has recently taken advantage of automation, using smart shopping as a core component of e-commerce, using automated signals to deliver better ads other than in the form of a shopping ad.
Recently, Joybird worked with Go Fish Digital to run a 10-week test with Google’s Performance Max campaigns and came up with a roadmap for greater success online.
Melissa Spaulding, chief PPC strategist at Go Fish Digital, said the results from using Performance Max showed a return on investment that far exceeded what was expected. Key performance criteria from the test included a 95% increase in revenue and a 40% higher return on ad spend.
Categories with the highest return on ad spend during testing included dining, media, storage, and decor, while sofas and chairs also exceeded expectations.
Going forward, Performance Max will continue to play a key role in Joybird’s online operations, she said.
“We feel positive that the Performance Max campaign will continue to drive revenue growth in paid advertising through 2022,” Spaulding said. “Our team will also take advantage of any new features that are released and will collaborate with Google on the strategy.”
Ornelas said having a robust online platform as well as a growing fleet of stores means customers can experience Joybird how and when they want. With that in mind, he said it’s essential to make sure these experiences are the best they can be.
“We combine it all with the idea of a great customer experience in our physical and digital channels,” he said. “It comes down to the investments and how our clients face us.
“It’s making sure the website runs as smoothly on a mobile platform as it does on desktop, and of course, there’s been a lot of focus on making sure we connect all of that with great customer service.”
