
Home furnishings and housewares retailer Williams-Sonoma is enjoying profitable growth in a competitive marketplace. What's its secret? Pat Connolly, chief strategy and business development officer for the San Francisco-based company, provided some insight into that question for the audience at NEMOA's directXchange Fall Conference in Groton, Conn. yesterday. Specifically, Connolly outlined six beliefs that Williams-Sonoma holds as integral to its success.
1. Product: Williams-Sonoma creates, designs and manufactures about 85 percent of the products it sells, Connolly said. The company has created a global supply chain, importing merchandise from around the world, particularly Asia. In addition, Williams-Sonoma has three manufacturing facilities in the United States — one each in North Carolina, Texas and California. We have control over our product, said Connolly. This has helped Williams-Sonoma to build its most valuable asset, its brand.
2. Lifestyle merchandising: The best to way sell home products is to show them in peoples’ homes, Connolly said. Williams-Sonoma goes to great lengths to make that possible. It scouts out and rents homes in markets as far away as Mexico and Canada, then transforms those homes — e.g., paints walls, replaces furniture — into the perfect canvases for its catalog photo shoots. "It's like making movies," said Connolly. While Williams-Sonoma does have the ability to use CGI technology that can digitally put products into photos/rooms, it doesn't plan on abandoning its on-site photo shoots. It's who we are as a brand, Connolly said.
3. Multichannel retail: Today's consumers engage brands and make purchases in more than one channel. For Williams-Sonoma, that includes its 600-plus retail stores, e-commerce site and catalogs. Successful retailers going forward will need to perfect more than one channel, Connolly said. Williams-Sonoma's history as a catalog brand is the foundation for its success. We believe our catalog heritage is the primary driver of results, Connolly said. Williams-Sonoma will mail a quarter-billion catalogs this year. Nothing conveys our brand better than our catalog, Connolly said.

Joe Keenan is the executive editor of Total Retail. Joe has more than 10 years experience covering the retail industry, and enjoys profiling innovative companies and people in the space.