Pottery Barn Kids

In an effort to tap into the $532 billion global marketplace for housewares and home furnishings, Williams-Sonoma, the San Francisco-based omnichnannel retailer, took its business beyond its domestic borders. In a session yesterday at NetSuite's SuiteWorld conference in San Jose, Calif., Rob Bogan, vice president of international systems for Williams-Sonoma, discussed the brand's experiences going global.

Williams-Sonoma reported that profit for the third quarter rose 19 percent to $43.4 million from $36.5 million in the same period last year. Revenue rose 6 percent to $867.2 million, compared with $815.5 million last year, solidly beating Wall Street’s expected $855.7 million in revenue.

Willams-Sonoma’s PBteen brand opened its first-ever pop-up store on Nov. 4 in Natick, Mass. The space is centered around the PBteen Design Lab, four computer terminals where shoppers can create a dream room by selecting and placing PBteen furniture and accessories in their virtual room.

Williams-Sonoma, a specialty retailer of high-quality products for the home, announced today that Pottery Barn, Pottery Barn Kids, West Elm and Williams-Sonoma will offer international shipping, joining PBteen in its partnership with FiftyOne Global Ecommerce, a provider of international e-commerce services and infrastructure to U.S. retailers. Customers in more than 75 countries will now be able to shop online for Williams-Sonoma products.

Williams-Sonoma announced that PBteen, a resource for home furnishings for teens and tweens, will now be available to Canadian customers for the first time through a partnership with FiftyOne Global Ecommerce.

National Geographic and Pottery Barn Kids are teaming up to create a dynamic new program featuring educational content, activities and merchandise that will excite and engage kids and their parents. This new adventure launches April 21 at Pottery Barn Kids — in-store, online and in the catalog.

During a session at last week’s NEMOA Conference in Cambridge, Mass., Peter Grebus, who heads Williams-Sonoma’s customer information management group, explained a two-pronged approach the home furnishings multichannel marketer has used to increase the adoption of marketing sciences for intuition across the organization. Specifically, he noted that in the short run, Williams-Sonoma has focused on a “four walls” process. The multititle multichannel marketer, whose direct business comprises 42.2 percent of its sales, has emphasized the integration of browse and purchase data to enable contextual selling across channels. This includes the following: * dynamic content and recommendations; * data that’s currently constrained by the

“For a company like ours that has very strict ROI goals and standards, it was really important for us to be in there with natural search,” says PotteryBarn.com Marketing Manager Karen Shea, explaining how the company’s PotteryBarn.com, PBTeen.com and PotteryBarnKids.com sites reevaluated their natural search optimization performance last year. When its sister brand Williams-Sonoma drew positive results from a natural search solution, Pottery Barn’s marketing team began considering its own program. Pottery Barn came up with four goals: 1. Dramatically increase indexation levels on Google and other major search engines. 2. Increase total search traffic to each of the three e-commerce sites. 3. Increase total natural search

For years now, Garnet Hill, a Franconia, N.H.-based apparel and home furnishings cataloger, has placed follow-up calls whenever customers encounter a problem with the company. Specifically, 24 to 48 hours after a customer complaint, Garnet Hill calls the customer and casually asks how the problem was handled and if it was resolved. Smart and sensitive upselling techniques make Garnet Hill’s customers feel cared about. Liberal employee discounts have its employees wearing the clothing and using the products it sells, so it’s easy for them to personalize the experience. This “touchy-feely” group has products open and laying around so reps literally can get their

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