Can You Sell What You Can’t Touch?

How do you sell furniture that customers can’t touch, sit on, or see in person?

Full transcript of YouTube episode of Shaping Commerce in which we talk with David Petersen from Gat Creek, who shares how their brand blends traditional craftsmanship with cutting-edge e-commerce.

Premiered Feb 3, 2026 IronPlane eCommerce Development 

"I think the biggest misconception that people have about selling furniture online is the idea that you can just sort of collect a bunch of photography, get some copy up there, turn on a shopping cart, and away you go. Our chat feature really cracked the door open to inviting consumers to talk to my team. I don't think the AI bot is going to think up to tell the salesperson about the first interior designer that they didn't like on their job. And those are the juicy bits. Starting a business online, you’ve got to have a lot of capital for sure. And I think that that is underestimated that you just have to have financial resources because it takes time for the business to scale up."

- David Petersen, Gat Creek

[music] [music]

Introduction and the Gat Creek Value Stream

Kuba Zwoliński: (Shaping Commerce): Hello everyone. Welcome to the Shaping Commerce podcast, the first episode. I'm your host Kuba and today my guest is David Peterson, Vice President of Sales and Marketing at Gat Creek, a wood furniture manufacturer in West Virginia. David, hello. How are you doing today?

David Petersen (Gat Creek): I'm doing great. And now that everything is working, I feel like a million bucks. [laughter]

Kuba Zwoliński: Oh, me too. Me too. It's like, you know, we are a few years from the pandemic when we thought that all the magic around video conferencing and recording was done and we are almost on Mars. But no, still a few years later we have problems with recording with simple things. Anyway, we did it. So, we can go to our questions.

Why Local Retailers are Essential for Delivery

Kuba Zwoliński: As we discussed, we have a couple of interesting topics and for me it's really exciting to learn more about it because I think even few years ago, before we started working together on one of the first projects, I thought that furnitures are one of those products that are totally not sellable online. So it's too difficult a product to sell online. So, it's interesting to see how it's booming and . . . actually like please tell me more. So, what's this biggest misconception that people have about selling furniture online and how do you overcome it?

Key Success Factors for High-End Online Furniture Stores

David Petersen: Well, thank you for picking me for episode number one. I hope it doesn't hurt your ratings and the whole thing collapses, but I'll do my best to make it interesting and fun. I think the biggest misconception that people have about selling furniture online is the idea that you can just sort of collect a bunch of photography, get some copy up there, turn on a shopping cart, and away you go. It's so much more complex than that.

There are so many projects that I see out there that are executed by retailers that we work with or other people we know in the industry and they never get off of first base because they haven't thought through what the nature of the project is.

And you know the other thing is that – and this is a thing that I've learned as a function of how we've approached the marketplace – is that to take charge of the entire, let's call it, value stream of an e-commerce website all the way from let's say if we did it that way – which we don't here at Gat Creek where we manufacture wood furniture – we do not take charge of the entire value stream – we involve our local retailers to make the home delivery. It makes it something that's practical for us to execute because we're not trying to do the whole thing, which is, you know, there's a lot of complexity.

There are a lot of different things that need to be done, from manufacturing the goods, to packaging them, to shipping them to their destination or near their destination on over-the-road trucking, to making a home delivery, and then dealing with the after delivery issues, too. It's just a giant enterprise and trying to do it all just doesn't work.

The Power of Chat: Turning Conversations into Sales

Kuba Zwoliński: Yes, I think that you’ve somewhat answered, at least partially, my next question. So, what are key factors that make an online furniture store successful beyond the product itself. You said that your distributors – this is actually important that it's e-commerce, but you have those people on site somewhere there who can help to fit everything to make sure it's perfect. But what else? What else, when we just focus on the digital part of business?

David Petersen: Yeah. Well, to build . . . you know, once you have a website that works, you've got traffic, you have people that are interested in your things – you're going to wait a while, by the way, for a sales to take place because consumers think about, especially at the high end, they think long and hard about making a purchase like furniture, and certainly with it being something that they can't touch and feel. It's something that they . . . that there's sort of an additional consideration that has to take place. And a lot of times, that value or that problem or issue to overcome is resolved by a lot of talking.

AI vs. Human Touch: Will Chatbots Replace Salespeople?

Our chat feature, the chat feature on our website, really cracked the door open to inviting consumers to talk to my team about the purchase they're thinking of making. And we've got two inside sales people who have a lot of experience with people and they have a lot of experience with furniture. And what we find is that once invited, a consumer who is considering buying our thing wants to talk about it, and it's not the kind of talk that you'd typically see or you typically design around a customer service office where it's like answering questions and getting off the phone. This is about talking about the person's home, their family, their dog, where they live, how they found this house, what they're choosing from, who they're working with on the upholstery, who's their interior designer, why they didn't like the first one. Talk helps a lot.

Kuba Zwoliński: It's like a full interview to really know the client. But that's actually . . . that may be actually dangerous because if you really know well the client and then you say no, no, no, you need to choose completely different furniture, now that I know better than you what you need.

David Petersen: [laughter] Yeah. Every once in a while, our sales team will say, "Geez, you know, maybe she should be buying something from somebody else." I said, "No, she's just been . . . just keep talking to this customer. It'll be somebody . . . it'll be something that you'll feel comfortable with and they'll do well to buy our things, too." So, it's interesting what kind of relationships develop, and that keeps that customer coming back, too, and they like the people here in this organization and it really benefits us greatly.

Kuba Zwoliński: Okay. So, yeah, the customer service – that always works. However, the controversial question – what about AI? It's really growing. It's better and better. You think that chat bots can be at least close to a good salesperson on the phone because that's . . . also, like for me, it's a little bit sad that maybe those great guys who have amazing experience . . . and one day they may be replaced by artificial intelligence online.

David Petersen: Yeah. Well, I do think that factual information is something that obviously AI is going to, I would say is likely in the long term to fumble less often than your run-of-the-mill customer service person. The kind of treatment that I think that it can't replace is that personal engagement that I just talked about. You know, I don't think the AI bot is going to think to tell the salesperson about the first interior designer that they didn't like on their job. I just don't, you know, and those are the juicy bits [laughter] people like talking about and I don't think an AI robot's gonna . . . a chatbot's gonna take any of that attention away.

Kuba Zwoliński: Yeah, hopefully. I also personally think that in a few years those businesses who will keep real people in the customer service – it will be like a boutique business – something special, because, you know, AI is cheap and everyone is trying to optimize operations. So, it's easy to put an AI chatbot on the line, but if you can have real people and those people have enough knowledge and the right mindset and maybe a little bit of psychology skills so they know how to talk to customers, that will be very unique and I think having that on board may be a great business advantage.

Augmented Reality (AR) in the Furniture Industry

Kuba Zwoliński: But when we are talking about new technologies, where is the place for new technologies in selling furniture online? What about augmented reality or virtual reality? Do you think it plays a really important role or it's more just a marketing thing to make it nice and shiny and have a cool website?

David Petersen: Well, here we've had AR feature on our website for a couple of years and I frankly have been disappointed in the amount of engagement that our customer tells us about anyways with the tool. But I don't think there's anything wrong with the tool. I think that it's just the progression that people need to go through that . . . where they experience, somebody shows it to them, they understand it, they try it themselves, they experience it, they share it with somebody else, right? And that . . . my feeling is that people just haven't done that yet.

Increasingly, I see AR feature on the product pages of lots of websites, and so it's out there. And I know that when we sort of figured out the AR thing and it was pretty early – you know, the ability to put a dining table in the hallway at our office was very cool, and then to put like a real chair up next to it to see how it scaled and if it was complementary in style and all that stuff. I just saw that as a tremendous value.

And with our dealer base, in particular, we did get out front with the AR feature to try to provide that impetus to try it – you know, to give sales associates that are at retail a little video of me for a minute and 30 seconds saying here's how this thing works. And you could see that we got some people utilizing it, but there needs to be a lot – people need to experience and try it and have some success with it to really get it out there.

VR, I have no experience with. I don't know anybody in the industry who's employing that, and I'm sure there are people that are. I just don't know about that. So, I don't have any information about that. I do think that what's next in that space – and I've seen it and it's cool – is basically being able to generate two or three images and put them on the floor together. So, you can see what complementary products – you know, how well the products complement one another in style.

Reducing "Buyer’s Remorse" with New Technology

And that's the kind of thing that goes right to an objection – or something that gets in the way of a consumer making a purchase – is that they don't want to make a mistake, right? Unfortunately, in the furniture business, you're spending a lot of money. You're making a big commitment. If it's customized, you know it's not coming back. So, you want to be able to . . . as a consumer, you want to be able to make a good choice.

I think that AR helps to solve for that. And I think being able to put two or three products that you're thinking about for a room out on the floor in all their AR glory will be really beneficial to consumers and will make that feature all the more valuable.

Kuba Zwoliński: Okay, great. So, do you think it's still a little bit early for those technologies, that they are – that the customers have to get used to them? Because I can definitely see that in retail – that there are more and more e-commerce features that you can find in retail, like interactive changing rooms or smart shopping carts, but people are a little bit afraid. I think it's still more hassle with the technology than actually a real optimization of operations. But the question is if this is not the right technology, or maybe this is not the right time yet and we just need to be patient and make sure that people understand how to get all the benefits from using it.

David Petersen: Yeah. Well, I can give you a good example of a technology-driven feature that we brought to market and how the market responded at first, which was negatively, and then now they embrace it. It's like something they want to see.

The "STIHL" Model: Integrating E-commerce with Local Dealers

When we first introduced this website with IronPlane’s help in – I think it was 2018. It was 2017-2018. Anyways, the idea was basically that in markets where we had retailers, that if a consumer made a purchase decision on our website, that basically that transaction would be completed and fulfilled by the local retailer. Maybe there were two or three retailers who embraced that idea to start with, right? It just seemed like wow, you're way too much – you're way too tightly knitted to my business here. My business is selling furniture. You go make it, Peterson. We'll sell it and do the rest.

But we really stuck to it and made it so that we just talked about it a lot, shared experiences that retailers had when they were referred a consumer right out of the blue – with a person that had wanted to buy our furniture in Des Moines – and you know it was like free money in Des Moines when we showed up with that order.

So, it's the kind of thing now where we tell people about what we're doing when they're recruiting them as a new retailer and they hardly even ask a question. They understand it. They've had enough experience themselves. You’re buying things from the internet, and all the different ways that a transaction can take place online, that it seems to them like a very logical thing now and when we first introduced it, it seemed like we were coming from outer space.

Kuba Zwoliński: So, when working with new technologies, it's sometimes difficult to decide if you should continue or you should try all those different cool technologies. How do you think to choose how to verify if it's really working, if it should be like intuition, or do you think there are some metrics that you can just follow and see when it's the right time to stop it? Because, you know, even the coolest project may be just not working and may be not bringing the right value for the business, right?

David Petersen: Yeah. For me, we're not a very large organization and we don't have a big front office. This is a manufacturing company and so a lot of our assets are poured into capital improvements and building a great workforce and those sorts of things. So, we don't wing it. But, I would say we look for what's going on in similar markets and see what the leaders in those markets are doing that might be applicable to our company.

So, that idea of basically having local retailers take over the part of the value chain that is taking the payment, charging local area sales tax, placing an order with the factory, receiving the order from the factory and checking the product for damage and making sure it's the right thing, you know, talking to the consumer, scheduling a home delivery, making the home delivery. Turning that over turned out to be a good idea. but it came from STIHL Chainsaw!

Kuba Zwoliński: That was a good example. I remember you told me that. So, you can tell it now.

David Petersen: STIHL Chainsaw! Yeah, it's like, my brother likes chainsaws and so I was just thinking about chainsaws. I didn't want to buy one, but I was thinking about one and I went on their website, and here was this wonderful shopping experience where a STIHL chainsaw – the folks at STIHL had this wonderful website – it explained all the different models they had, what they were good for. It talked about safety with chainsaws, how you could – you know, all the things that you'd want to know about when you're making a purchase. And then, when you go push that Add to Cart button, it gives you your choice of, like Ace Hardware stores, where you could buy that product.

And it occurred to me that – again, sort of in the value chain – the local retailer has got to make sure that that chainsaw is ready for use and that the person who's buying it, who has any questions, can get the information they know to be able to use it correctly and safely. And of course STIHL would want that to happen that way and so the value was there.

Anyways, then I started looking for that, and at the time Fender Guitar did something like that and there were some other companies that were doing the same thing, and so it gave us confidence to do it. So we're just copycats, Kuba, That's all we are and it's what we have time for.

Kuba Zwoliński: But do you think there is also – like in maybe some simple furnitures – there is a place for a direct-to-customer without that last part, that just clients receive the furniture and that's it – they don't need any more support. Or do you think that, in general, for all furnitures it's good to have that last part of the delivery with specialized support?

David Petersen: Yeah. This is totally about the upper end of the marketplace where we do our business. There's a lot of furniture in the marketplace and there are a lot of households that buy products that are – shoot, some of them you get them home and you have to build them. And there's everything in between, right? So, I only can speak to really my experiences in this sort of higher end of the marketplace.

Kuba Zwoliński: Okay. And that's actually very interesting, you know. I'm from Europe and I remember IKEA forever. It was always with us and half of the houses are furniture – they have all the furnitures from IKEA. And the interesting thing is that IKEA actually jumped on the e-commerce train very late.

David Petersen: Oh, really?

Kuba Zwoliński: Yes. Yes. For a long time, you could purchase only in store and of course bring the boxes home and have all the fun putting them together, and e-commerce for them was a big challenge. So, that's interesting, and of course this is a totally different sector. As you said, you are in this upper level with different types of furnitures. But it's interesting to see that even for giants like that, e-commerce was a big challenge – how to approach it – and we can also see totally different stories in different furniture manufacturers like you see in different types.

So, yeah – that's true that in different types of furnitures there are different approaches, and I think for every furniture the supply chain and logistics is super important. But do you think it was a bigger problem before when you started and it's easy now, or that that part is always, and always will be, one of the major challenges in selling furnitures online?

Logistics Nightmares: When Furniture is Bigger than the Elevator

David Petersen: Yeah, I think for us, we've accumulated experience, right? And I think that that has made it a more successful exercise for us over time to manage the logistics of getting the furniture from – a product from our dock door to someone's home successfully, and the unsuccessful rate is less than 1%. So, this isn't something that's like a super huge topic for us. We're always looking to improve.

But, I can also remember plenty of experiences that I've had and some of your questions have got me thinking about this, Kuba. When we're building a custom piece of furniture – and not this company but another place that I worked before where we were building a piece of furniture for somebody's lot, you know, fourth floor space in Manhattan – and we failed to compare the size of the piece with the size of the elevator and turns out the piece of furniture is bigger than the elevator. It's not going to the third floor. And those kinds of situations – they happen often enough that you're reminded that it doesn't happen that often and it's because there's people asking those questions before it gets to you.

So, the IKEA thing is very interesting because, if I'm right, I think IKEA stores that I've been to in the United States, all the inventory is in the building, right?

Kuba Zwoliński: Most of it. Most of it. They have some warehouses that you need to pick up from at the separate location. And I think it's even more common right now. But you're right – most of the inventory is in this one big building which is also a showroom.

David Petersen: Right. And so, then there you are, trying to pick orders, right, for your internet-based customers around all the people that are walking around with their Swedish meatballs – it's just not a great combination. I'm sure there was some complexity to that that might prevent them from pulling the trigger.

Kuba Zwoliński: Yeah, I didn't think about it. Yeah, but you're right. That's the challenge that was not so obvious, but you are right. If you have to collect all the orders, it's a little bit similar to buying groceries online – that they are collected from the same store and you just have to run with the shopping cart and try to find all the shopping. Yeah, you're right. That's an interesting point.

The $100 Chair Test: Overcoming the "Try Before You Buy" Objection

With those challenges in logistics, do you think that there will be any time – in the future there will be a place for try-before-buy that you can order some furnitures and try it – really – without augmented reality. Just really try it. Try it and you know if you don't like it, send it and get another one.

David Petersen: Yeah. Well, my experience with that is that it all seems to be – this “I need to try it before I buy it” thing – is all about how chairs sit. Customers want to sit in a chair before they buy it. And for obvious reasons, right? People are different sizes, chairs are different sizes, that the seat is lower or higher by a quarter of an inch still makes a difference for folks. You know, how broad the back is sometimes can make a big difference in terms of how comfortable something is. I'm thinking right now only of wood chairs, but you can apply that to upholstered chairs and rattan chairs and chairs made of all kinds of different materials .

And again, my experience is in the upper end of the marketplace, but there are fewer stores trying to display more products all the time in the marketplace. So the likelihood of one of the 20 chairs that we offer being on the floor of a retailer is very, very low. And so we get people calling us up and we get contact.

We've had actually two interesting experiments that we've run recently where what we discovered – again, through chat, through conversations with our inside salespeople – we discovered that there was a customer that was in one of our stores in Georgia. They were ready to buy a dining table, eight chairs, and a buffet from us – really a great sale. But they needed to sit in the chair before they were going to make a purchase.

So our solution was basically to first test to see how serious the customer was. And so we basically let the consumer know that we would need a $100 fee paid to move the chair down to the retailer in Georgia – sort of like, and I don't know if you've experienced this – within the United States you can buy used cars through a company called CarMax and if the car is in Charleston, South Carolina, they'll drive it up for you to try for $200 or something like that.

Kuba Zwoliński: Wow!

David Petersen: So, it's the same sort of thing. I'm thinking, well, we're willing to send the chair down. We'll charge you $100. All I'm interested in finding out is are they serious. Because if they buy for a hundred bucks and maybe not they're not that serious. But if they're like, "Oh, yeah, sure," so they pay us $100, we ship it down, they try the seat, turns out that it's great, they make the purchase. And we are two-for-two on this little project of figuring out how to get past that objection, which is very real and understandable. And you know, if we do this 10 times and we have eight or nine successes out of 10, I mean, it's the kind of thing that I think we could execute and promote to our retailers as opposed to just addressing these things as they come up.

Showrooms as Advertising: Learning from Room & Board and Restoration Hardware

Kuba Zwoliński: Yeah, sure. And that also takes us to the interesting question many e-commerce ask – if e-commerce can actually exist without retail. Do you think that even also your business, Gat Creek, also needs some showrooms and physical presence, or will your local dealers be enough for that – they are enough representation and you don't need a dedicated manufacturer showroom?

David Petersen: Yeah. That's not sort of the appetite of our business. But I will say this – one of the things I was thinking about as we were sort of preparing to talk about all this stuff is to think about the companies that are in the higher end that are multi – that their brand is distributed and promoted across a bunch of different arenas. They're retail stores. I'll give you three examples: Room & Board, Pottery Barn, and Restoration Hardware.

They all started out as – Room & Board was basically a single store operation in Minneapolis with the same good idea that they're executing today. They're the most similar outfit, but they rely on their stores as advertising vehicles. They are only located in parts of – in metropolitan areas where tourists typically visit. That's the case in Boston, that's in the case in Chicago, and other other locations I've been to. But they rely on basically people on the phone, catalog, and website to complement their store, and their store plays a role of advertising.

Then you've got Restoration Hardware. That store was totally different in its first incarnation. It barely sold furniture at all. And today it's this international powerhouse and they rely a lot on catalog – I mean, you get the bricks of catalogs from them. They have a great website. They have tremendous stores.

But these are huge companies that have gone through giant transformations. We really like our model for manufacturers – again, none of those companies are manufacturers – we're a manufacturer. We like our model for manufacturers where we subcontract the final mile delivery, the presentation of our products to local prospects, and all of that to a retailer or an interior designer as being the best use of our expertise and our resources. And it works.

And a consumer expects products like ours to be sold through independent retailers in local markets and through interior designers, which are the two principal channels by far. We do 2% of our business direct-to-consumer just because there's no place to buy furniture in Pittsfield, New Hampshire – Pittsburgh, New Hampshire, I’m sorry. Pittsburgh New Hampshire is that little tippity top of the state. Nobody ever goes there and nobody ever barely buys furniture there.

Kuba Zwoliński: Maybe I should plan a trip there. It sounds interesting.

David Petersen: They get a lot of moose. I got to tell you that they get a lot of moose.

Kuba Zwoliński: You said the word “independent” and it takes us to another interesting question – as a manufacturer, how much you should steer the pricing. Do you think that it should be like one universal pricing that’s kept on the same level everywhere or there should be some freedom for the dealers and for designers in how they structure it?

David Petersen: Yeah. What ends up happening – and by the way, our retailers and designers are free to price our products as they see fit and we do have a distribution policy. But the idea is to make sure everybody's informed and I think that's the most important thing – that all of our distribution knows what goes into creating our products and they get a good idea of what the value of the product is.

But what ends up happening is that when you have an e-commerce website out there with a retail price on it, that ends up being the price by default. It's what a customer – it's what empowers a customer to be able to make a purchase decision, right? If you don't have the information available to you, then sometimes you just stop. That's the end of that company or that brand being part of your consideration set because it's too much work. And if you make it easy to shop and it's transparent, it's very natural to assume that that's the price for the product everywhere. And so it tends to make it so that our products are priced about the same all across the country, and we try to support that – just because we think that it sells furniture.

Kuba Zwoliński: Yeah. Okay, let's go back to online because we have that question that we discussed before that you like it a lot. And I think it's an important one because the technology is advanced but that's actually always a kind of a challenge. It requires a lot of work. So, what do you think or how do you balance the need for really high quality photos and product photography, video, 3D models, and combine it with a large number of SKUs that customers are also expecting to see on a website?

David Petersen: Yeah, that's a hard one to pull off. It's better to start working with a business and the assortment and the approach they're going to take to the marketplace and how they're going to use their manufacturing assets or their – you figure that out early so that you've got a logical merchandise assortment that'll work on the internet. It’s a little bit of math just thinking about how to make something work online.

But to me, it gets boiled down to you only can offer so many options and they have to have real value to the consumer or they won't understand the products that are before them. Like, for example, in our online catalog, in our catalog of products, and how we've merchandised our line, every product offers the choice of material and finish. And so that is what somebody knows to expect while they're shopping for our things. We don't have a bunch of different rules for different collections of goods.

And this can happen rapidly, especially if you have more than one factory that's building your products and there are different variables that they're used to building – how they're used to building things. So, having control over and getting it early – an assortment that can be logical and sustained like we've done with material and finish – you know, the shape, the size, the height, the weight, whether it's a chair or a table or a bed or whatever – they're all made out of lumber, you know, and it's ash, cherry, maple, walnut, or it could be painted maple. There's no issue there.

If we were selling a bunch of other products or working – like, if we had a rattan factory in the Philippines and we were trying to make that, well then of course quickly there's no material variable and maybe somebody might expect that because the rest of our line is like that. But we don't do that, and it just makes it easier to get your head wrapped around.

What I see an awful lot in the marketplace – our retailers are often recruited by companies that want to help them build an e-commerce website on their local retailer site. Every time I see it, I just feel sorry for them because I've already seen the end of this movie and the end of the movie is the project doesn't get completed because it's too much variability. The pictures all look like they're different. It doesn't look like the same brand, doesn't look like the same value. The copy is translated from Polish, or no, it was English originally. I mean there's all this variability that really doesn't make for a very coherent shopping experience and it doesn't add any value for the consumer.

So, if you think about it, it’s really that kind of merchandising effort in any of these successful companies I talked about like Pottery Barn and Restoration Arc – that’s way back at the beginning of the process, not after it's in a box and you say, “Okay, how now are we going to make this merchandising assortment makes sense to a consumer when we've already committed to these designs and finishes and we're trying to make it so that wildly different things appear the same as images.” They might look great on your showroom floor as, you know, as an eclectic assortment of different materials and colors and finishes.

Matter of fact, that's what a lot of these retailers do really well – is to combine all these things together on a floor and show you how you can mix these materials and make them look great. But if they're just solo shots on a page with a price and some copy and dimensions, it's not going anywhere.

Kuba Zwoliński: Oh, okay. And actually, did you see a lot of customers who want to buy the whole style? So for example, you have one piece of furniture and another piece of furniture – are there more clients, customers who are buying one by one and building their own style or do you think there are some customers who just want to have the full living room and they just need one set and that's it?

David Petersen: Yeah. There's both kinds of customers and the way that our products are assorted we've got them both covered. Our approach is similar to in apparel – a “related separates” arrangement, where the products are clearly of a design style but they're not exactly the same. So, you could choose to buy a bed from Gat Creek and there are bedroom case goods that are very complementary, and then there's maybe another set that's somewhat complementary. Or you could decide to buy an upholstered bed and then choose Gat Creek because we've left the presentation of our products to be more open to the customer's imagination. And they say, "Oh, look at that. I think that's complementary to the upholstered bed."

Really, I think the strength of our assortment is that flexibility – that you can put it with something that it very closely coordinates with or, you know, push the envelope a little bit or mix and match with things that are vintage but totally different materials. And those ideas are supported by our website, too, and by the photography that appears in our catalogs. It's an approach to furnishing your home that appeals to people who feel it's an exercise in self-expression without getting too crazy.

Sustainability and the Appalachian Hardwood Forest

Kuba Zwoliński: Okay. Yes, that's very interesting. When we talk about so many different finishes and different versions, what about sustainability? This is a growing trend everywhere in all commerce that customers are more and more thinking about it and checking if the product is sustainable. Do you think this is also an important trend in furniture, or people would rather still buy the look and don't ask difficult questions?

David Petersen: Oh, I think there are lots of consumers that are interested in sustainability and they are underserved because there are just lots of people who just haven't taken the time to find out what it's all about –.you know, what does sustainability mean?

I was at a forum and a couple of participants just felt like sustainability was something, you know, a nice word that went really well with circularity but I didn't learn anything from those presenters. But Gat Caperton, who's the owner of this business, is expert in this space. We build furniture basically out of raw lumber and it makes it really easy for us to keep track of what our products are made of. And, you know, it's a natural material.

And if you're working only in hardwood lumber and you're located in Berkeley Springs, West Virginia, well, you're in a good spot because there's a lot of trees here and within a 250 mile radius of the factory, we can get that principal raw material in quantities that are never going to be over consumed. There's something like 2.6 or 2.7 times as many hardwood trees in the forest today as there were last year. So, we're barely touching the capacity of the Appalachian forest that is a powerhouse when it comes to growing the trees that we rely on.

Then there are other issues beyond basically the source of raw material. It's the energy to transport those materials here, and it's easy to miss that piece – when raw materials like birch logs or maple logs have been shipped around the world in recent years. There's also the energy that it takes to produce the goods. That's something that we're always trying to address – how to use less energy and, of course, pollution minimization because, of course, when you're consuming fossil fuels in any event, you're going to be contributing to CO2.

And then finally, the impact on the people – not just our customers, though they're important, but the people that work here too. And so, with an eye on all those topics, I think that we can claim to be working regularly on improving how we can do basically more with less, or more with the same, and make improvements on our use of natural resources every day we come to work.

Built to Last: The Trend of Refurbishing vs. Replacing

Kuba Zwoliński: Okay. Oh – that's something that just came to my mind, because there are more and more fashion companies introducing new programs for repairing the previous purchases. So do you think that this trend will also come to your business – that it may be interesting for customers to send back a chair and have it renovated? Because, you know, with hardwood it’s easier – like, it makes sense – those furnitures are made to last many years.

David Petersen: Yeah. And they are – they’re made to last for decades. And with the help of a local furniture refinisher, you can bring our products back to new and you don't have to send it back to the factory. There's a guy down the street that does it. And it's interesting – as we're working on introducing a new top coat finish and it’s been on our furniture now for several months and we're going to start a real push about it here at the upcoming fall highpoint market – a lot of our customers, their first question is “How do I refinish this?” because they want to know – their mindset is “I'm going to own this for a very long period of time and I want to know how to take care of it. I want to know how to resolve Fido chewing on the dining room table leg and other household calamities.” They want to be prepared. And so, that just reaffirms our customers’ intent, you know, that it's something that they want to have and they expect it to last and last.

Kuba Zwoliński: Oh, I love it. Like, I really got emotional about getting rid of my old stuff, including furnitures. And I'm still also from the generation IKEA. So I have – unfortunately, a lot of my furnitures come from them, and they are usually not made from solid wood. So that actually makes me sad that when you try to move it from one place to another, there is a big chance it will fall apart and you will not be able to put it together. So, yeah, I think it's great having some useful piece that you can keep for a long time and fix it when it's needed. I think it's a big value, that's for sure.

David Petersen: Yeah, especially when you have kids.

Kuba Zwoliński: Oh, yeah. Or you have animals at home. Yeah, like that's [laughter] it makes sense in many different scenarios. That's for sure.

Future Trends: Digital Advertising and Influencer Marketing

Okay, so coming back to your main field – sales and marketing – because of course there are so many manufacturers on the market. I think even from my local market there are so many furniture manufacturers, so I think you have to be innovative and creative to make sure that customers will know about your quality because you may have the best product ever but if no one knows it, you don't have much. So, what are your favorite trends in marketing in the furniture e-commerce business or the most innovative campaign you remember recently?

David Petersen: Yeah. What I'm excited about, as we grow this business, is being able to get into more digital advertising. I'm very excited about this and Gat Caperton, who owns this company, is enthusiastic about doing more of this, too. We feel like increasingly consumers are looking for sophisticated information with advice about products online, that they do a lot of their shopping online. They may not be making the purchase decision apparent online but they're spending plenty of time on a Sunday evening sitting around in their pajamas looking at their iPad and dreaming about the furniture that they're going to buy sometime in the next two to three years. And that's the nature of the customer that we serve – somebody who really does their homework and is really interested in the fine points of what we do and the products that we offer.

And so we think that if we can do a better job with the real basics of digital advertising and then do some more, you know, get more aggressive as we see the results, that we're going to be able to reach a lot more prospects so our retailers and the interior designers who lead sales in the field for us, you know, choose Gat Creek more often on behalf of their customers. So that's the exciting piece for us. We're not experts at this, but we see what others have done to succeed using the excellent – the wonderfully targeted tools that are available to marketers and advertisers online and it'll be really interesting. And for me – I'm looking forward to just learning about all this stuff because we're all a curious bunch here.

Kuba Zwoliński: Yeah, I'm also curious if there are many influencers that are promoting furnitures. Actually, I just thought about it – I don't know any – maybe I don't follow the right Instagram or Tik Tok channels. But it's interesting – do you know any furniture businesses that are working with influencers and creating some social media engaging content in this way?

David Petersen: Yeah. Actually, I worked for a company that tried working with an influencer. This was 10 years ago and it was a very targeted audience. It was for families with children. We made children's furniture and nursery room furniture. And I could see the potential. It's a lot of work because you’ve got to move furniture around and you're relying an awful lot on somebody that you don't have a long relationship with, you know, basically to represent your product and in a way that's consistent with your regular messaging. But, you know, those are risks that can be mitigated with just careful screening and preparation.

But what I'm excited about really is people – when people start thinking about buying furniture, they start looking on the internet and they start searching for things and they are attracted to articles or blog posts that educate them about what makes hardwood furniture different. And then, later on in the cycle, we have an opportunity to advertise to that same sort of consumer on Instagram.

And I just get excited about the opportunity to participate in the journey that a consumer is going through as they begin to think about swapping out their IKEA furniture for something that's more permanent and then how they go through the process of that and being able to help them reflect on what's important and what they want, and then in convincing them to shop with us. And, to help those retailers and designers that are fans of our products gain distribution too – I get a lot of satisfaction out of that.

Kuba Zwoliński: I think it may actually be more and more important when the generations like, you know, generation Z or like the next one, will be growing up and they will actually become a customer even like for Gat Creek – they will be older. They will want to buy more fancy furnitures, but they may still look in the same favorite places for the recommendation. And that will be a completely new challenge for even those more upper level products for those demanding customers.

David Petersen: Yeah. Well, we don't have to win them all. We just have to win some of them – some of them. Yeah.

3 Pieces of Advice for New Online Furniture Businesses

Kuba Zwoliński: Okay, David, that was a great time. Thank you very much for all your, for so many insights. At the end, if someone is just starting an online business with furnitures, they may manufacture great products, but they want to start selling online – do you have three pieces of advice that those business owners or managers should be especially careful for? What do you think?

David Petersen: Starting a business online, you’ve got to have a lot of capital for sure, and I think that is underestimated – that you just have to have financial resources because it takes time for the business to scale up. It's tricky, for sure. I think that there's a lot of money that people spend on very detailed pieces of their marketing plan, when there's some more basic kinds of things to tackle first.

I've had a great experience working with all the people that are in our technical circle, including the IronPlane people, about how they've seen things work in similar industries and you really need to have a partner that understands how websites work and that's really important.

And the one other thing that I would do if I was starting a new business in the home furnishings industry is that I would want to mitigate some of the risk and some of the expense by peeling off a piece that partners can perform just like we've done here. I think that it’s just a really smart strategic choice – it's been a really good one for us – to be so invested in our retail partners and also very encouraging about these long-term relationships with interior designers and smaller markets. I just think that was a great strategic choice for us.

And there's probably other parts that you could peel off, you know, like you don't have to be the designer of the products. You can go find a designer that takes that responsibility and, with the guidance of the owner of the business, you could get a good result. There's lots of different jobs to take and find partners to complete without having to take financial responsibility for the whole thing.

Kuba Zwoliński: Okay. Thank you. Thank you, David, for your time. Thank you for the great conversation. I'm happy that we made it – you know, so many problems to start [laughter] but we did it. So, thank you very much again.

David Petersen: You're a great host, Kuba. I had a really nice time. Thank you.

Kuba Zwoliński: Yeah, it was great. So, thank you again and see you at the next episode of Shaping Commerce. Thanks.