by Doug Sewell

I came across a great article in Modern Woodworking Magazine.  The article featured another great Dallas company, William & Wesley – manufacturers of high-end furniture.  W&W’s custom

furniture and draperies can be seen in luxury homes, hotels, and resorts from Las Vegas to the Caribbean to the Middle East.  A truly magnificent company, William & Wesley’s success during the recession caught the attention of Modern Woodworking Magazine, and by proxy, me.

It’s important to benchmark your company’s operations off other successful companies and industries – preferably ones related to you.  As a plantation shutters manufacturer, I felt W&W’s business model was especially relevant.  The opening line of the article really struck a chord: “With so many U.S. furniture manufacturers moving production to China the last thing needed would be another furniture manufacturer doing the same thing.” I really wanted to see how W&W had responded to globalization (and, in fact, reversed its effects by being outsourced from countries in Asia, Europe, and Africa!).

It’s an incredible article, and you can read the full version here.

Here are some of the lessons I learned from William & Wesley:

1) Stand Apart

Really, that’s Marketing 101, but that lesson was reiterated again and again in how W&W responded to furniture outsourcing.  As I mentioned earlier, it’s important to benchmark your operations against other successful ones.  In 2001, when W&W’s founders, Bill Lawrence and Jarrett Ouellette, founded the company, they saw the furniture manufacturing industry as so poorly run they refused to benchmark off it.  They decided to stand apart and develop a unique business model – one where furniture wasn’t what they sold.  They decided to sell something different: TIME.

“We sell time,” says Ouellette.  Obviously furniture provides the income, but what makes W&W stand apart is that they can provide luxury furniture from scratch in four to six weeks – versus the sixteen week norm for importing product from China. “Quality is essential, of course. . . you can’t play in this arena unless your quality is extraordinary.  What separates us from our competition is our additional focus on time.”

W&W rightly discerned that people “people just don’t want to wait sixteen weeks.” By focusing on the niche concerned with quick turnaround for one-of-a-kind custom furniture, William & Wesley set themselves apart and attracted the clientele they were after.

What sets your company apart?

2) Stand and Deliver

Selling to a niche is great, but it’s useless if you can’t actually do what you claim.  William & Wesley said they could produce high-end furniture in four to six weeks, and they delivered on that promise.  Says Ouellette in Modern Woodworking’s article: “Manufacturing is not about machinery, but rather about understanding the bottlenecks.  We took that premise from [the book] ‘The Goal’ and put it to work in furniture manufacturing.  We have a very rudimentary job shop, but it allows us to be totally flexible.”

William & Wesley decided that they could deliver on their promise and took the steps necessary.

Can you feasibly provide what you’re promising?  What steps are necessary to bring this to being?

3) Stand Ready

William & Wesley’s business model was new, and in the eyes of designers and architects, unproven.  Lawrence and Ouellette didn’t deny that; rather they took a sales approach that encouraged these companies to give them a try in situations where produce was absolutely needed in haste.  For example, if a designer made a mistake, it could take their usual vendor another sixteen weeks to provide a replacement.  W&W made themselves available to build a “fill-in” to satiate the customer’s immediate needs.

By encouraging a “try us when you need us” mindset, W&W slowly began to win the respect of its clients.  Eventually, people began dropping their usual vendors from overseas to buy exclusively from William & Wesley.  This is evidence that the patient acquisition of industry respect is imperative to long term success.

Do prospective clients know you’re available to help them in their time of need?  How can you reinforce the “try us when you need us” mindset?

There are many more lessons to be learned from William & Wesley.  I encourage you to read the full article at Modern Woodworking Magazine’s website.

The Sun is Rising.