The Voice of Experience - Ornament Shop

PRLog (Press Release) - Sep 23, 2009 -
OrnamentShop.com has been in business 11 years. Owner Dianne Weller has a long history in retail, initially “doing the circuit” of major charity fund-raising gift shows, including the Jr. League show in Chicago and Giftorama for the Kingswood Alumnae Association, held in the Saarinen-designed Kingswood School/Cranbrook. Her husband Russell would often take time off from his advertising sales firm to help out.

Initially, her effort was called Whiffs and she sold smell-alike fragrances. That evolved over time to include whimsical log animals and then personalized Christmas ornaments. Eventually the ornament side of the business predominated and, 11 years ago, she and her husband went online with OrnamentShop.com.

Now, with more than 2,000 different ornaments and other collectibles that commemorate almost every occasion imaginable from Christmas to teacher gifts, weddings, anniversaries and graduation, OrnamentShop.com is the highest-ranked “personalized ornament” site on the Web. There is no brick-and-mortar store, but Weller has maintained a fleet of seasonal kiosks in selected shopping malls in Wisconsin, Illinois and Indiana.

How’s business in this economy, she’s asked. “Since January,” she replied, “we’ve been about even with last year, which is pretty darn good. We actually have a larger number of orders, but the number of items per order is down. Our price-points work well for people, today especially.”

Do you get many leads for the online operation from kiosk customers, Corp! asks. Weller pauses, “That’s hard to track, but the kiosks do get the products out there from October 15 to the day after Christmas for people to enjoy and we do think many of them visit us online at other times. And, the kiosks are good revenue producers.”

With a full-time staff of five, OrnamentShop.com ramps up during the holiday season to a total of 45 in the warehouse and another 75 in the kiosk operation. “A lot of our people come back every year,” Weller comments, “which is wonderful. It’s sort of like a family reunion at Christmastime.”

The key to her success? “Most of our visitors come to us from search engine optimization [SEO],” she says. “Our SEO marketing firm does a great job for us. They’ve worked very closely with us to add more descriptive copy, a history of ornaments and a trivia game, and other things that help keep us on top of the rankings,” she continues. “They make suggestions, we make suggestions – it’s a good team effort. That’s important, too.”

Advice for prospective “e-tailers”? Weller is asked if she has any words of wisdom for start-up web marketers? “It takes a lot more time and a lot more money than just getting your site up” she says with a laugh. “If you don’t do the marketing it’s worthless. I think a lot of people say ‘I’ve got a web site, World! Come buy stuff.’ But,” she cautions, “I know that there are more than 500,000 web sites that have Christmas Ornaments listed on their site somewhere. And most of them would like to be up top in the listings because most people don’t look past the first page in a search. If you can’t be on that first page, you’re not going to have the hits and not be able to show what you have. For every step that you’re down from that first listing you’re down a considerable percentage in sales. There have been many studies that show this,” Weller concludes.

Photo:
http://www.prlog.org/10351926/1