(re)ALIGN Expansion Sherpas help global home furnishings distributor, largely to brick & mortar customers, to enter and expand a new “channel” – Ecommerce. Sherpas design and build the business from $1 to $10M revenues in two years.
Décor Therapy Story
• The CEO of a distributor to brick & mortar stores was fretting about market share losses and margin erosion. Sound familiar? I asked “what about channel expansion, into ecommerce?” While open, he knew the challenges, on the customer side (channel conflict) and operationally (shipping and invoicing many small orders instead of one 40’ container at a time).
• We quickly assembled a team of Sherpas, researched both market and operational investments needed, and built a new brand – Décor Therapy was born a few months later.
• We pursued the channel expansion opportunity with a vengeance, and built credibility internally by selling “free inventory” (headed for the liquidator, at a loss) at healthy margins online.
Define, refine and scale an ancillary channel (Ecommerce) without creating core channel conflict
Décor Therapy
• The holding company was looking for additional growth stories to position itself for sale.
• An ecommerce strategy required a well-coordinated answer to all the questions outlined in this diagram.
• Sherpas were assigned to build the business model (research, design the brand and sales collateral, build the process for selecting/uploading SKUs, and coordinate with the Ops team) and to champion great execution.
find a gap* in the market, and a market** in the gap
Market (demand) side
Operations (supply) side