From The Quarterly, Issue 2: How Stark Has Expanded Into DTC While Still Prioritizing the Trade Audience
Late last year, fourth-generation, family-run DLN Partner Stark opened its orders beyond the trade for the first time. With a new website that includes stocked inventory available to consumers, it’s all part of an increased effort to “transparency and convenience” that CEO Chad Stark says is improving interior designer relationships while expanding to new audiences. Here, Chad opens up to the DLN about why it works.
DLN: I know this new element of the business was a long time coming. Can you tell us about how you got here?
Chad Stark: When I joined the business 12 years ago, I began re-educating myself on the trade-only model. It’s something our industry was built on, but it really only exists in the home industry. So I immediately started thinking, how can we do things that trade-only companies can’t, but that retail can’t either?
We like to call ourselves “trade-preferred.” We’re a company that makes it easy to work with; in a world of convenience, we need to give convenience to our customers, wherever they are. Through many previous iterations of our site, designers were saying, “I don’t want to remember a log-in; I just want to get my products as quickly as possible.” So we began offering samples on our site, the same way we would to anyone in store. This brought about interest to consumers, and the general reaction from designers was, “I don’t care who you sell to as long as I get special treatment.”
DLN: What have been the biggest benefits of opening to consumers?
CS: The reality is that our stock section only makes up nine percent of our sales, but it opens up our audience immensely. Designers who already work with us see all these styles and then can customize them; designers who previously hadn’t worked with us now will, because for the first time, they can see pricing, and they realize what a wide range we have. So overall, it’s helped the business immensely, and we haven’t had anyone upset about it.
One of the most prominent ways we aim to protect the design trade is with our commission protection promise: Our policy is that if a designer is sourcing from us and their client goes around them and buys from us directly, we give the designer a check for 25% of what the customer paid. It’s our attempt to continue to reiterate to the interior design community that expanding access doesn’t mean abandoning the trade; it just means opening doors to the four out of five people who don’t work with designers.
DLN: Was there any adjustment you had to make to your production to allow for this expansion?
CS: Five years ago, we looked at our inventory and realized with handmade, we were always running out of samples. So we said, “We don’t want to market something if we don’t have inventory.” After all, if you can’t see it, you can’t sell it. If that means we sell fewer SKUs but can better support the SKUs we sell, that’s a better experience. Sampling is an essential part of the sale, and that needs to be available. So we had already changed that strategy, and that decision enabled us to do something that now ends up being convenient for the homeowner as well.
DLN: What’s the most important takeaway from this strategic shift?
CS: We can walk and chew gum at the same time. We can do more than one thing as a business. That doesn’t mean we’re losing our core business; it means we are diversifying and growing. Active interior designers still do 85% of our sales, but we also can build models that are sustainable and scalable while we maintain focus on that group. We’re a company that plays to win, not a company that plays not to lose.