A Chat With November’s Profile, Mark Desrochers, co-founder/marketing director, Classic Designs by Matthew Burak (Text & Audio)

Catalog Success: Where’s your company headquartered?
Mark Desrochers: St. Johnsbury, Vermont.

CS: When was the company established? Was this also the same time it began mailing catalogs?
MD: We don’t look back too much, so we’re actually pretty weak at recalling some of these dates. Matt [Burak] was a furniture maker, and he had a long and successful run as a furniture maker. We incubated this table leg business for a few years inside of his furniture business. We split it out in December of 1999. It’s more realistic to say the idea was … we wrote the business plan in ’95. December of ’99 was when we incorporated the business.

CS: Were catalogs part of the business right away?
MD: Yeah, it was a trifold brochure with exactly six [table] legs in it.

CS: What’s the primary merchandise offered in the catalog?
MD: With the origins of the furniture company in period, in reproduction Colonial furniture, our first designs, and our first successes, were in period-style table legs: Queen Anne, William and Mary. Those were designs that we had a demand for in our furniture business and those were the designs that we went to market with initially. And they were well received. There was no place in the country that one could purchase a ready-made, historically accurate, period-style furniture leg … wooden table leg. It just didn’t exist. And that’s what people responded to.
It was really one of those situations where Matt had a need in his furniture business, and he identified that need and filled that need. We presented a solution to furniture makers like Matt, a solution to that need. People grabbed right hold of it; they liked it. It’s a long process to turn a piece of tree wood into a table leg if you’re only doing three or four at a time. And the journey’s kind of fraught with inefficiency and peril, but once you batch ’em up and run ’em in fairly large quantities, it goes a lot better. It’s much more efficient.

CS: What customer demographic does your catalog/Web site target?
MD: We’re targeting the small [furniture] shop owner. So we’re targeting hobbyists and professional woodworkers, both. The commercial woodworkers, the smaller shops are a core customer for us.

CS: Do you sell mainly to B-to-B customers or consumers?
MD: We sell both B-to-B and consumer.

CS: How many times a year do you mail the catalog?
MD: We mail multiple times a year.

CS: How many employees do you have at Classic Design?
MD: Forty.

CS: How do sales break down by channel?
MD: Approaching half is e-commerce. The catalog is slightly more than 50 percent.

CS: How many SKUs do you average per catalog?
MD: About 1,000.

CS: How many SKUs do you offer overall?
MD: Maybe 1,400 or so.

CS: How did you get your start in the catalog business?
MD: Everybody has a few lives, and I had a life as a landscape architect. Then I traded that for 10 years as a private yacht captain. And then I traded that for my first foray into direct marketing, which is this business. My partner’s [Matthew Burak] somewhat similar. He’s had a career in woodworking. That’s what he brings to the table — the woodworking knowledge. He’s been a boat builder and an architectural woodworker, and he’s designed his own line of furniture. And now he concentrates on designing the table legs themselves, the different wood turnings themselves. So together, we get through it. But direct marketing was new to us.
We were introduced to direct marketing through a customer in Matt’s furniture store who bought some furniture from us. We struck up a conversation with this character out there, she’s rather nefarious, Amy Africa. She was working for this guy that bought a bunch furniture from Matt, and that’s how we got introduced to direct marketing. And we’ve ended up consulting with her for years.

CS: How did you and Matt meet and decide to work together?
MD: We had worked together; we were basically best friends.

CS: What challenges did you face at Classic Design when you first started in the catalog/multichannel business?
MD: Well, developing the lists certainly was an initial challenge. Of course, that remains a primary challenge in the business today.

CS: How did you acquire customers when you first started Classic Design?
MD: We were advertising in the various woodworking magazines. It was basically a free catalog offer. We’re still running some of those same ads today. That was the offer, and that remains the offer that works best — free literature, free catalog offer. We’re still out there doing that, to some degree.

CS: What other customer acquisition tools does the company use today?
MD: We’re pretty involved in search engine marketing and pay per click.

CS: What current challenges does the company face?
MD: I think prospecting is a big challenge for us in the current environment of rising cost of paper and postage. That’s a common theme for everybody. The growing of the house list is one of our biggest challenges.

CS: In regards to the rising costs associated with mailing catalogs, has anything in particular been done at Classic Design to offset these increases?
MD: Yes there has. We definitely changed our trim size, and we’re big into co-mailing. We actually have reduced our page count a little bit to get to a less costly postal tier — lighter weight. And those things are working pretty well.

CS: How many pages, on average, have been cut from the catalog?
MD: We’ve reduced it by as much as 20 percent.

CS: What were the exact changes to the trim size?
MD: We just shaved a little off. I couldn’t tell you how much it is. We didn’t go to a slim jim or anything like that. It was just a minor trim adjustment, but it definitely got us down into the next postal tier.

CS: Have you had any negative feedback from customers on the change in trim size?
MD: No, not at all.

CS: What are the keys to the success Classic Design has enjoyed?
MD: It’s definitely about the product. We have a product that people want. We’re selling to the upper end and our product reflects that. It’s well made, it’s highly detailed, it’s got good scale and good proportion; in a world where there are a lot of mass-produced products, we carved out a niche for that — more highly detailed wood turning. So it’s really a lot about the product.
We have a big product selection; we’re constantly introducing new products. There’s new products in every catalog that goes out. There’s something new that we can focus our customers’ attention on. And they’re looking for new. New is a powerful driver, motivator.

CS: Do you have a lot of competitors in your market?
MD: There is quite a bit of competition, and more all the time. The two big players were established when we started, and now we’re bigger than they are. We’re a bigger presence in the market, so we’re gratified there. And a lot of it has to do with the fact that the products speak for themselves. They’re the products that people want.

CS: Why do you believe your company has stepped up and separated itself from its competition?
MD: The other thing is that we’ve positioned the company creatively. We made the decision to take advantage of Matt’s furniture making experience, and we speak with authority about what a woodworker can do with our products: what the limitations are, what the opportunities are. And when woodworkers have questions about style or design or proportion or balance, they come to us for the answer. We’ve got Matt as the face of the company, and Matt is a well known woodworker in woodworking circles across America. We’re taking advantage of his expertise — we are the trusted source for wood turnings, cabinet makers and furniture makers.

CS: What about the catalog/direct marketing industry is most appealing to you?
MD: The people in the direct marketing industry that we’ve met have all been very kind and very generous to us. The people that we’re meeting at the trade shows and the conventions, and the consultants, they’re not … we don’t present any threat, so people have been very supportive and very generous with sharing information. And I think that must be true across the whole industry. Most everything we’ve learned, you’ve got a woodworker and you’ve got an offshore sailor, and most all of our success, in one way or another, can be attributed back to the kindness that’s been showed to us through the various trade associations over the years. Most everything we’ve learned, we’ve learned at the trade shows and conventions.
And one of the key things … we’re up here in the corner of northeastern Vermont, and the local economy isn’t all that vibrant. But direct marketing allows us to tap into the … it allows us to sell our products to furniture makers across the country. We have a much greater reach through direct marketing, both the catalog and the Internet. And that’s pretty powerful.

CS: Being in this rural area, how does Classic Design attract and retain high-level employee talent?
MD: We outstrip the supply chain’s ability to deliver legs to us reliably. So we were forced to, reluctantly, go into manufacturing ourselves. And wood turning is a craft that’s not prevalent in our area, our region. And so we had to commit to a very strong training program to develop our production staff in a very strong program of cross-training to fill out our work force. And that’s worked very well. In direct marketing, it’s really much the same. We’ve taken what we’ve learned from the various conventions and trade shows and conferences, and had to develop staff with that small bit of expertise that we’ve seen. We’ve brought it back home and developed it. We’ve worked with consultants quite a bit over the years, as well, developing our skills in direct marketing, circulation, creative.

CS: Is the manufacturing end of your business located in the same building as your headquarters?
MD: Yeah, we don’t actually make furniture anymore. But we do still own the furniture shop that we built for Matt’s business. That’s in this building. We’re in this warehouse right in the downtown, and it’s a 66,000 square foot building. It’s multistory. We occupy that and that’s the site of the furniture shop where Matt had his original furniture business. We’re in there now with our production facility, as well as our administrative and headquarters.

CS: Do you operate any retail stores, including out of your headquarters?
MD: We don’t really have too much of a retail store. We do have a small retail showroom. We don’t do a lot of bricks-and-mortar retailing. We don’t have any other locations. It’s a very niche business and I can’t imagine it paying to have a retail table leg location.

CS: Do table legs account for all of your products?
MD: There are also interior columns, which are a good part of our business. And there are also what are called “feet,” which are smaller legs, basically under 10 inches high. And those might go underneath cabinets or underneath a kitchen island or underneath armoires or underneath entertainment centers. That’s our business — columns, feet and legs.

CS: What’s one big business mistake you’ve made over the years?
MD: Honestly, I have to say we haven’t made too many big mistakes. We’ve been lucky. Our product isn’t seasonal, it’s not perishable … some of the styles have been in fashion for 200 years. It’s durable goods. We haven’t had to deal with a lot of the vagaries of the consumers’ mind. We’ve been lucky there, and I think our timing’s been good.
There’s been a tremendous move towards outsourcing of production for woodworkers. For instance, there’s been pressures from Asia and other offshore manufacturers on the American furniture industry. One way for our customer to get lean and to get more competitive was to outsource. Instead of making their own table legs, they looked to a more efficient way to buy them in just as they need them. And that has worked to our advantage. So timing wise, I think we’ve been very lucky.

CS: What’s done at Classic Design to create a light and fun environment for your employees?
MD: We have a very light environment; we don’t take ourselves too seriously. The organization’s pretty flat — the owners see everybody every day. We’re all in it together. We have a lot of events together, basically centering around food. It’s a pretty supportive environment. It’s a small town, all our children are in schools with one another, we see one another at athletic events around the community, social events around the community. It’s pretty much small-town living.

CS: What do you think you would’ve done for a career if you hadn’t gotten involved in the catalog/multichannel business?
MD: Oh, I’d still be out there sailing. No question about it. That was a pretty good gig.

CS: What hobbies do you enjoy away from work?
MD: I’m pretty active up here; you’ve got to be active in the winter, winter’s are long. I’m big on snow skiing and water skiing. And I’ve got two small children, so we’re busy with them all the time. There’s only 7,000 people in the town, so it’s fairly rural. Our pleasures are those of the rural environment, more than the urban.

CS: Is there anything you’d like to add on Classic Design?
MD: One of the key things that we had in mind was that we were going to take a traditional Vermont wood products business and graft onto a modern direct marketing business model.

CS: And the catalog helps extend the reach of your products?
MD: Absolutely. The catalog is key to our success. We’re still driving sales with catalogs.

CS: And do you still try to acquire prospects with catalogs, or has this shifted online?
MD: We’re doing it in both places.