Dear Stephen:
I am the CEO of a large European luxury furniture manufacturer. We have an excellent reputation in Europe and have always believed the United States should be a much bigger market for us.
Like many European manufacturers, when we first became serious about America, we started with our country’s trade and export organization. They helped us understand the market and pointed us toward the American specialists we would need—from legal and distribution resources to experienced recruiters. When the conversation turned to finding furniture sales leadership and salespeople who already understood the U.S. market, that network led us to The Viscusi Group.
After more than forty years of recruiting the people who actually sell furniture in America, what are European companies still getting wrong? We make extraordinary products, yet many of us are still fighting for recognition and market share while American companies such as RH have created enormous awareness with consumers, designers, and the trade. Is the problem sales, distribution, marketing, showrooms, inventory, pricing, or management—or are European headquarters still misunderstanding how the American consumer, the trade customer, and the A&D community actually buy?
If you were sitting in my chair and wanted to substantially increase our American revenue, where would you start?
Signed,
Made There. Not Selling Enough Here.
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Dear Made There:
First of all, I am not sure I know the meaning of the word diplomatic, so you do not have to worry about my holding back. You asked me what European furniture companies are getting wrong in America, and before I criticize anybody, I should probably begin by defending Europe—because I certainly do not think the problem is the furniture.
I have been fortunate enough to visit factories throughout Italy, Scandinavia, Germany, England, and France, and some of what I have seen is extraordinary. I have walked the factory floors, met the craftspeople, and watched the attention that goes into these products. There is a culture of craftsmanship surrounding many of these companies that is almost impossible to reproduce. You see it in the materials, the engineering, the architecture of the factories, and the people doing the work. You even see it in the way they live around the product. The Italians can somehow make an espresso at a furniture factory look more elegant than a cocktail at an American five-star hotel.
That is why I do not think Europe has a furniture problem. I think many European furniture companies have an American marketing problem. I am a recruiter, not a consultant, and after more than forty years in this business, I know better than to wake up one morning and give myself a new profession because it sounds impressive. From our office in Midtown Manhattan, The Viscusi Group recruits the sales leaders, salespeople, and marketing executives who build these businesses in the United States, so I have had a very good seat from which to watch what works, what does not work, and, occasionally, what makes absolutely no sense at all.
Here’s one of the strangest patterns that I continue to see. European companies understand the need to hire Americans to sell in America, so they hire an American president, an American sales director, and American salespeople in New York, Miami, Dallas, Los Angeles, and everywhere else the business takes them. But then, when the conversation turns to marketing the brand to Americans, many of the important decisions suddenly travel back across the Atlantic. To borrow and slightly abuse a famous political phrase, I think in many cases it really is the marketing, stupid.
I would keep the CEO in Milan, the design studio in Copenhagen, the engineering in Germany, and the craftsmanship in Italy. I would keep the history, heritage, and soul of the company exactly where they belong, because the last thing I would ever suggest is taking a wonderful European furniture company and trying to make it feel American. Americans are interested in these brands precisely because they are not American, and destroying that distinction in the name of localization would be ridiculous.
What I am suggesting is very different. If the United States is expected to become one of your most important markets, then the marketing of the brand in the United States should be led by people in the United States who genuinely understand the American customer—and who have enough authority and enough money to act like America actually matters.
When I say marketing, I do not mean hiring a good American PR firm and deciding the problem has been solved. Public relations matters, editorial coverage matters, events matter, and relationships with designers, editors, and influential people matter enormously, but PR is one piece of marketing. It is not an American marketing department. Somebody still has to decide how the brand speaks to the American consumer, what an American designer sees online, how video and social media are used, which industry events actually matter, what a dealer needs, and branding even crosses over into lead-times and quick ship items. All those issues give a consumer who has never heard of your company enough confidence to spend a very large amount of money on your furniture.
There is also no single American furniture customer, which is something I think European headquarters sometimes underestimates. The affluent consumer may know RH immediately and have absolutely no idea that a furniture company considered enormously important in Milan even exists. The trade customer is looking at margins, territory, pricing, inventory, lead times, and your on-line catalog and spec tools—all factors of whether doing business with your company is going to be profitable or painful. The A&D community may never personally write the check, but an architect or interior designer can control a tremendous purchase and needs specifications, samples, customization, responsiveness, dependable delivery, and confidence that your company will perform when it matters.
There are different customer types, and they cannot all be marketed to in exactly the same way. Yet I still hear people talk about a “U.S. marketing strategy” as though everyone between Manhattan and Malibu is one person. Translating a European campaign into English is not necessarily an American marketing strategy, just as putting an American flag on the website in July does not make you an American brand.
RH inevitably comes up in this conversation, and maybe there is something about RH the furniture industry does not discuss enough. The company is headquartered in Corte Madera, in Marin County, just across the Golden Gate from San Francisco. Continue south through the Bay Area and you reach the world that produced Apple, Google, and an entire generation of companies that became obsessed not only with making products but with controlling how customers discover them, experience them, and ultimately buy them.
I am not suggesting RH is a technology company, and I am certainly not suggesting there is something magical in the Bay Area water, although given California real estate prices perhaps somebody should bottle it. I do think there is something interesting about a furniture company growing up in an environment where businesses learned to think relentlessly about brand, customer experience, and scale. Apple did not invent the telephone, Google did not invent information, and RH certainly did not invent the sofa. What those companies understood, in very different businesses, is that making the product is only the beginning of creating the customer relationship.
RH deserves credit for bringing some of that mentality into furniture. Gary Friedman has never seemed particularly interested in running RH like a traditional furniture retailer. The galleries, Sourcebooks, digital presence, restaurants, design services, architecture, and hospitality are different pieces of the same story. Whether you love the aesthetic, hate the aesthetic, or fall somewhere in between is almost irrelevant to the lesson. RH understands that furniture does not market itself.
That does not mean European furniture companies should copy RH. Nobody wants Poltrona Frau to wake up tomorrow morning and decide it wants to become RH, least of all me. Europe already has something that cannot be manufactured overnight: generations of craftsmanship, history, authenticity, and some of the greatest furniture-making cultures in the world. The opportunity is not to Americanize the European product. The opportunity is to combine that extraordinary European product with an equally serious understanding of American marketing.
The story of RH going into Europe is another column altogether. My aunt has a beautiful apartment in Milan, and I am not convinced one of those enormous RH sofas could make it through her front door, much less find somewhere to live once it got inside. She would probably object anyway because the apartment is already filled with Poltrona Frau and a little B&B Italia, and she has wonderful taste. I should probably stop name-dropping the contents of my aunt’s apartment before she reads this and decides I am no longer invited for dinner.
Back to America. Some European companies have been spoiled, in a way, by the excellence of their own products. When you spend generations learning how to make something exceptional, it is understandable to believe that once people see it, touch it, and understand the craftsmanship, they will want it. They very well may, but first they have to know you exist. The American consumer is not required to take a course in European furniture history before furnishing the living room, and the American designer has hundreds of other brands trying to get into the same project.
If I were sitting in your chair tomorrow morning, my first thought would be to look at the organizational chart and ask who owns American marketing, where that person sits, who that person reports to, what decisions can be made without calling Europe, and what kind of budget is actually under that person’s control. I would want the American marketing people sitting with the American salespeople and hearing what they are hearing every day from consumers, dealers, designers, architects, and specifiers. Marketing created several thousand miles away from the customer eventually starts to sound like marketing created several thousand miles away from the customer.
Then I would look at the money, because America is expensive. Good executives are expensive, good content is expensive, media is expensive, real estate is expensive, and getting the attention of affluent Americans and influential designers is expensive. If management tells the board that America is one of the company’s most important growth opportunities and then funds American marketing as though it were a small export experiment, nobody should be surprised when the results continue to look like a small export experiment.
I would pay American money for excellent American marketing talent and give those people real responsibility. I would also expect them occasionally to tell Europe that something that works beautifully in Milan, Copenhagen, or Munich is not going to work in Miami or New York. That is not disrespecting the brand. That is why you hired them.
None of this means surrendering control of the company’s identity. Europe should protect the craftsmanship, history, design language, and culture that make these furniture brands special. The challenge is understanding the difference between protecting the brand and controlling every interpretation of the brand from another continent. If America is important enough to be expected to produce serious revenue, then American marketing deserves serious talent, authority, and investment.
The Europeans already know how to make the furniture, and I certainly would not tell them how to do that. But RH figured out something equally important somewhere along the way: Americans cannot buy a brand they do not know, and they cannot want a brand nobody has bothered to make them want. Maybe the next great opportunity for European furniture in America is not another showroom, another salesperson, or another collection. Maybe it is finally putting the same obsession into American marketing that Europe has always put into making the furniture.
Stephen Viscusi