TRANSCRIPT:
When I try to describe it to people, I often say, ‘we represent the best of Australian-made
in wood”, and that’s what we’re always trying to do. We’re trying to be the best specialist
wood gallery in the world. We have amazing furniture, beautifully hand-crafted giftware
and local artists, fine artists. The Bungendore wood works gallery was opened up 30
years ago by my father, across the road. He opened it up as a place to sit and sell his
woodwork. Bungendore Woodworks Gallery has a very unique set of products.
Everything is different, everything is handmade, made of different timbers, a variety of
timbers by over 250 makers.
So setting up an e-commerce website posed a lot of challenges like supply descriptions.
It wasn’t like anything was the same. It took a lot of maintenance and we had to be very
careful about what we were going to put online and we had to ask ourselves the
question if we would gain a return on investment. In late 2011, we decided to do a proof
of concept and set up a test e-commerce website using an out-of-the-box system, just to
see if our customers would buy anything or not. So that’s been running now for six
months and sales have been steady. Not dramatic, but we’ve now proven to ourselves
that people are willing to buy these unique products online.
Possibly the most powerful marketing tool of our website and our digital online presence
is our e-newsletters. It was quite surprising how well they worked for us. In late 2010, we
decided to try and save some money on our printing costs and move to an e-newsletter
system and not print and not mail out our quarterly newsletters. E-newsletters, they’ve
been around ever since the internet’s been around, and it’s a pretty low-fi way of
connecting to customers. The interesting thing with us is it’s definitely our most powerful
way. People really respond to it. We can create a newsletter in a couple of days; we can
send it out whenever we want. We can schedule it to come out on Tuesdays at 11am,
and we can get a whole range of statistics from it about how many people clicked
through, how many people unsubscribed, how many people shared it on Twitter or
Facebook. It’s just mind boggling to see the impact that this very simple low-fi
technology has in connecting to our customers.
As a small business we have to be a bit wary of where we invest our time when it comes
to an online presence, and obviously there’s a lot of hype about Facebook and Twitter
and various other social media platforms. So we were waiting, we were late to the party
on that, mainly because we weren’t sure if it was going to work for us from a business
point of view. About 12 months ago we finally set up our Facebook profile page. I think
it’s a nice way for us to connect with people, but we haven’t yet seen any result in sales.
That said, we’re pretty excited about Pinterest. Pinterest is a really nice, interesting new
social media that’s gained a lot of press recently. I think it’s very uniquely suited to our
business. Pinterest essentially is all about sharing images with your friends and your
family and your social network that are really beautiful, and I think we have an
abundance of beautiful products and images.
The Café Wood Works is a business next door. Even though it’s a separate business
from the Bungendore Wood Works Gallery, it’s a very symbiotic relationship that we
have. So we have a café section on our website where we show their menu and
promote their events.
In terms of resources that we put towards out digital online presence, it probably
averages out at about two full time days a week. I primarily do the majority of the work
updating the new sections, putting new products online, Facebook posts and the like,
however other staff will pitch in wherever and however necessary. By being willing to get
in there and just have a go and try our best and punch above our weight, we’ve learnt a
lot of things, and I think we’re stronger for it. We’ve made many mistakes but I’d do them
all again because we wouldn’t have such a good online presence without making those
mistakes.