Stop me if you’ve heard this before: flooring is an industry with a lot of SKUs.
If you think of a car manufacturer, say Toyota, you might have 20 products in the market at any given time. You’ll have some variations within those products, of course. But still, it’s not a huge number.
If you’re a flooring manufacturer, however, that number could be hundreds of thousands.
Here at Roomvo, we work with some of the biggest players in home decor manufacturing — Shaw, Mohawk, Dal-Tile, MSI, and Engineered Floors, to name a few. And, almost every day, I hear how challenging it can be to have such an expansive product range. You have thousands of products. And you may be working with thousands of dealers.
So, how are you giving all those dealers the support they require to sell your products? How are you maintaining that brand control and consistency downstream? And how do you know what’s truly resonating with the end consumer — without having to rely on lagging indicators?
For a lot of manufacturers, including each of those listed above, the Roomvo Partner Program (RPP) has become a huge part of their business strategy.
Here’s how it can help.
Visualize it
Let’s start with the most transformative part of the Roomvo platform: room visualization.
Picture your shopper in their kitchen, a mess of tiny flooring samples strewn across the floor, desperately trying to imagine how their new renovations could look. Not an easy task.
With Roomvo, shoppers can upload a picture of their room to the visualizer and swipe through different products to see what looks best. For manufacturers, that means better engagement, quicker purchase decisions, and ultimately, more sales. Now wouldn’t you want those benefits for the businesses selling your products too?
When you sign up for RPP, each one of your dealers gets free access to Roomvo Assistant, the room visualization widget that lives on their existing websites.
You can also set your retailers up with a new, subsidized website, complete with a customizable product catalog, search engine optimization, lead capture functionality, and, of course, our state-of-the-art room visualization technology.
So, with room visualization, you’re generating leads, reducing the time it takes for a customer to make a purchase, driving conversions, and, in many cases, nudging customers towards higher tickets. All with a single tool that your retail partners can add to their websites for free if you’re signed up for RPP.
Assuming they don’t already have it, of course.
Don’t get left behind
Now we focus on the other camp: the 5,500+ (and growing) dealers who already have Roomvo. When a manufacturer joins RPP, they get instant access to that network. In turn, it becomes easier for any of those dealers to access your products.
Maybe it helps you connect with a dealer you weren’t working with previously, helping to open new doors and expand your reach.
Or perhaps a retailer already carries your products, but they can’t show them on their visualizer because you’re not signed up for RPP. Most of the world’s leading brands are already partnered with Roomvo. Do you really want to be the only one whose products aren’t available to visualize?
If you’re not signed up for RPP, you could be giving the upper hand to your competitors in the showroom too. Many dealers are now using QR codes and interactive kiosks to bring visualization into the showroom. Without RPP, shoppers might not even know your products are available.
Syncing product data
RPP doesn’t just get your products into the hands of our 5,500+ dealers. It also allows you to control the flow of information and sync your product data with them — instantly.
Like I mentioned at the beginning, the flooring industry has a lot of SKUs — sometimes hundreds of thousands for just one manufacturer. I’ve seen first-hand the logistical problems this can create. Every time manufacturers make changes to products upstream, they also need to update their dealers downstream. This can be incredibly complex. You might be partnered with thousands of dealers, who each carry a different selection of your products, making quality control a real challenge.
Luckily, RPP helps manufacturers take back control of their data, their assets, and their brand.
Whenever you upload or change a product image, for example, the image will automatically be updated across both of your room visualizers and, depending on their level of integration, your dealers’ product catalogs and product display pages (PDPs). And if you take your product offline, it’s offline. No need to ask each one of your dealers to remove them from their catalogs individually. No need for manual labor. No need to worry about image quality, incorrect product details, or out-of-date product offerings.
When we asked Michael Johnson, the vice president of enterprise sales and marketing technology over at Shaw, about their partnership with Roomvo, he said getting access to the Roomvo footprint was a “critical” component for this very reason.
“It gave us a channel where we could provide our dealers with timely data that helps them sell our product in their local market,” Johnson said. “We sync with Roomvo on hundreds of thousands of selling styles every single day. So, the partnership that we’ve established with Roomvo allows us to provide our dealers out in the marketplace with accurate images, accurate product descriptions, accurate specs, and the most timely changes to which product is added or removed from our portfolio.”
RPP allows manufacturers to provide dealers with accurate images, product descriptions, and specs on hundreds of thousands of products. Each dealer can personalize their data streams according to which products they carry, rather than a generic list of products. In other words, it allows you to put your best foot forward, making sure your products are being presented as they should to the end consumer. This gives you more control of your brand, more visibility for your products, and, ultimately, more sales.
Access to consumer insights
With so many products out in the market, deciding what stays and what goes is massive. Without RPP, manufacturers have limited access to what’s happening at the retail level, so it’s tough to see which products are actually resonating with consumers.
Roomvo helps inform decisions on product development, marketing and merchandising with a data-driven approach, giving you easy access to consumer-level insights gleaned from visualizer usage across your entire retail network.
As Todd Skidmore, senior director of digital marketing, e-commerce, and analytics at Mohawk, explained in our recent webinar, this gives manufacturers a much larger data sample to work with.
“I think that’s the biggest benefit you get,” Skidmore said. “You’re looking at a wide variety of dealers, and you can also start to understand geographic differences because you have enough of a sampling size … If we only had our brand sites, that’s potentially not enough information to drive the reach or the locality of things and the specifics when you get to a certain geographic area.”
With the breadth of data available from Roomvo, Skidmore said his team has a better understanding of the types of products, categories, color trends, and design approaches that are driving engagement and leads. And they use that information to ensure their product development decisions “are matching what consumers are actually engaging with.”
For example, if no one is viewing your product today, you already know that in six months no one is probably buying it. So, maybe let’s reduce production and not waste money on products that nobody is buying. Or let’s up our game with promotion. If you do neither, the sales data will eventually come in several months later. At that point, it’s too late. You’ve already lost millions of dollars.
Generally, this can be a massive blind spot. We’re constantly striving to give manufacturers more data, better data, that helps inform business decisions related to product development, marketing, and merchandising. And we’re just getting started.
Give more, get more
No manufacturer in the world has the resources to cater to every dealer the way they’d like.
It’s just not feasible.
That’s why it’s so important to build automated, scalable systems using the latest technologies, which allow you to interact with your dealers more efficiently. Then, you’ll be able to cater to 1,000 instead of 100, offering best-in-class service without needing to be there every day.
Don’t underestimate the impact this could have on your bottom line. This way, you’ll be able to do a lot more for your dealers — and get a lot more from them.
And that, to me, sounds like a win-win.
