4 Tips to Help Small Furniture Makers Perform Bettersubmitted on 28 March 2018
Being a furniture maker that completes individual cabinets, wardrobes, tables, and other woodworking projects in a small workshop isn’t easy. The list of equipment necessary is long and the hours aren’t much shorter either. It helps to have a good understanding of dependable woodworking design, find the right tools, and learn how to manage the business aspects too.
Here are four tips to help small furniture manufacturers get better results.
Have the Right Tools
Whether you’re a medium-sized workshop or a small one with a goal to expand into a bigger space, having the right tools is essential. Woodworking tools manufacturer Timesavers Inc has over seven decades of experience producing sanders, abrasive belts, and other equipment to produce the perfect finish to cabinetry, desks, and other furniture. Their products are used by over 50,000 people, so you cannot go wrong with Timesavers. Their tools are certainly more geared towards furniture makers that work on a larger scale, but even if your current operation is smaller, keep an eye out for their equipment because it’s best-in-class.
Modern Designs
Popular designs evolve over time. When looking at cabinets and other wood-based furniture over the past couple of decades, designs have modernized. Sometimes these are small things like the types of handles used on desk drawers or how the final finish looks. Consumers want a thoroughly modern piece of handmade furniture that will fit into the existing décor and not look out of place.
It’s a good idea to prepare a variety of design options and finishing touches for each basic product model. This way, the buyer feels that they’re customizing their handmade furniture to their specifications, even when they’re ordering from a limited list of choices.
Hone Your Marketing Efforts
The cost of marketing falls when furniture manufacturers take advantage of online marketing opportunities. While taking out whole page adverts in home décor magazines like Architectural Digest, House Beautiful, or Country Living isn’t within most small business’ budgets, targeting likely consumers on Facebook certainly is.
When you know the email addresses of previous customers, these can be fed into Facebook to access either these same previous buyers or people who fit the same demographic as them. The social giant now has over two billion users and is an excellent platform to target the most likely buyers far more exactly and at a substantially lower cost than with magazine or other forms of advertising.
Personalized Service
When dealing with the homeowner directly and not their interior designer, furnishing a home is far more personal. What they’re looking for Is not just a quality product, but a feeling of receiving a good service from people who care. We’re all tired of phoning call centers and getting an automated system. One of the benefits of being a smaller business is that personalized service can be a major selling point in the eyes of the buyer. Use that to your advantage.
Growing a small furniture maker into a larger one is a matter of getting a few things right. Using the best tools, providing product options to customize your product line sufficiently, marketing well and getting a little personal (but not too much) all do a lot to close the gap between your small business and larger competitors. Soon enough, you’ll be expanding and chomping at their heels for a larger slice of the market.
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