by Here’s the story of a small furniture and design shop that’s done a nice job of standing out in a tough market.
Verde Home, a designer showroom and retail store in Atlanta, has built its own distinctive brand with a do-it-yourself approach to marketing and product development.
The two couples operating the home fashion store, with its smart transitional mix of furniture and rugs, have created a clean and unique look in the store. And communications with shoppers and online browsers employ custom art and copy to match.
As a result, Verde Home presents successfully in the home-furnishings intensive West Midtown as a highly refined and stylish resource for full design plans, custom rugs and smart-looking home furnishings.
The big deal we’re focusing on to start are the lovely and clever illustrations by one of the owners.
Instead of relying on manufacturer-supplied photography, Verde Home blends watercolor drawings with in-store photography on its website and in its point-of-sale collateral.
“Right from the start, we didn’t want to look like everyone else,” says Kent Schneider, one of the store’s founders and the husband of Leighanne, the artist who creates the watercolors that give the marketing its unique look. “But early on we realized that it’s difficult to create your own brand in the absence of your own photographer.”
For the store’s significant products and categories, Leighanne converts manufacturer photo image packs into the illustrations.
“It’s part of our brand now so everything that goes out there is going to have that hand-drawn watercolor look,” says Kent Schneider, whose facility with computers and digital marketing has also played a key role in the store’s marketing outreach.
Leighanne’s artwork strikes an appealing chord with shoppers, he says: “I think there’s a little bit of nostalgia to it. We live in such a digital age, but designers who’ve been around for a while recognize it as a lost art. And the younger folks see it as cool and on trend.”
And with his advanced desktop-publishing skills (Google tells me that’s an obsolete term now but the work done here deserves the fancier term), Kent can crank out customized catalogs for the stores’ key vendors, in addition to the informational cards sprinkled around the store.
As much as possible, room sketches will be presented to customers with the watercolors incorporated.
Click into the website a layer or two, and you’ll find many of the same product thumbnail photo links that most retailers rely on to present their assortment of favored products, but the flavor is set by the artwork.
“We keep it all as up to date as possible, but with all the changes the manufacturers are always making, it’s hard to keep it all up to date,” he says. But he never uses links to his manufacturers’ sites, as he doesn’t want shoppers’ attention to waver from Verde Home’s offerings.
Verde Home opened in 2006, a partnership of Kent Schneider and husband-and-wife Paul and Laura Walker-Baird. Kent and Leighanne Schneider got married a few years later.
How’d we get here
The first Verde Home location was a tight two-bay shop, with one room for rugs and the rest for furniture and presentations. Perhaps a bit early for that particular fringe of Atlanta’s Howell Mill style district, the shop was in a new development, and you really had to know where it was to find it.
They wanted to do retail business, but the early days were largely driven by Laura’s design projects. She was already well established in Atlanta, and she still stays busy-busy working with clients, putting together presentations and overseeing installations as well as merchandising the store.
Her look is a sophisticated contemporary or perhaps modern transitional, and her eye guides the store’s product selections and displays. The showroom has great natural light and the upholstery covers are strong and colorful. She sprinkles in antiques and other one-of-a-kinds.
The store moved to a better retail location in 2015, and since then they’ve expanded twice to the current showroom of about 10,000 square feet. Besides being visible from the street, the new space was closer to the largest cluster of lifestyle retailers such as Room & Board, Design Within Reach and a passel of stylish design shops owned locally. The modern specialists Cantoni and Design Within Reach both moved their Atlanta stores to this furniture enterprise zone in the last few years.
Atlanta’s Howell Mill or West Midtown area has been buzzing with designers and trade showrooms for quite some time, but many of those specialists have been forced to evolve over the past 15 years to more of a retail-inclusive approach. Of course, this is a trend that’s not exclusive to Atlanta.
On top of that, Atlanta — again this is consistent with what’s happening in most city centers — is fairly exploding with people I now recognize as old children but defined in sociology as Millennials. With all the new houses, apartment complexes, high-rises and condos everywhere in Atlanta, the in-town market has been strong for furniture.
We are too polite to ask how old they are, but we are not too timid to guess that the Baird-Walkers and the Schneiders are Generation X. The families’ partnership dates back to Paul and Kent’s New England college days together.
They moved to Atlanta in the ‘90s and went to work together for a small rug importer, Rugs by Robinson Ltd., primarily serving the design trade in the Southeast but sometimes venturing out to larger swaths of the country. It was an intense training program for future retailers.
With Laura’s design business growing fast, they opened the store in 2007. As the Verde name translates, their first focus put a heavy emphasis on green, sustainable products, and their short list of key vendors do emphasize environmentally-responsible production.
Product mix snapshot
Rugs have continued to be a major piece of who they are — still neck-and-neck with upholstery for lead product category. Their design partnership with Jaipur Living allows them to create custom rugs for display and for customers. “That’s been a lot of fun, and it’s been getting better and better,” Kent says.
Besides supplying products to Laura’s design clients, Verde Home has also pursued the design trade vigorously, and that’s been a big chunk of their business.
“To get the trust of the designers, you need to know how they work and you need to make their lives easier as much as possible,” Paul Baird explains. If they trust you to be precise and solve problems, designers are “long-haul customers,” he says.
For merchandising, Verde Home works with a tight list of factories who can mirror the retailer’s focus on environmentalism and strong partnerships. In addition to Jaipur rugs, key brands include better domestic brands such as American Leather upholstery, Copeland bedroom and dining room and Johnston Casuals for metal and glass. Selamat Designs supplies mixed-media imported pieces, and Four Hands supplies some accent pieces. Massoud was recently brought in to expand the store’s fabric options for upholstery.
Vendor selection has been a careful process from the start. “We want to know that these are our kind of people,” Baird says. As a small store, the five or six people on staff all have to be multi-tasking problem solvers, and the vendors have to be partners in the daily struggle to get things done and answer questions.
Especially with the current extended lead times on factory orders, Verde Home’s customers want answers. “We’re in the same boat as everyone else,” Kent Schneider says. “It’s just a logistics problem. Paul and I spend more time trying to figure out where everything is than just about anything else.”
Why’d we write this story
This is my second retail profile for Home News Now. I should have explained after my first one on Bliss Home of Knoxville, Tenn., that I know these people, having worked with them directly as a sales rep. In fact, I like them, but I don’t think I ever took any sort of compensation from them, unless you include lunch.
What we’re going to try and do in this space is talk to some of the interesting people out in the retail world. If you know someone who’s doing a particularly notable job of building a retail operation, feel free to let me know via email at tedmonds@homenewsnow.com
Tom Edmonds has been writing about and watching the furniture industry since 1993. He’s been a reporter most of his career and spent quite a while as a sales rep. He lives in Atlanta.
