(Newswire.net — October 16, 2020) —
We bring down that mDesign storage box marked ‘winter’ with all of our sweaters and coats, and the box marked ‘holiday season’ from the attic. Now, your dad can begin to assemble that less-than-scary haunted house that he forces every neighborhood child to walk through BEFORE they can take their well-deserved treats and continue on their trick-or-treat way every All Hallow’s Eve, or as you like to call it, Halloween.
Yes, October is remembered as that colder, festive month that culminates in the ghoulish holiday to end them all. But, October has many reasons to be festive even if you aren’t one to go for the big scare.
October is also known as and for:
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National Adopt a Shelter Dog Month (so cute! #adoptdontshop)
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National American Pharmacist’s Month
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National Awareness Month (nope, not of anything specific… just here to get you aware of your awareness)
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National Sarcastic Month (But I’m SURE you knew that already, right?)
I hope you enjoyed my attempt to celebrate national sarcastic month above. Get it?
October also touts important moments like Get Organized Week (another one of mDesign’s favorite weeks of the year) or Babbling Day, National Nut Day, or Hermits Day and National Increase Your Psychic Powers Day, which happens to be celebrated on the last day of the month and totally overshadows Halloween every year. Yet again, my attempts to celebrate National Sarcastic Month fall flat.
National Get to Know your Customers Day
Needless to say, October is a very festive month of the year. But, there is one day of the month that should stand out to businesses more than most. It’s called GET TO KNOW YOUR CUSTOMERS DAY! This holiday might not get you a day off of work or the kids off from school, but it does remind businesses how important it is to reach out to patrons and get to know them better. The day is observed annually on the third Thursday of each quarter (January, April, July, October). And I should wish you a Happy Get to Know Your Customers Day, if I forgot my manners in July and didn’t bring it up then.
This year, mDesign, the digitally-native, straight-to-consumer home furnishings and storage brand, believes that a successful business is not only celebrating the third Thursday of every quarter, but uses every day of the year to honor Get to Know Your Customers Day. mDesign opened its doors to customers officially in 2015, but not in the traditional sense.
Bob Immerman, Founder and Chief Innovation Officer of mDesign, started the brand with the intention to never sell one mDesign storage product or home furnishing piece to the customer in person in a store. After forty years of designing lines of products that retail shops would only showcase a small portion of in their stores, Immerman’s confidence in his ability to understand his buyer, and to listen to what they wanted and needed, was intact. From that confidence grew an experiment focused on you, the consumer. He wanted to sell his products directly to you, cut out the retail middleman, create ‘uncomplicated home solutions to keep your life organized and styled’ and sell them directly to his consumer. The Amazon Marketplace was mDesign’s first and most important stop.
mDesign’s Amazon Success Started with the Customer
mDesign knows that without the consumer, there would be no mDesign. Immerman did his homework and began to get to know the customer he wanted mDesign and MetroDecor to speak to. In researching Amazon’s marketplace, he learned that almost 90% of consumers use it for product comparison meaning tons of consumer traffic and, though Amazon offered their own private-label brands, their third-party competitors were making up half of the market share and that was growing. Even better, Amazon continued to steal market share from brick-and-mortar stores year over year especially in the home decor and home improvement industries. So, If third-party sellers were doing better and better in the Amazon Marketplace and Amazon was taking annual revenue away from the classic retailer year over year, then a home decor brand that offered durable and stylish products clearly had a good possibility of benefiting and finding its customer by placing its inventory on Amazon. The potential mDesign customer who was shopping online from home was shopping in one place more than most, Amazon. If mDesign was going to become a leader in the e-commerce world, Timmerman knew his focus needed to be on collecting Amazon market share first and foremost.
In getting to know the mDesign home decor shopper from the outset, Immerman and team were able to focus their new product offerings on those which would sell in the Amazon Marketplace specifically. Well, it worked. mDesign/MetroDecor (on the Amazon platform) has become, in only five short years, the fourth top selling third-party brand on Amazon’s US marketplace and continues its journey up that ladder overtaking brands in the top ten and claiming its current spot just inches away from earning a place on the medal stand (in the top three). mDesign’s exceptionally quick growth is worth studying to understand the steps a brand must take to become a nationally recognized leader in their industry.
mDesign’s International Growth
mDesign’s product team continues to listen and get to know the American customer every single moment, but quickly after entering the US marketplace, the team realized the true expanse possible for the brand beyond the American marketplace. Recently, in cooperation with Amazon, the company began its systematic international takeover of all 16 of Amazon’s International marketplaces. To date, mDesign is selling in marketplaces in the UK, France, Spain, Germany, and Italy in Europe. By the end of the year, they will have entered Amazon Canada, Mexico, and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) marketplaces as well. The list is growing quickly and growth does not stop there. MDesign is in negotiations with Amazon as to the timing of the brand’s launch into the world’s remaining marketplaces. The hope and expectation of the brand is to have entered all 16 international marketplaces by the end of 2022.
Getting to Know Every Consumer
Amazon might be mDesign’s bread and butter when looking at a sales report, but the executives for the home decor brand that offers to ‘organize and style’ your life knows there are customers everywhere. Obviously, it was of great importance to the brand to gain its foothold, but team mDesign knows there’s life outside of Amazon. mDesign continues to sell in other online marketplaces like Wal-Mart, Target, and is soon expanding to several other important digital retail platforms. mDesign also has specific worldwide expansion plans for online marketplaces like eBay and Otto. Most are still in the final stages of negotiation, but each marks the choices made by mDesign executives after truly listening to and getting to know their ideal international customer.
mDesign Home Decor, the branded website built out over the last several years, is also an important tool that they utilize for more than simply acting as an ecommerce platform to gather sales.Yes, of course you can buy all the most popular and in-demand mDesign products on the company website. But there’s much more. The mDesign marketing gurus have taken to using the website as a unique and important place to promote content that is helpful in creating function and understanding around the mDesign products and lifestyle. The brand utilizes a blog space within www.mdesignhomedecor.com that informs the mDesign customer of everyday ways that they can utilize the many mDesign storage and organizational products they have purchased. The marketing team’s mBlog, as mDesign calls it, clearly understands who is buying their product and creates content to specifically speak to each of those buyers and their unique needs.
mDesign’s Top Consumers
From original founder Bob Immerman to the full scale marketing department that mDesign today possesses, there’ one key motivating force: listening to and understanding the mindset of the customer and the end-state solution. So, in order for the home decor digital mega-brand to have seen this type of quick and steady growth, much work went into qualifying the mDesign shopper and identifying their largest pain points in order to create the right collection of products.
The mDesign team landed on five types of customers that pinpointed and recognized the likely mDesign consumer:
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The Posh Perfectionist
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The Neat Freak
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The Clutter & Shutter
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The Out and About
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The Social Butterfly
Do not worry. Whether you are a new mother planning how to organize your children’s existence, the city resident attempting to conserve space, the brand new college student (or his or her mother/father) who needs to simplify a new life in a new place, or the young upstart who is getting settled and moving up in their new career of choice and doesn’t want to lose anything every time you move to a bigger place, mDesign has tirelessly worked to get to know you. Once they understood you, and maybe generally categorized you into a customer “type” (though they always note that the beauty of the mDesign consumer in their individuality and the unique ways they use the same mDesign products), the mDesign team creates product upon product, one after the next, each fitting a need for form or function or style that you magically have been seeking in your life.
For the team at mDesign, every day is International Get to Know Your Customers Day and it clearly shows in their exponential and exciting growth over the last five years coupled with expectations of much, much bigger things to come.
And, that statement is in no way an attempt on my part to celebrate National Sarcastic Month.
Find MetroDecor and mDesign on the Amazon Marketplace or visit mDesign website at www.mDesignhomedecor.com.