Stop waiting for your website to be perfect and get on with it!

Allan

Good to be here, Tim. Thanks for having me.

Tim

Mate, it’s a pleasure. Now, a $25 million a year Internet retailer, top 500 Internet company in America, etc., etc., etc.

Allan

Etc., etc., etc. Sounds impressive, doesn’t it?

Tim

Well, they’re nice numbers. I’ll get to some more numbers in a minute, but it started under the back deck of your brother’s house.

Allan

Yeah. Actually, under my folks’ back deck. Well, if you want to hear the story –

Tim

That’s why you’re here.

Allan

That’s why I’m here. It started with an idea that I’ve had about flipping homes. There were a lot of older homes in our area. We decided to go renovate them, and we started ripping all of the old stuff out and putting new stuff in, kind of basic renovation. And we noticed that there was a lot of old cast iron claw foot tubs, you know, those old, big, heavy soakers. And my idea was to take a sledgehammer to them and destroy them and throw them in the dumpster, and my brother, at that time, was like, “You know, somebody somewhere has got to be buying these things.” So he calls around and finds a company in New York City that says, “Yeah, we’ll pay you $50 a piece for them.” And so we saved a bunch of them up and <inaudible> *0:12:05 trailer and started loading them up and take them into the city and we came out made $300 on six tubs. That’s awesome. That’s great. Beer money, you know, and off we go. So we stopped doing the home renovation but my brother is intrigued by the selling of these tubs so then he starts placing an ad in the local, we call The Paper <inaudible> *0:12:32, that’s the local classifieds paper. That’s all it is, just classifieds. And he said something like, “I’ll come to your house and remove those old tubs for free as long as you’ve got all four feet.” And people called left and right, and we would find tubs in farmers’ fields and under foundations and used as troughs and as grottos for the Virgin Mary, I mean, any conceivable … planters … never as a tub. It was always something else.

Tim

Was it literally like, you know, you ran that ad, like a line ad – I’m guessing it was a $20-line ad – were you really inundated kind of straightaway?

Allan

It started off slowly because I don’t think people knew what to do with it. I think what more than likely happened was it appeared in the miscellaneous section because what else do you put in there? So I think what happened is somebody would read that and, if they didn’t have a tub, they’d mention, like, “Hey, Phil, don’t you have a tub you’re using as a horse trough? Well, if you want to sell that, this idiot’s going to come to your house and take it out of your yard for you.” Well, we would. We went all over the place ripping this stuff out. And so we started selling them into New York and then finally they were like, “You know, we can’t buy as many of them as you’re bringing in.” So my brother said, “Well, what do you guys do with them?” And they said, “Well, we refinish them.” So my brother learns how to refinish a tub. It’s not that hard. And so we start refinishing. He takes them to local antique shows and people were like, “Those tubs are awesome. We’d love one. Do you sell the plumbing?” “Uh, no, but we’ll figure it out.” And that’s how it began.

Tim

Man, you’re just slowly, slowly owning the entire value chain.

Allan

I think what it came down to – my brother and I talked about it, you know, looking back at it 20 years later – I think what it was that we just wouldn’t say no, and I think that served us well at the beginning. And you just did whatever it took. But now, as a company that’s maturing into a larger company – we now have 45 employees now – there’s actual discipline occasionally, you know, in what we do in our thinking. I think what we’ve discovered is that you have to say no a lot more. You really have to constrain yourself or you will wind up just swamped.

Tim

That’s interesting. Let’s just talk about that moment because you’ve gone from you and your brother having some fun and realizing that, “Ha! We’ve hit on something here.” And you realized that, all of a sudden, you can earn more with a value chain, you can earn more dough. Can you remember the point in time when it, all of a sudden, was like, “Oh, this is getting serious”?

Allan

Well, I’d started off in a different career path so there was a point when my brother started doing it on his own, and then I joined back on later on. But he told me that the very first website we built was 1996, I think it was, 1995-1996. I can’t remember but somewhere right in there. And they charged him $10,000 for a site now that, you know, is all but free. And he was thinking to himself, “You know, all I have to do is sell one faucet a day every day of the year and I’ll pay for this site.” And I think it was that moment when it just started to dawn on us that there’s something here. And there was like incremental moments in there. The one I think … I had signed back on and we were custom quoting everything. You had to write into us, you know, you could do a little bit of e-commerce online but we didn’t have a lot of product up. It was more of a front page with a telephone number and some products, and I was quoting shipping. Now, you have to understand that a cast iron claw foot tub, particularly a vintage one, is unique so everyone had to be photographed and measured and catalogued, and because they’re all different and created differently and individually weighed and then you had to do individual quotes. And I remember the feeling I had. I had like five or six of them to do and I have had it. I looked at the last 50 that I’ve done. So the average cost is this, I built that into every tub price, changed the site to read free shipping. I thought I’ve just saved myself some work. Within about two weeks, we were getting just call after call after call after call about people wanting to place orders. No more questions about can you, can you not. Nope. We just started taking orders.

Tim

We’re still around ’96-’97?

Allan

We were around probably ’99 by this point.

Tim

It’s interesting, you know, because even back then, it just seems an eternity, doesn’t it? You were talking –

Allan

It feels like forever ago.

Tim

Online world but, you know, back then, I’m guessing it’s a relatively high involvement purchase. You were asking people back then to transact over this thing called the Internet, which hadn’t been around that long. You are asking them to buy something sight unseen if you like. They’re seeing it online. There are a number of barriers to purchase that I can see. They still exist today even. I mean, there are still a whole lot of people that just wouldn’t buy a bath online. What did you do back then? Free shipping is a good one.

Allan

Oh, that was massive.

Tim

Massive. Did you kind of overtly sit down and go how do we knock down every barrier to entry or, if you didn’t, what did you do?

Allan

Well, if I had to do it again, I think my … certainly, you learn a lot over the years, but I think it wasn’t lost on us that people were buying used bath tubs sight unseen, and there are all kinds of problems that can happen with this. The wonderful thing about cast iron claw foot tubs is they’re heavy and fragile so if you don’t pack them just right for long-haul shipping, they’ll wind up there in pieces. So it’s fraught with peril to buy a claw foot tub from sight unseen. We did a lot of things, like put trust marks on our site. We had one called Safe Shopping Network or we put our Better Business Bureau logo up. We did anything we could with trust marks. We got that one pretty quickly, and I think that helped considerably. People wanted to know that we were not some fly-by-night operation. I think that when they called up, they could talk to somebody who was in a position of responsibility.

Tim

So clearly your phone number is front and center of your site today. Back then, it was too?

Allan

Yeah, absolutely. And I think just by the fact we knew what we were talking about and we had the trust marks on the site, I think that calmed a lot of people down. And we’re still big into the trust marks. We realize that people don’t know who we are. And I think product ratings and reviews – I’ll take a side journey here on that one. We were certainly one of the first smaller companies to actively embrace ratings and reviews. I don’t know if you guys are familiar with Bazaarvoice and PowerReviews. They’re now one and the same company. But the joke at Bazaarvoice is we’re lucky number seven. We’re their seventh client, and I don’t know how many thousands they have now but we were there near the very beginning.

Tim

Can you explain what that is?

Allan

Yeah, product ratings and reviews are when customers are –

Tim

Oh, yeah, yeah. No, I get that. Feedback. <inaudible> *0:20:30

Allan

Well, what happens is when people leave ratings and reviews for a product, it does two things. It informs the public about a product, and there are all kinds of pros for that. There are all kinds of wonderful things that should happen. If you have an online store and you’re selling products and you’re not encouraging ratings and reviews, I just think you’re missing it. But the other it does is it builds an inherent trust in the site. So I would deliberately post, like I was very liberal with my posting policy. If you didn’t insult us, curse or didn’t mention a competitor, I didn’t care what you said. And there are some scathing reviews, and we earned some of them. I mean, boy, did we drop the ball occasionally. But I’d leave them on there, and people would call up and ask, “Is that true?” I go, “Yup. We absolutely did that to that customer.”

Tim

Did you get the opportunity to respond to those reviews?

Allan

Yes, absolutely. Yeah, and we would. And to this day, I respond to all public criticism or commentary about our site and, you know, you can look and if I think that the customer is being grotesquely unreasonable or is misrepresenting the fact, I will say it and I will provide the fact. But when we make a mistake – and, boy, we’ve done some doozies – I will grovel appropriately. It’s just not fair. I don’t think we should be adding to the net misery of the world, and I take it personally. Somebody’s trying to do their bathroom renovation and you ship them the wrong item and the next one arrives damaged and you’re just like … you just don’t need to do that to people. So I think you’ve got to take ratings and reviews seriously and you’ve got to answer customer’s problems online.

Tim

I’ve got a client who’s in the renovation business. He’s got an online store. He’s one of my Mastermind clients, and he’s wanting to know how do you get reviews? How do you encourage people to leave reviews? You have to be actively doing that, don’t you?

Allan

Well, you actively do. We send an email out four to six weeks after a purchase asking people to rate their product, and we get a decent return on that. One of the things we did years ago – we’ve done it I think three times now; we do it about every two years – is we have a review for charity. And we’ll let our employees pick a charity that they like. Last time it was Alex’s Lemonade Stand, which is a girl who passed away, a little girl from Philadelphia who was diagnosed with cancer and passed away from it. And here family started this little lemonade stand because that’s how she was raising money to pay for her cancer treatment, so it’s a great charity. And we teamed up with one of our vendor partners, one of the people who supply the products, and we said, “How about this? How about we offer … we email everyone that’s bought from us in the last two years and we just ask them to review their products, and for every approved review on our site, both of us will donate $2.50 to the Alex’s Lemonade Stand Foundation.” And in a period of about three weeks, we generated $12,000 in donations to this charity.

Tim

That’s a lot of reviews. That’s a thousand or so reviews.

Allan

It was roughly 1,200-ish. And for a small company like ours, that’s good. It was a good return rate and –

Tim

Let me just get that clear because this is interesting. I want to have a talk about online-offline because this discussion relates as much to an offline business as it does online. But you identified a charity. You sent an email out to everyone who’s bought a product from you in the last two years, last year, and said, “Hey, would you mind giving us a review of how your product is performing? If you do, we’re going to donate $2.50 to a charity, Alex’s Lemonade Stand and it’s going to be good for everyone.”

Allan

Everybody wins.

Tim

Everyone wins. Twelve hundred reviews come back. What did you do with those reviews? Did you put them specifically against each product that it referred to or is it just for a very long testimonial page? Where did you put them?

Allan

No. It’s against every product so if you go on to our site, you can click on any product and most of them … majority of our products have at least one review. But there are some that just, you know, people cannot talk enough about the curved shower rod or they cannot talk enough about a shower curtain with a panel in it. We have hundreds of reviews on those. And we just post it to the product. And our functionality that we get through Bazaar voice allows customers to go through and sort by high rating, low rating, relevancy, number of positive votes, I mean –

Tim

Yeah, I’m looking at it now.

Allan

You can really dissect the reviews quite easily.

Tim

Yeah, great. Love that. Powerful. I just want to go back to … just to finish the discussion around trust stamps because I’m looking at your site now. I’m assuming that the trust stamps you’re talking about standard credit card and PayPal ones. Then you’ve got BBB, which is a reliability program. You’ve got a Norton secured, tested for safety, Safe Shopping Network. You’ve got Internet Retailer top 500 online retailer. I guess there are some brands there … Norton is one that sticks out, obviously, Visa, Mastercard, etc. … not so much trust stamps because they’re just methods of payment. But what I’m asking is do people really trust them?

Allan

I think they do and I think there are other trust things we can do here. For instance, like even if you look at the middle of our page, you can see that we’ve put some of the top manufacturers that we carry. The fact that we’re, you know, <inaudible> *0:26:32 I think that that brings a level of trust in brands to our site. They wouldn’t … brand names there. You can trust us. When you look at our … the Better Business Bureau is very large in the United States. I think it’s a good standard reporting agency. Norton tells you that the site is fairly secure. The different payment methods show you that we have that kind of clearing house capability. The Internet Retailer saying that we’re a top 500 retailer, I think the message of that says that we’re large enough. We’re at least sizable enough to be in that list. So I think there’s a … when we looked at that, we didn’t want to overwhelm folks with the trust but letting them know that, “You can trust us. We are trustworthy.”

Tim

I’m looking at the site. Now, I’m going to be constructively critical about that.

Allan

Go ahead. There’s plenty to be critical about.

Tim

What’s that?

Allan

There’s plenty to be critical about.

Tim

Well, you know more than me because you’re part of a $25 million a year online business that sells vintage tubs and baths so what would I know? But with my consumer hat on, I go to the site and it feels like a site that hasn’t had an update for about seven years.

Allan

Well, see, that’s where I totally say you’re wrong.

Tim

I love it.

Allan

We haven’t had an update in about ten years.

Tim

(Laughs) Ten years it hasn’t had an update.  Oh, goodness me.

Allan

We’re in the process of modifying it. We had a number of business challenges that we had to face. One of the good problems we had was that we grew faster than we knew what to do with it. And, you know, I’m an American history major. I’m not some great venture capitalist. I’m not the brilliant entrepreneur. My brother is a geologist by training, so it’s not like we did the MBA program and then got venture capital and decided to fire this thing up. It’s a series of happy accidents. And I think, looking back, the first problem was we didn’t have a handle on the money. When you start pushing over a million dollars a year, the money can start getting away from you. The flow and velocity of money coming in and out of your business and the timing of it, how you think about it changes dramatically. And we just didn’t have that training so you don’t think about it until, fortunately, the people you hired go, “Hey, you got to be thinking about this differently. It’s not just a matter of us crunching numbers. You have to think differently about it.” Then it became an issue of how do we find efficiency. So then instead of, again, working on the site, we went out and secured supply chains so we could get out of the antique business and get into the standardized mass-produced ones. Now, we have arrangements with manufacturers all over the world. Simultaneously with that, one of the strategies we pursued – and again it was at the expense of paying attention to the site – was when the dot.com bust hit, when everyone was talking, “Oh, you got to get eyeballs on the site. It’s not about conversion. It’s about how many people see it.” And my brother and I –

Tim

Was that W.C. Fields saying that? (Laughs)

Allan

Well, it’s just my idiot voice. You know, even when everyone was talking about that and there was the <inaudible> *0:29:58 and all that silliness, you know, I get it. But for us it was always about, you know, we got to pay the bills. Eyeballs don’t pay it; sales pay it. So when I realized … I guess I had a kind of an epiphany. I realized that for that brief moment when it collapsed, Vintage Tub was going to be in a great position because we were growing and we would need the services that all of these web providers were providing and there will be limited buyers for those seller services. But I also knew that the Internet wasn’t going anywhere and that these big companies were going to figure it out, and the moment they did, they were going to turn around and suck all of the talent out of the room, and we would be left high and dry. We wouldn’t be able to hire the talent, wouldn’t be able to go out there and get the vendors we needed. So I started around 2001-2002 going out and networking aggressively at the major conferences. Me coming out to Australia is one of those … is a long offshoot of that. But we found that aggressive networking, going out and, you know, speaking at the shows, telling our story then beginning to moderate panels and then beginning to moderate entire tracks, that gave us incredible access to knowledge and information. And I think that was one of the transformative things that we did was to get out there and be just in the mix with the best people we could possibly find, the most knowledgeable people. And it has paid dividend after dividend after dividend. And then, of course, we went on to get a new ERP system, a new backend system, a new accounting system. So, finally, the very last thing we’re going to work on is –

Tim

Is the shop brand.

Allan

– is the shop brand. Everything else has been taken care of now. It’s taken that long to do it.

Tim

What great learning. I mean, you know, big deal if it looks seven … well, now, you’ve confirmed it’s ten years old. It’s functional. It’s selling … It’s a fossil. It’s a fossil selling $25 million of baths a year so well done on that. And now tell me what role does eBay play in the mix? Because I can go to Vintage Tub.com and buy a tub, and it looks as though I can also go to Vintage Tub on eBay. Is that an additional large distribution channel? Is it a clearance house? What is it?

Allan

It’s more of a clearance house for us. eBay was instrumental in my learning. When I broke away from the business near its infancy … once we got initially started, I broke away and did my own thing. One of the things I did was liquidate local businesses online, and I would list their items for sale on eBay. And, remember, this was back in ’97-’98 and I misspelled something once, and I’ve been known to do that, but I misspelled something and I didn’t catch it until a couple of sales cycles later. And, boy, this item was selling, and I looked at it, like, no one’s looking at it but I’m constantly selling it. And it dawned on me – my first great insight into pay-per-click and SEO advertising was that if you have a common misspelling for a word and you rank well for it, fewer people look for it so you have less competition. It was one of those kinds of weird things. You can misspell … like one of the brands we carry is Elizabethan Classics, and we misspelled Elizabethan. And we got far fewer searches but they converted to massive rate. And so it was one of those little weird tricks.

Tim

So the marketing lesson there is clearly people who can’t spell buy a lot.

Allan

That’s right. Yeah, we’re out there. But it was just one of those things that eBay taught me and it got me thinking about the power of the Internet. So my brother approached me and said, “Hey, you know, we’re really thinking about making a full time go at this business.” I was like, “Well, you got to believe in the Internet, man.” You know, I’m selling, you know, hundreds of dollars a month. (Laughs) And the first year we were in business – I always joke about this – the first year in business, it was my brother, his wife and myself, and the first year, we had net profit of $19,000 and we call that the year of starvation. And then off we went. But we believed it. I think the value for eBay for us now is not as great as it was to begin with. It’s a clearing house now but it was instrumental in teaching us how to sell online in certain ways and it also inspired us. It’s like, “No, the market’s there. We just have to figure out how to get to them.”

Tim

Now, you have a showroom as well, don’t you? You have a brick-and-mortar somewhere to go, I can touch and feel your baths.

Allan

If you want to touch and feel our baths, you’re more than welcome to. Yes, we have a showroom partially because we don’t get a lot of traffic to it. It’s a very nice showroom. It’s nicely laid out but it’s not a prime focus. What winds up happening is that, especially appliance dealers insist that we have product in the showroom, and I think that’s a throwback to the old days when the brick-and-mortar stores had to put them in there. So now we’ve got lots of stuff that very few people see but that’s okay –

Tim

At what point did you open a showroom?

Allan

That was … we had a showroom of sorts – and I’ll use the term very loosely – about maybe six to eight years ago. But we have a real showroom now for about three years.

Tim

It’s not an easy – I mean, I had to dig deep to find that on the site. It’s obviously not something you promote, given your online store and online business. I mean, it’s probably limited in terms of people who are ever going to go there but it’s obviously a good credentializer if people go, “Oh, these guys actually do have a high street presence. They must be good.”

Allan

Yeah, well, one of the things … certainly when someone takes the effort to come to our showroom – and I remember this when I was actually still selling out there. You know, right now, I’m just in product acquisition. But when I was actually meeting customers, it was like an adventure. You can drive two hours west from New York City and come to the wilds of Pennsylvania and see these tubs. Oooh. Yeah, they’d spend all day and have a blast.

Tim

Crazy day out.

Allan

Oh, yeah, it was a wacky day out.

Tim

Go home clean.

Allan

Yeah. Visit the folks out in Pennsatucky, as we call ourselves. But, you know, they really enjoyed it. And it still happens when folks come out and it’s a special experience because we’ll actually take a salesman and they’ll sit with them and, if it’s an hour, it’s an hour, if it’s three hours, it’s three hours. We don’t really care. <inaudible> *0:36:37 we’re more than happy to talk to you. So it’s still small but special.

Tim

Now, that brings me to the discussion – and, by the way, listeners, I’m talking to Allan Dick who is one of the founding employees and brother of the owner of Vintage Tub. And Allan is coming to Australia in a couple of weeks time to speak at – what is the – it’s an e-commerce conference, isn’t it?

Allan

It’s Online E-Commerce Melbourne. It’s going to be the … let me get my dates straight here –

Tim

April 18-19, I think from memory.

Allan

Yeah, I think that’s what it is. Yeah, and there are some pre-conference issues the day before, like on the 16^th. So, yeah, it’s a good show.

Tim

Great show. In fact, my sponsor Net Registry is one of the sponsors of that conference so it’s got to be good. Allan, I’m really keen to understand … I want to talk offline. What’s your view on bricks-and- mortar businesses that refuse to embrace the online world? And by that, I mean, I don’t mean going headlong into setting up an online shop and doing the whole catastrophe as you have so successfully done. But, at least, acknowledging that, you know what, the marketing world has changed. There are massive amounts of opportunities to market your business online, yet they’re still kind of … they’ve still got the six-year old, ten-year old website. They may not even have a website. What do you say to those people?

Allan

Well, I have learned not to tell other people how to do their business. But I would say that, in general, if you’re – I think I’ll answer it this way. I think there’s a huge misperception out there about the value of online and the synergy between on- and offline, and I’ll demonstrate this. Every year, we go to the kitchen and bath industry show and I’ve gone to that now for eight-ten years, something like that, and it’s an exhibition of all the major plumbing brands. And I remember when I would go there to start with, we were like – I got to watch how I phrase this; this is a public thing – we were shunned, I think is a very, very polite way of describing how we were treated at first. Then when the market crashed in 2008 and 2009, oh, they loved us. Online was a saviour. And then when the economy started improving, ah, we hate you guys again. What I keep having to evangelize is saying, “Look, can we skip past the brick-and-mortar versus catalogue or versus online store? Can we please just see reality for what it is?” We are, whether we like it or not, helping brick-and-mortar stores sell products, and brick-and-mortar stores, whether they like it or not, are helping us sell products. We just got to get out of the … the one channel is trying to kill the other. One channel isn’t going to kill it.

Tim

I can see how brick-and-mortar stores are helping online stores sell products because often there’s a significant price differential, depending on what category you’re talking about, high purchase, high involvement items. But how is an online store helping a brick-and-mortar store sell more items?

Allan

They’re doing it because our shelves have virtually unlimited shelf space. So, let’s say I’m a customer and I’m looking for – oh, I don’t know – a faucet or a toilet, and I can’t find the exact toilet I want at Home Depot or Lowes or my local brick-and-mortar store. I go online, either on my tablet or my mobile device or at work, and I find Vintage Tub has this great total corner toilet that no one else wants to display. Well, they’ve got a good relationship with their local store. They don’t trust us or they just want to tell their plumber about it. So they go into the brick-and-mortar store with our print out and say, “Can you get me this?” Now, I have scores to hundreds of emails from a major chain here – I’m not going to say who it is but it’s one everyone’s heard of – and they sell the same line and item that we rank very highly for. I’ve actually had … certainly hundreds of customers have written to us, saying, “Can you help me purchase this at my local X store?” But I’ve also have had emails from their associates writing to us, asking us for information. And in the spirit of goodwill and good karma, it’s some basic questions that’s not about to close the sale for you. And I guess one of the things I can’t stand is when a brick-and-mortar store says, “I can’t close the guy who walks into my showroom with a printout, saying ‘I want to buy something.’” I mean, unless they’re buying that product at such a disadvantage and there’s no excuse for appliance buying groups and some of these other potential things that people can do, there’s no excuse why brick-and-mortar stores, even of a moderate size, couldn’t compete against us. It’s just silly. So I don’t have any sympathy for people who don’t know basic closing techniques. I’m sorry, I just don’t. I’m certain I’ll get hate mail for that but that’s how I feel.

Tim

<inaudible> *0:42:09.

Allan

Oh, please do. (Laughs) <inaudible> *0:42:12

Tim

Thanks so much, mate, for appearing on the Small Business Big Marketing show. I think it’s a great story. I look forward to the next iteration of the website when it’s done. Feel free to share it because I’d love to see it. And I’ll put links in the show notes to Vintage Tub.com –

Allan

We appreciate it.

Tim

– and check all about it. And do you deliver internationally or is it all USA, Canada?

Allan

I have overnighted a tub to Tokyo.

Tim

Wow!

Allan

Yeah, that was one crazy delivery. So, but, yes, we can. We certainly can.

Tim

Love it. Allan, thanks for appearing, mate.

Allan

All right, Tim. Thank you so much for having me. Good day, everyone.