To My Fellow Showroom Owners,
With the start of a new year, I’ve been doing what many of us do: reviewing the past and planning for the future. It’s a fitting activity for January, but this process is something that we as business owners should be doing year-round. Learning to recognize the hurdles in our way, and then identifying the best ways to overcome them, is a huge part of keeping the lights on. Lately, I’ve been thinking hard about a hurdle that affects us all – bad data.
The unfortunate reality is that, right now, the standards that have been set surrounding the flow of data from vendors to showrooms are pretty low. The lack of data is hurting us all, vendors included. Great data exists, it’s just not making it to showrooms, which is a massive missed opportunity for everyone involved. Showrooms make up a huge chunk of the lighting industry, and it does everyone in the supply chain a disservice to have them working off incomplete data.
I think we have an opportunity to do something about it. I’d like to invite you to read on, and let’s start a discussion that will ultimately help us all. Bottom line: It’s time for better product data.
The Value of Trust and Expertise
As a showroom owner myself, I – like you – have an intimate understanding of the importance of lighting showrooms to the entire distribution channel for the industry. The majority of our business is with new construction or remodeling projects – and in those instances, homeowners want to talk to an expert to make sure the job gets done right.
Our expertise holds value in a way that hasn’t held as fast in other industries. It’s easy to misspeak and say that the relationship we have with our customers, and the information and resources we provide, are invaluable… but one quick look around will tell you that the value is clear when you look at how much healthier the margins are compared to our contemporary home construction industries.
Lighting showrooms are a critical part of the industry – our expertise and customer service keep it profitable! In a world of online low-balling and fixture quality whack-a-mole, consumers prove over and over again that they’d rather buy from an expert they can trust.
So then, as showroom owners, one of the most critical things we can do is to continue to find ways to make our industry thrive. What’s better for showrooms is better for everyone along the distribution channel from our customers to our vendors. It’s no secret that one of the biggest challenges showrooms face is competing with online retailers. In this challenge, I also see a huge opportunity that’s readily available to showrooms and vendors alike.
Better Data is Better for Everyone
When you check out the storefronts of online retailers, it’s clear to see what a difference high-quality data can make to the shopping experience. Creating a beautiful, highly searchable, user-friendly virtual storefront is no small task. It costs vendors thousands of dollars, and massive amounts of effort, to create great data for large online retailers. This data is highly effective – it’s full of details and images and parameters that make their products easy to find and easy to envision in a project.
Unfortunately, the data that comes to lighting showrooms is often delayed… and much less refined. At times it feels like showrooms are at the end of the line – we have to beg for quality, on-time data, and we usually don’t get it in the most useful format.
Now, I want to be clear – I don’t feel there is ANY intentional slight by vendors. I feel that showrooms just haven’t worked together enough to make it viable to provide us with great data on time. It’s just been the status quo for so long that we’ve gotten used to it.
We can do better!
In my work with XOLogic and Lit Living, I have seen how monumentally important having good data is. Product catalogs that are data-rich are more searchable, and when they’re current they’re better equipped to take advantage of new releases and trends as they come.
Some Focus & An Open Invitation
Over the next few months, the XOLogic teams will be releasing new tools and resources in an effort to improve the data we get, and to make great data for lighting showrooms doable for our lighting vendor partners. I think you’ll agree the basic needs showrooms have aren’t big asks.
1 – Showrooms need vendor data early (before products go to market). If a product is sellable, it should have data. Period. Showrooms will appreciate greatly when that data is in the hands of the e-catalogs before it hits the market.
2 – Accurate, detailed, enriched data makes products more sellable. Great data has lots of product detail. More detail makes products more searchable, and the higher up on a search result a product is, the more likely it is to sell.
3 – High-quality images and videos sell more product. The old adage rings true – a picture is worth a thousand words. And in our line of work, high-quality pictures are worth more than words – they increase views and sales.
I’d like to issue a personal invitation to showroom owners to reach out to your top few vendors and ask them to learn more about the tools (many are free, and all are easy) that XOLogic is releasing early in 2023 for better data.
These resources have been in the works for many months, and they’ll help bring lighting showrooms’ data up to par with online retailers. Everyone stands to benefit.
Bottom Line: Better Data Means Better Results
It’s time for showrooms to get some love (in the form of better data). From what I can see, brick and mortar lighting distributors collectively dwarf the online-only channel for most vendors in the lighting industry. I believe that we can, collectively, work together with our vendors to create a better standard for showroom product data.
And that means more sales (for both vendors and showrooms)!
So please, join me in reaching out to your key vendors. PLEASE do not use pressure or irritation, but establish a friendly dialog in requesting that they look into the resources soon to be available for them to get their showroom clients better data.
Better data leads to better results for showrooms AND our vendors. So let’s make better data for showrooms a “thing” in 2023.
SINCERELY,
JASON PETERSEN
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What exactly do I mean when I say “better data”? It’s actually pretty simple. I break down the three things showrooms need their data to have in Getting Showrooms Better Data.
