Showroom Success

As of yet I haven’t frequented a great many glass shop showrooms, but there is one type of retail showroom I do often visit. In my free time I’m an avid knitter and occasionally when I’m on travel I’ll make a point of looking up local craft or yarn shops in the telephone book to see if there’s something unique in the area (if you’ll bear with me, gentlemen, I promise there’s a point to this girly anecdote). Even when I don’t have a particular project in mind, I enjoy visiting these retail shops to see what’s available. Every craft chain has the same discount acrylics, basic wools and the trendier fringe-type yarns, but by visiting different retail shops around the country I’ve come across local yarns that vary widely in texture and colors.

Just this past weekend I found a small shop in Pennsylvania with an interesting selection. I was discouraged at first by the generic inventory set at the front of the shop, but upon further inspection I found several shelves of hand-dyed yarn toward the back of the store. It seemed an odd way to set up inventory to me; wouldn’t you want your most impressive custom material set toward the front?

Well, what about glass? When it comes to setting up your showroom, do you find it more beneficial to put your custom products up front to attract attention—or do you get better results by making the most-requested items clearly visible?

I may have plenty of experience in browsing, but I don’t know the best way to set up a showroom—although, for the April issue of USGlass, I’m hoping to find out. For our April Retailers Issue, I’m looking to learn what it takes to set up a successful showroom.

I recently received a few tips from Buddy Moses, co-owner of Ajax Glass Co. in Fort Worth, Texas. The 63-year-old company does both commercial and residential work, and also has a 12,000-square-foot showroom with a wide variety of inventory on hand. Buddy took a few minutes to talk to me about how he stocks his big retail space.

“Obviously show a lot of product,” he told me, “but make it roomy enough that people can maneuver and move around. We try to carry almost everything in stock and that way we don’t have to depend on other people to supply [product], which is just going to delay delivery times. For example, on the hardware end, people don’t carry as much as we do in stock and they have to order it. [Customers] kind of like to spend their money and just carry it out or have it immediately.”

In addition to hardware, the company offers numerous types of mirrors, glass furniture, glass sinks and shower door enclosures.

“We try to show some of everything so people can see the wide selections,” Buddy said, “and I think that’s important to try to make them in display situations so that people can get a visual of what it may look like in their homes.”

Having a wide variety of product in the showroom means that when it comes to the Ajax’s installation services, any product they’ll need is right at hand. It just happens to benefit the retail customers as well.

So is a bigger selection better? Or do you aim to set out a sampling of what you can accomplish? What’s the secret to your showroom success? Drop me a line at mheadley@glass.com and we’ll see about featuring your glass shop showroom in our April issue.