A Multichannel Merchant Who Knows Her Craft

Sandy Sandler admits that she’s a person who takes problems one at a time. “I like to do all the research, get all the ‘i’s dotted and ‘t’s crossed, and then move on,” she says.

In that light, it makes sense that Sandler would wait until her company, which manufactures and sells a bow-tying item called the Bowdabra, would wait to put up its first transactional Web site until three months ago. She founded Bowdabra back in 1998, when she was training people in starting up corporate gift businesses and found how difficult it was for most people to tie a good bow in a ribbon.

Sandler saw an initial market among small florists and other independent retailers who couldn’t afford the $1,500 to $10,000 that bow-making machinery can cost. So she went out and researched designs, eventually arriving at something that looks and operates something like a bagel slicer: Ribbon goes in lengthwise, gets folded over in a variety of different ways, and then tied up with a special branded Bowdabra wire. Sandler used her M.B.A. in international marketing to line up overseas manufacturers for the gizmo.

But she also saw that at a suggested retail price of $17.98, Bowdabra could reach beyond that first audience of professional decorators, gift-sellers and retailers to tap into the large Martha Stewart nation of home crafters. With that target demographic in mind, the next job became getting the Bowdabra into retail craft stores.

That turned out to be a tough sell in the U.S. “Stores were reluctant to stock it because they already had plenty of other bow-making inventory they wanted to sell,” she says. Again she turned to her overseas contacts to get into retail outlets in Europe, Australia and Brazil. She also pitched directly to ribbon manufacturers, getting them to use their influence to gain entry to big crafts chains by pointing out that wider availability of the Bowdabra would be good for their sales, too. ‘I pointed out that Bowdabra is the razor, but their products are the blades,” she says. “Our success could help them expand.”

So a few years go by. By now, Bowdabra has won a place on the shelves at big U.S. crafts chains such as Michael’s Arts and Crafts, JoAnn Stores, and A.C. Moore. Sandler has become a regular on QVC in America (more on that later) and has stand-ins selling her product on cable channels in Germany and Britain. But she starts to get the sense that her target retail market of women 35 to 55 is changing.

“I began to read that these women were doing more shopping online,” she says. “They weren’t the early adopters of e-commerce, but as time has passed, they’ve become more comfortable with the notion of giving their credit card information to buy things on the Internet. And they now value the convenience of shopping over the Web. Fourteen percent of the crafting market purchased craft items online last year.”

That suggested changes in the way Bowdabra made itself available to customers. For one thing, not everyone was within reach of those retail stores. And users who wanted to re-supply with additional ribbon or wire might not be able to get to a store.

But beyond that, Sandler felt a new, fully functional Web site for Bowdabra would be important as a customer relations tool. “Our product takes some simple training to use,” she says. “From the start, we packaged a complete step-by-step instruction book with the product and sold how-to instructional videos in retail stores.” But not all the stores stocked the videos, and users were coming up with new and interesting projects for the Bowdabra every week—projects that Sandler’s market would enjoy learning about.

The result is the new www.bowdabra.com, a big step beyond the brochureware site Sandler’s company used to have. Customers can use a shopping cart to buy the Bowdabra, the wire, and a selection of specialty ribbons they might not be able to find in their local crafts store. Sandler has minimized channel conflicts with her retail partners by selling the basic unit at the full suggested retail price; most of the resellers offer it for around $14.98, three dollars less. At about the same time as the Bowdabra site launch, the company also opened a store on the Yahoo! Shopping site, figuring that would maximize outreach to those Web customers who still needed some reassurance about buying over the Internet.

But the new site’s purpose is as much about instruction as it is about transactions. “We really want customers to be happy with our product,” Sandler says. “You just can’t show all the ways to use it in a booklet or a 30-minute video. I want to sell them the product and let them feel that they’ve gotten one hundred times more than their money’s worth.” To do that, Bowdabra mounts a “library” of .PDF files with instructions for the basic types of bows and a changing selection of a dozen or so special projects, depending on the season.

It also includes an e-mail contact through which users can reach the company with questions about products or projects, and Sandler makes a point of answering these herself. “I’m pretty good at it,” she says. “If [entrepreneur and Dallas Mavericks owner] Mark Cuban can answer all his own e-mail, so can I.” She also uses e-mail to point out where Bowdabra products can be purchased locally—another means of avoiding conflicts with her retailers.

That sales-and-customer service mix is one reason Sandler has preferred to use affiliate marketing with crafts and wedding sites rather than search engine marketing [SEM]as a way to build traffic to the Web site. “We’ve thought about SEM, but that can get expensive for a small company,” she says. “Our Web site is as much about customer service as it is about sales. The goal is primarily to let buyers see other ways to use the Bowdabra. So do we really want to pay money for clicks?” The jury’s still out on that one while Sandler waits to see how the product sells through the site.

But one marketing channel the company is interested in for sure is a return to QVC in the U.S. Sandler made her first appearance on the cable shopping channel in 1998. She admits to being nervous- not about presenting the product on live TV, but about making the sales numbers QVC required. “Their buyers buy a certain amount of the product, and you have to guarantee that you’ll sell that many units, or you don’t come back,” she says. “In our case, they bought 5,000 units, and I had eight minutes in which to sell them. I was worried we wouldn’t make it, but we did.”

In fact, Sandler says, she was so nervous that she recruited satisfied customers to call in with product testimonials. But she learned quickly that that’s verboten on QVC when the producer demanded names and said those calls would not be put through. “They’re very strict about keeping everything totally legitimate,” she says.

Sandler needn’t have worried. She made her quota that first appearance, and in fact, she and Bowdabra were a QVC staple for four years; once selling 11,374 units in 14 minutes. The company has also had great success with Vic’s overseas subsidiaries. Bowdabra just hired another presenter for the British version, saving Sandler a long commute over the Atlantic; and the company has expanded to a competing shopping channel in Germany.

Back home, Sandler says her aims for marketing her company are now focused on forging links with more retail outlets such as party stores and making new connections with crafts wholesalers such as Darien, a big name in the professional design business. “As for the Internet, I hope we can make that a good new base from which to market our product,” Sandler says.