Q: Is it all about technology or is there a style and price story, too?
BC: Did we come up with this specific product because you can fold it? Absolutely. But I think it's going to be special because it's a new look for us and its totally different from anything else that we do. The quality itself is just very special, and consumers are reacting to it in an extremely positive way. They really like the fact that the rug is beautiful first and foremost. Because if it's not beautiful and it's not colored right to begin with, it doesn't matter that you can fold it.
Q: What about price? How does it stack up?
BC: It's great quality, but at the same time it's $499 - $599 retail for 8x10. A 5x8 would be $199 - $299. So it's an amazing value for the look you get.
The Left Bank Vintage Tapis rug by Karastan combines traditional motifs in modern fashion colors.
Q: Who's the target customer? Is it Millennials?
BC: This is aimed at the entire market, but I do think that it has a real appeal to the Millennial. It's made in a responsible way. It's made in America. It's got a great price point on it. I think all those different pieces will really register with the Millennial.
Q: Karastan also merchandises a lot of romance into Vintage Tapis, doesn't it?
BC: We laugh about the slogan we use: We call it the '100-year-old rug made yesterday.' A Vintage Tapis rug looks like a worn antique hand-knotted - like a sumac, or a dhurrie, or the kazak type rugs you see that have a low profile. Like the ones that are sold as antiques: worn in places, not in others. They have that rich texture and patina to the colors, and all the things that go into what an antique rug is. Vintage rugs are huge in the market right now. The whole idea behind this was to get to that.
A detail of a machine-made Vintage Tapis medallion rug shows the flat-weave tapestry hand-knotted look Karastan achieves in this new construction.
Q: So when did Sarah Willett enter the process?
BC: Once we knew we had the construction, the next step was figuring out how to design the collection. We already worked with Sarah Willett on her first Patina Vie line for Karastan, and learned that she is an amazing rug designer. Sarah is a designer in that she actually draws the designs. She understands how looms work, she understands how yarns work so she is able to get elbow to elbow with our designer staff and come up with her own thing from the ground up.
Q: That's not the typical licensee/licensor relationship, is it?
BC: I'll say this: There are a lot of licensed products in rugs out in the market. And with most celebrity brands, the celebrity is not a rug designer. They have a lifestyle they're trying to sell, or they have a curated line that ties together everything from furniture to rugs, or whatever it may be.
Sarah understood this new construction we had. She was able to get in there and look at our colors and pull from that to develop her color creel. It truly is her rug line: it's her look and really just drops like a piece of a puzzle into the Patina Vie lifestyle.
The point of sale display for Vintage Tapis maximizes return on investment, holding 24 8x10 rugs in 16 square feet.
Q: There was a lot of buzz about the Vintage Tapis display fixture at your showroom. What's the back story?
BC: Our customers were blown away by the entire package. When you have a product that people like from an aesthetic standpoint, and then you add more pieces of value to it, like the fact that you can fold it to save on freight, and then you've got this great display will drive more profit, it' a message retailers really like to hear.
Q: How do you figure the Vintage Tapis display drives profits?
BC: It's amazing what you can do in 16 square feet. We fold up 24 8x10 rugs and drop them into a display that fits into a pallet. If you evaluate the retail floor on a profit per square foot basis, this drives the profit per foot through the roof because there's so much inventory in such a confined area that can turn pretty quickly.
Signage on the Vintage Tapis pallet display illustrates that consumers can grab a rug and take it home.
Q: Can you share the numbers with our readers?
BC: We frame it up this way: Your average sofa group in a furniture store takes up about 100 square feet. If you look at a furniture store that is 10,000 square feet and drives top line sales of $2.5 million dollars, then what you are saying is that you are getting about $250 of sales per square foot annual.
In normal profit margin - let's say 55, you're getting $140 of profit in that 100 square feet. That's about what a furniture store is going to get out of a sofa group annual on average. For years, we sold rug racks against that metric. We said, a 5x8 rug rack has 20 arms and takes up about 140 square feet - if its 14 feet wide and about 10 feet deep. With the industry average being 2.8 turns, you can think through the sales: it's a little bit over $40,000 in top line sales and if it generates at that same 55 profit margin you end up with about $175 of profit per square foot - which is good. Better than a sofa group on average. That's how you can convince people to get in the rug business.
Designs in the Vintage Tapis collection range from transitional to classic with a fresh Patina Vie color palette.
Q: And how does Vintage Tapis measure up in profit potential?
BC: With the Vintage Tapis display, and the fact that it's 8x10s folded in a display measuring 16 square feet -- even assuming an average industry turn rate of 2.8 it's going to generate over $1,300 in profit per foot. That's assuming it doesn't go above a turn rate of 5, which I think it will.
The point made is the profit on this display will be above the roof for anybody that carries it. You've just got a winning story there. A winning quality, a new designer, a new technique with a game plan drawn up to be very, very successful.