Yipit Blog

When we tackle a new category, we don’t just grab a shirttail or push it out of bounds. We Terry Tate Office Linebacker it.

Here’s an update on what we have been doing with our first major category: home furniture.

Terry Tate Office Linebacker

Step 1. Learn how to shop for furniture

To ascertain the key questions and decision factors facing NYC furniture shoppers, we looked at the following:

Industry Experts. We consumed every NYC design and shopping journal we could get our hands on, including: Apartment Therapy New York, New York Magazine, Daily Candy New York, Daily Dose, Design*Sponge, Dwell Blog, NYT Home & Garden, and many more.

Taxonomy. To formulate a universe of products, we scoured major furniture websites, like Ikea, Rooms To Go and Furniture.com, as well as the websites of local showrooms. We learned how stores organize their inventory and (hopefully) how shoppers expect that inventory to be organized.

Interviews. We solicited as much feedback as possible from store owners, interior designers, and friends.

Step 2. Find every furniture store

Next we compiled a list of every business that could possibly sell furniture. We:

1. Acquired detailed business listings data from provider Localeze. We looked at a lot of vendors, but were particularly impressed by Localeze’s proprietary listings compilation process (see this case study PDF for more info).
2. From the Localeze database, we included all businesses that: (i) were in a furniture related category or (ii) had furniture or a related term in the name.
3. Looked up websites of major retail chains and added Manhattan locations not already on our list.
   
4. Added any showrooms mentioned in the NYC design and shopping media that we did not already have.
   

Eventually, we narrowed our list down to approximately 2,000 furniture stores.

Step 3. Understand every store

Finally we needed to learn as much as possible about every store. Here’s how we did it:

Went Door to Door. Seriously. Some had closed, some didn’t sell furniture, and some were awesome. For every furniture store, we documented what each store sold and what made them special. We collected over 400 points of data at each location. We also spoke to as many people as we could – the owners, the clerks and the customers.

Went Webpage to Webpage. We also reviewed the stores’ websites, news media / blog references and online profiles on sites like Yelp, Citysearch and New York Magazine. We’ve organized all this research and will display it on each store’s Yipit profile.

Step 4: To be decided

We want to be ridiculously thorough. That’s why we’re releasing Yipit as early as possible, so we can gather feedback on how to maximize the information on each business and continue to improve our results.

Coming up with the methodology above was a challenge for us: lots of research, mistakes and hard work. But, now that we have the experience under out belt, we will be able to aggressively expand into other categories. We also recognize that it’s not in any way perfect. So, if you have any ideas at all on how we can improve it / sources to check, please email us or leave a comment.

Update: Check out Yipit’s results for Furniture New York and Couches New York.

Tags: furniture, Yipit

This entry was posted on Friday, July 18th, 2008 at 1:08 pm and is filed under Yipit. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.