The great furniture boom of 2020-21 showed Dovetail Furniture what their business trajectory could look like with further investment into warehouse capacity, infrastructure, and catalog assortment.
“Our company has grown a lot since Marco Petruzzi became CEO in 2018,” says Marco Mazzoni, Dovetail Furniture’s director of technology and web solutions. “Our goal will always be to serve our core audience of family businesses who know us. These are the people who stop by our showroom at High Point just to chat because they’ve been friends with us for years, and appreciate the personal touch in our relationship.”
But Marco also says that since Dovetail Furniture’s boom in 2021, the business’ audience of designers has been growing quickly and organically—and it’s required more investment in infrastructure to meet the demand.
“In the last two years, we’ve built a new office and showroom, purchased another warehouse, launched a new website, and traded in our ERP system from the 90s for a modern one,” Marco says. “Now that our infrastructure transformation is done, we’re ready to focus more heavily on our product, specifically to elevate certain parts of our offering for a new audience of designers.”
Dovetail Furniture’s digital transformation also led them to revamp their digital catalog as part of new ecommerce opportunities—which led them to Bear.
Venessa Riojas-Furlong, Dovetail Furniture’s ecommerce business development manager, is a team of one. “We have a very large catalog of items,” she says, “and getting all our digital assets in place while managing inventory uploads and troubleshooting for large platforms would need me to either clone myself or hire a whole team to keep up with it all.”
When the company decided to launch on Perigold, Venessa knew she would need to enlist some help. “Wayfair has some of the most labor intensive spreadsheets for a product upload compared to any other retailer in ecommerce,” she says. “They're eight tabs long for just one product.”
When Venessa started working with Bear, she found out that managing metadata for large platforms didn’t need to be so complicated.
“When you’re working with channels like Wayfair,” Venessa says, “there’s a taxonomy for each product and that filters down to the metadata you have to work with. Bear has based their spreadsheet off Wayfair’s—because it’s the most extensive in the industry—but it’s much easier to use and the listings are pushed out to everyone.”
With Bear, Dovetail’s metadata is centralized in one place instead of several across various channels. To launch and manage products at scale on Wayfair, Perigold, Overstock, and Houzz, Venessa uploads digital assets, keywords, product descriptions, etc. to one place. From there, Bear takes care of disseminating and customizing that information to each channel depending on how the listings need to be built and presented.
“With Bear, I can finally trust that someone thinks about listings the way I do,” Venessa says. “I know that the product is being represented correctly on any given channel without needing to make decisions myself for every single item in our catalog.”
Now with more than 2,400 product listings across 4 channels, Dovetail Furniture has the bandwidth to expand their business to more channels than they originally anticipated. “I can finally focus on customer service over back-end logistics,” Venessa says. “I don’t need to worry about whether or not our listings are being properly monitored every day. For me, this is huge.”
You can see Dovetail Furniture in real life at High Point Spring Market. They’re located in the Historic Market Square, at space 142.
