What reaches a homewares board
A store estate and an online channel run as rivals for the same credit. A customer who researches on the screen and buys in the showroom, or the reverse, and a business that measures neither. A considered purchase that the site treats as a basket. Delivery and returns economics that decide the margin after the sale is won. An own-brand range whose online proposition has not yet been built. Which of these is binding is not decided in advance. The Cat’s Whiskers determines it, and the Review reports what it found, not what it expected.
How the Review reads it
The Review walks the proposition the way a customer does: the first search, the landing, the product page, the basket, the checkout, the parcel, the return. It is measured against traffic, conversion, order value, margin and repeat, and checked against all seven foundations of the Cat’s Whiskers. It resolves to the one constraint that is actually binding in this business, which is rarely the one the room arrived with.
The record behind it
The UK’s largest furniture retailer: 400 stores, a business built on Sunday showroom traffic, and an ecommerce channel generating next to nothing. The channel built as a business unit rather than a website, with its own platform, team and P&L; measurement pioneered that proved digital’s impact on in-store sales, published as a Google case study, turning the store estate from digital’s rival into its beneficiary. Three consecutive years of 82% growth, negligible to £30m in three years. In the Gulf, a retail group’s own-brand homewares business run alongside its apparel franchises.
Who this is for