Gold Standard

As for the Mitchell Gold Co. brand, it's a work in progress. The company certainly doesn't rank as one of the biggest furniture manufacturers. And customers at Pottery Barn and many of the other retailers that sell Mitchell Gold furniture have to work pretty hard to find out who manufactured the sofas in those stores, because the retailers don't go out of their way to tell people that they don't make the merchandise themselves. And the Mitchell Gold Co. has no retail stores of its own.

But Gold and Williams have run a couple of groundbreaking advertising campaigns over the years in an effort to boost their visibility. From the outset, their key marketing insight was that furniture didn't need to be sold as if it were a major appliance. They weren't against putting people in their ads. And once they saw how much mileage Calvin Klein was getting out of his provocative advertisements, they decided to push their own ads even further. "We realized that no one in furniture was doing anything even remotely sexy," Gold says. "As a company with very little to spend on marketing, we figured that would be the best way to get people talking about us and perhaps even to generate some free editorial coverage."

The campaign pushed the envelope. One ad, which a couple of publications banned from their pages, pictured a couple enjoying coffee on a couch, basking in the afterglow of what was presumably a night of wild sex. Another ad depicted two great-looking young men on a sofa flanking a ringlet-haired child seated in a kid-sized club chair. Were the men gay? Were they dads? Had they adopted the little girl? It wasn't clear, because the ad copy had only one sentence: "A kid deserves to feel at home."

Who could argue with that sentiment? Not many, it turned out: The positive emails and letters that poured in far outnumbered the negative ones. "You have to figure that the majority of our customers are women," Gold explains. "They probably notice that the guys are cute before they think about whether they're gay." To Williams, it just makes sense that the company would have gay guys in the ad, instead of straight ones. "Whom among your male friends are you going to go to for advice on buying furniture?" Williams asks. "The straight ones or the gay ones?"

Many readers who liked the specific pieces in the ads did call to request more information. Others wrote in to applaud the company for promoting gay adoption or to say hi to Lulu, Gold and Williams's bulldog, who appears in some of the ads. But it's questionable whether people who aren't in the market for furniture at the moment that an ad appears will remember the company's name when they go shopping for a couch four years down the road.

To make that happen, Gold and Williams needed to reinforce provocative ad messages with well-designed approaches to selling the products in the stores. And they did just that. The first principle: Separate the people who sell furniture to stores from those who teach the stores how to sell to customers. "We decided to have separate people for training and selling," says Gold. "If you have people on sales commission who are doing both jobs, and they have a choice between doing sales training or going out to drum up orders, guess which part of the job is going to get shortchanged?"

Gold and Williams coined a new term for this training job: "the answer person," or "TAP" for short. Jeff McNeely, 26, is the tap for the northeastern part of the United States and eastern Canada. "I usually do anywhere from three to five training sessions a week, though lately it's been running closer to five," he says. "They usually take place at odd hours when the stores aren't open. If it's in the morning, I bring sinful breakfast treats, and if it's in the evening, I order pizza or bring sandwiches. Then I talk about the history of the company, and how and why we design our products the way we do."

To reinforce his message, McNeely travels with collateral. "I bring samples of the wood corner blocks from the sofa frames with me," he says. "I also bring different pieces of leather so that people can see how the color varies a bit from hide to hide. It's like a traveling trunk show, and I drag it down the street in two rolling suitcases."

He also leaves behind a custom-made book for each store. The books contain information about the specific products sold at a particular store, along with fabric specifications and information about the Mitchell Gold Co. With the help of folks back at the home office, McNeely updates each book several times during the year as the company adds new fabrics and discontinues old ones. He's also on call all day every day in case the in-store staff has questions.