Name of your website?Hollywood Love Rugs
Your name?
Vince Trankina
Your Location (city, etc)
Tehachapi
We feature mostly hard to find exotic rugs and pillows; soft furnishings, with a romantic and exotic theme - area rugs for those you love - sheepskin rugs, tibetan lambs wool, flokati rugs, and a large line of faux fur rugs which are a real emerging product.
What inspired you to launch your own website?
My partner has been selling rugs skins and hides for thirty years, and we decided to try and go online in 1999 with a small yahoo store. We have been competing with large companies online ever since, carving out a niche in specialty items. We both had worked in the entertainment industry most of our lives and I was in a career change from being a production exec at a large animation company. We wanted some independence and thought we could bring some creativity to the online rug business.
When did you launch your first website, and what was it?
We launched in the summer of 1999, and it was a simple store, a yahoo store, with mostly drop shipped items. I took all the photographs myself and basically self-taught everything from site building to optimizing and submissions.
How did you decide on a name for your website?
My partner had sold and rented lots of rugs to the movies and television productions over the years, including about 30 leopard print cowhides to Cher for her Malibu home. (she struck a hard bargain too) We wanted something catchy and something we hoped in time we could brand - area rugs for those you love.
What makes it different from other, similar offerings?
Well, this is not a css ecommerce site with just a lot of stuff pulled from catalogues by a webmaster. It's very subdued and has a lot of detail, including a Q and A about the different types of rugs we sell and their differences. We sell to mostly women and we keep a very tasteful high fashion feel to the store. We also do a lot of custom orders and provide a lot of personalized service.
What is your eventual goal? (To sell it, keep it for income, secure a book or other mainstream media deal?)
Well we want to build it now -- it's become more and more difficult to compete online with the search engines consolidating and basically getting very greedy for ad dollars. We can't compete with large companies in advertising. So it's very challenging and mostly we go out and find merchandise that people just can't get any where else and offer it for a great price. Eventually though, it might be an asset to sell - definately we want to set it up so it can basically run itself eventually with some exclusive branded products and a few good employees.
How does your investment of time and money balance against your success?
It's pretty good - my partner and I do everything ourselves, and we keep a very low overhead. I can't complain as I work mostly in my home office, even pay the bills through my online banking, so I'm sitting on a mountain here with my wolf in the backyard making a decent living and of course - it's all a factor of how much time and effort you want to invest - so you always have a feeling of control over your destiny that you don't have trying to keep a job for a lifetime. The independence is worth it.
If you had an unlimited development budget for development, how would you change your site?
Well - I would definately start up our own warehouse operation, and bring in a lot more merchandise from overseas and drop ship a lot less. I would also automate the web work and have a couple of people working continually at optimizing pages, tags, text, and submitting to directories and also monitoring our online advertising.
If your site got really big, really quickly, would you be able to keep up with the demand?
Yes -- we actually can. Much of our stuff is drop shipped but from people my partner has been doing business with for 40 years so we get great service, great prices and they are incredibly reliable and ready always to step things up. We also know how to expand in increments as needed. We try and prioritize our products so that we are not working 80% of the time to make 20% of the profits.
What unexpected costs and headaches have you had to deal with?
We have huge problems now with the exchange rate of the dollar against the Euro which has just butchered our profit margins on flokati from Greece and faux fur from France. It's been very challenging just trying to figure out what our cost is going to be from month to month. We hate to pass on these rising costs to customers but the declining dollar is really squeezing anybody that sells foreign goods.
What has been your biggest challenge?
Re-inventing the business about every 18 months, because the internet landscape keeps changing. The search engine landscape has radically changed and is going to change a lot more. Massive competition online of course is the biggest challenge, and the greed of search engines.
What method has been most successful for promoting your website?
Actually - finding new products which we can sell pretty exclusively -- if you optimize those pages and submit and advertise properly you can get a lot of traffic. You can't go out there and try and compete for "area rugs", but specialized products you can bring traffic in, and customers will look around. You need branded products, or you are just another catalogue out there among thousands.
How has running your website differed from your expectations?
A lot more work - and it's never done -- you have to constantly invest and try to anticipate opportunities.
How long have you run the site already, and how long will you continue to keep it up if you don't enjoy big gains in traffic, income or popularity?
We have had this almost nine years and I can say we are not losing traffic -- it has been hard to make gains but it has stimulated a lot of local sales and wholesale success so we don't plan on shutting it down. It's an asset and if we do sell it to some parties with a lot of capital, they can easly pump up the volume on this business.
Was it worth it?
Definately -- however I am anxious now to set this up and move on into some more interesting areas online. It's still an exciting and relatively open way to express yourself and reach consumers directly as a small player in the economy
What is your website address?
Hollywood Love Rugs
