Stefan Brugger wanted to transform the way Gautier USA did business. Unfortunately for him, his decision to move forward with this change came as the world was plummeting into a deep economic recession.
One of his many challenges was the fact that high-end contemporary furniture is not high on most priority lists when the pocketbook tightens.
“The biggest chunk of the market is still traditional furniture,” says Brugger, the company’s CEO. “So in this niche of high-end contemporary European furniture, it was a big challenge to survive this economic downturn.”
The challenge was made even more difficult by Brugger’s plan to scrap the old way of relying on distributors to sell furniture for the $220 million company. He wanted to launch his own line of franchise stores that would sell the product with a more personal touch.
“Our goal is to create an environment (that) makes the furniture understandable for the people who are maybe not so informed about contemporary furniture,” Brugger says. “We try to work more on these qualitative things than to overreact and quit on our strategy and go like everybody with sales and panic measures.”
So how do you as a niche business launch a new way of doing things during a time of great economic uncertainty? How do you get employees and customers to believe in a strategy that seems to go against the grain of what everyone else out in the marketplace is doing?
The answer is you show confidence in the plan you’ve developed, in the product that you’re selling and in your employees’ ability to meet the needs of your customers.
You look for ways to get your employees to feed off of your energy and sell your brand to your customers. In simple terms, you don’t panic.
“It would be fatal to panic,” Brugger says. “We are willing to survive and overcome this economy and have a clean, understandable and coherent strategy for the time which follows.”
Brugger just needed the 650 employees joining him on the new venture to not panic either and to buy in to his plan for change.