Who Are You partnering With?

There’s a hush all over the business world, giving us an opportunity to look at places we can get better ourselves and our businesses and discover new avenues to success.

Let’s all agree; you want to market your luxury business to the top interior designers, architects, builders and stylish homeowners in your market. So, what road do you take? Do you wade into social media on Facebook, Pinterest, Instagram, Twitter, or TikTok? How about joining the digital marketing world and improve your website to best in class and set up your digital ad spend on Google? Or do you meet with the local luxury showrooms that do not directly compete with you to work out ways you can build your brands together, focusing on keeping these wealthy folks from traveling to the major design centers and making them understand that their own luxury community has what they desire.

Where else do you go to share your brand’s captivating stories? Do we dive into the local social-digital worlds, or meet our wealthy and stylish clients in their world? What are the popular fine restaurants, elegant home-furnishings store and art galleries that always hosts the packed open houses? If any of these are lacking a beautiful bathroom and equally elegant entry door hardware, there is an opportunity to meet your targeted customer. Working with businesses that also target your market can increase both brands' reach. Might the gallery want to hang a few pieces in your showroom? At your next event, does that restaurant offer a catering service? Does the fine furniture store have some pieces that would look great in your showroom? When you create a cool bathroom, all involved can plaster it all over Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest. It’s all a circle.

Take a moment and list the trade showrooms in your market that your designers, architects and builders rely on. Then add the retail businesses that cater to the well-to-do. Restaurants, surface showrooms, clothing stores, elegant spas and auto dealerships. One of the finest bathrooms I have ever seen was the men’s room in an Audi dealership. Black steampunk fixtures highlighted a well-thought-out promo piece. It stuck in my mind.

Another, mostly forgotten product placement opportunity is fine salons and day spas. They are a beehive of pampering and style: if the bathrooms are not a point of conversation, you should make them so.

Think creatively and barter with these companies to help them improve their store’s customer experience. These are businesses that thrive on people who want the best, and we all know what a few carefully chosen cabinet knobs can do for a kitchen. Form a luxury service community; us against them. Help these local partners in luxury products and service set up elegant bathrooms and place your brand’s logo tastefully on the mirror and on the inside of the door. Visitors will not miss it.

All brick and mortar businesses are under attack from competition, the new generations‘ changing tastes and now this virus. So why not work together? You are stronger going into a battle with allies. Put your business in the best possible position to succeed by leveraging you and your newfound local partners’ strong brands. Why Not?

Finally: We are in a completely unknown business environment and speaking with people in your local market that target your key customers can be a very good thing. You will likely discover their fears are similar to yours, and by working together you will all emerge better prepared to kick ass when we are allowed to build beautiful buildings.

For the time being, please talk to many…while staying at least 6 feet away.

P.S. Vendors, At Phylrich we considered these installations a display and priced it as aggressively as possible. It was my mentor Alfred R. Dubin’s idea and he was 100% correct. From Beverly Hills to the upper east side of New York City, Phylrich had beautiful working displays in some of the most expensive real estate in North America. It paid off handsomely.