EBizInsider

When we got married my wife’s family and I owned five stores in three states. Since we went online, we’ve closed four of the brick-and-mortars and sold to every continent except Antarctica.

—Karl Schilling, Kaleidoscopestoyou.com

The “net effect” has been very positive for

Talk about the very definition of “niche market” and you’ve just described Kaleidoscopes To You. Founder Karl Schilling started making and selling kaleidoscopes when he was still in high school. “It helped pay for high school and college,” he says. After 10 years, in the early nineties, he started a series of brick-and-mortar stores in Illinois and Minnesota selling seasonally and ultimately opened a store in the Mall of America in Minnesota. But when Kaleidoscopestoyou.com went online, Karl realized it was the perfect match for his niche business. “We needed lots of traffic for this business,” says Karl. “We had people come from all over to buy our products at the Mall, but we were really made for the Internet.”

Kaleidoscopes To You is 8 people total with a product line of 781 items. Karl runs the business with his wife Jean, a native of Manly Iowa (Karl says with pride that he married a ‘Manly woman’). In 1996 they went online and Karl says he realized that ultimately their success would be tied to cyberspace. “I learned code and designed the first site myself,” he recalls. “It was slow in the early years but I always believed it would work.”

The Schillings found Solid Cactus and had their site redesigned in 2005. Since then he’s been a Solid Cactus client and has continued to ‘tweak’ his site. “As I recall I was a tough sell on the redesign,” says Karl. “Now I’m a junkie for changes.” Among the additions he likes best are the Quantity Price Table (“it’s excellent, clean and concise”) and Snap Shop (“a good navigation tool; the new version is very advanced”). He’s also a big believer in branding through checkout. “As a retailer I’ve seen increases,” he says. “Seeing the shell throughout the checkout process is very comforting for customers.”

Perhaps the best praise for Kaleidoscopestoyou.com comes from his customers. “They tell me that they shop other sites,” Karl says. “But they say we have a more professional look, we have more products and they trust us.”

The net effect has been very positive. “We’ve seen 25-30% growth in each of the past four years,” says Karl. The Schillings are now expanding their horizons. “We had Solid Cactus clone a second site for us called Marblesforyou.com. That site just went live in April, but we have 350 products and we’re very hopeful.”

Karl says he’s more comfortable as an Internet retailer. “I like the marketing aspect,” he says. “I like developing different angles to attract customers and grow our base.” One area where he’s concentrating is on organic listings. “We were spending so much money on our pay-per-click advertising that I decided to get more serious about our natural rankings. That’s what I do now, ‘tweak’ for natural listings. In addition, I try to identify trouble areas and deal with them. We monitor our phone calls carefully for content and subject. I find when I get several questions about the same thing it’s usually a problem that is confusing people. That’s something I can fix.”

Karl is still tweaking Kaleidoscopestoyou.com, as well. Solid Cactus will be adding a blog section to the site this month. He believes the interactive possibilities, combined with general industry knowledge make e-commerce blogs important.

Karl Schilling has advice for making your own site attractive without spending lots of money. “A good ‘about us’ page is valuable if you do it right,” says Karl. “Make sure you include a picture of yourselves and the location of your business. Let people see who you are. It’s hard to make people feel at home online and I believe a good ‘about us’ page gives people a greater sense of comfort.”

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