BenchMade Modern’s Edgar Blazona on getting customers to buy high-end furniture online

When the New York Times writes about your product, sales inevitably explode. That’s at least what high-end sofa company BenchMade Modern experienced. It was featured in a trend story in 2016 and then, in 2019, became highly rated on the newspaper’s review website the Wirecutter (it remains the site’s top choice). When the Wirecutter review hit, said founder Edgar Blazona, “our web numbers spiked.” Blazona joined the Modern Retail Podcast and spoke about how he’s grown his company over the years. This isn’t his first furniture foray. In the 2000s he began selling modern children’s furniture online on websites like Wayfair. But he decided to get into the sofa game in 2015. BenchMade Modern makes furniture that averages between $3,000 and $6,000. It focuses on having as short of a lead time as possible while still being custom made. Currently, its lead time time averages five weeks, but Blazona said it can be as low as three. Unsurprisingly, the last year was big for the company. Sales did nosedive in March, which caused BenchMade Modern to temporarily pivot to manufacturing PPE. But in May, things picked back up as people were stuck at home and in need of nicer furniture. According to Blazona, revenue went up 100% year-over-year in 2020. The focus now is on keeping this growth. Blazona said the company is still facing some supply chain hiccups, but he doesn’t think demand for furniture is going to dip post-pandemic. The company has slowly been adding new products like rugs and lighting. The strategy, he said, is “just fine-tuning all of that and adding these new categories so that we can be a little bit more of a one-stop-shop.”