Zenzu spends approximately ninety five percent of its marketing budget on online advertising. Of this ninety five percent nearly 60 percent is actually spent on advertising under the search terms Chinese furniture and oriental furniture. The origins of Zenzu, while based on the fact that it’s directors have a great deal of experience living in and doing business in China, also had a very strong influence in the company’s knowledge of search engine advertising and optimisation. In fact the whole premise of Zenzu as an online oriental furniture company is predicated on the statistics that were available from the big online search engines such as google, yahoo and microsoft.

By analysing data from these companies it was though the Chinese furniture would be a niche market ideally suited to be the first in our portfolio of online retail businesses. Coupled with the term oriental furniture, data suggested that there were just enough people searching under those terms to generate income and business, but not so many as to make the advertising budget unsustainable. It is by focusing on niche areas that small business such as ourselves can survive. By contrast if we were to try and market purely as a generic furniture supplier then we would have to carry a vast amount of stock, compete against a myriad of competitors and invest a huge monthly sum in online advertising. Thus a large initial investment to go with the inherent risk of a starting any new business.

It is the aim of Aston Holding Group Ltd and Rocombe Design Ltd to develop this search engine led advertising concept and to establish a wide range of businesses with specific niche orientations. This backwards engineering approach, so effectively used for the Chinese furniture business, firstly takes a retail idea or concept then runs statistics on whether it is a suitable online environment to be competing. Then Sund Sourcing Ltd our partner in China gets involved to ascertain whether products can be ethically and reliably sourced and whether they offer a margin which can sustain business from the projected consumer search volumes. oriental furniture proved to be an ideal model to follow in terms of quantity of impressions per month, quantity of click throughs, subsequent sales and ability to supply products with a reasonable margin.

On its own the Chinese furniture business just about generates a self-sustaining annual profit but large gains were not really as much the point as was the proof of concept. And, as a proof of concept exercise it was highly successful. Having evaluated many different products and products since we have decided on the launch of Domo Doors (working title) later this year. As with niche terms such as oriental furniture, the doors business will concentrate on a few specific keywords and we are safe in the knowledge that we will be able to compete highly effectively on this basis against the existing online retailers who don’t have quite as much niche focus. We shall see what happens in the near future, and the look out continues for the next retail opportunity, some of which are under investigation as we speak .

Zenzu Chinese furniture is part of a small group of companies focused on manufacturing and craftsmanship in China. There are several business entities including Rocombe Design Ltd, Aston Holdings Group Ltd and Sund Sourcing Ltd. The oriental furniture business falls under the remit of Rocombe Design Ltd which in turn offers UK warehousing services to Sund Sourcing Ltd and Aston Holdings Group Ltd. Aston Holding Group Ltd will cover the new Domo Doors business as a legal entity and has been set up specifically as a vehicle for promoting new online retail businesses. Aston Holding Group Ltd also looks at projects from Sund Sourcing Ltd that may present a good retail / re-seller opportunity.

Sund Sourcing Ltd is a Hong Kong based company which provides engineering, design, sourcing and product development services to small business in the UK. The focus is on helping these companies manufacture products in China and Sund’s specialism is in taking on new or entrepreneurial companies and helping them to design, develop and manufacture products in China; it also offers storage and distribution solution to its UK customer base. Sund Sourcing Ltd has directors who are also involved in Rocombe Design Ltd and it is therefore not surprising to know that Sund Sourcing Ltd was involved in the initial investigation into the Zenzu Chinese furniture retail project. It’s primary role was in visiting oriental furniture factories and workshops throughout the Zhejiang province with the aim of finding a reliable, flexible and friendly supplier to work with.

Sund Sourcing Ltd has an office in South China and for the Chinese furniture business having a presence in the country is invaluable. Staff can be on a plane and in Cixi in the Zhejiang province within a day if there are any urgent quality issues surrounding the oriental furniture that needs to be shipped over to UK for retail distribution.

Sund Sourcing Ltd is a registered Hong Kong Company but has its genesis in Sweden with the founder of the company who moved to China/Hong Kong at the end of the 1990s. Started four years ago and originally focused on helping a few larger Swedish companies establish themselves in the Guangdong  region, the company has expanded to focus on a wider range of smaller companies, primarily in Scandinavia and the UK. The company does have knowledge of Chinese furniture and maintains strong links with the oriental furniture industry in Zhejiang, however it’s real skill-set is in its engineering force. The team includes product designers, engineers with expertise in plastics, metals and packaging, as well as generalist managers who help customers find and liaise with good Chinese suppliers in and amongst the overwhelming choice that is available.

The Zenzu chinese furniture store is currently planning for the expansion of its business model beyond oriental furniture to incorporate solid wooden doors. The wooden doors business will be a separate marketing and company entity, currently with the working title domo doors, and we are targetting the import of stock into the UK this December in time for the peak retail season in January and February.

The wooden doors venture will replicate the business model used for oriental furniture with marketing heavily focussed on search engine advertising and search engine keyword optimisation. The sales, storage and distribution infrastructure to support this marketing effort will take advantage of that already in place for chinese furniture : on the sales side our current staff will cover all customer interaction with the simple addition of a dedicated salesline focussed on Domo doors; distribution will continue to be provided by our delivery partner Motorlink Distribution; the only area that requires significant investment and expansion is therefore storage.

The plan is to expand the rented storage area dedicated to Zenzu’s oriental furniture range. The expansion will provide a small office, an upstairs mezzanine display area and additional square footage for pure storage. Ideal for racking, the doors should not take up a hugely excessive storage footprint and by combining the door warehousing with the chinese furniture  business provides some of the benefits of economies of scale. The combination not only allows for economies of scale but also provides the opportunity to have a more formalised display area. The plan is to be more active in advertising Zenzu and Domo doors as having a showroom facility. We are not entirely sure how to staff up for this offering as at present we have an unattended warehouse and only accept visitors by appointment. However, in partnership with Motorlink Distribution we should be able to accept Monday to Friday come in off the street visits. If this proves successful then we may consider an expanded weekend staffing service altough from day one we will continue to do weekend visits in a pre-booked basis only.

As we are an online company it is not crucial to have a showroom facility, especially as we offer a home visit service for our chinese furniture  and also provide postal samples for customers to review. However, it is our gut feel that for the solid doors it may be a more requested service requirement to have the warehouse available for viewings on a flexible basis. Of course, it may be that the open door policy also draws more customers to see our oriental furniture pieces; perhaps customers who might otherwise no purchase with us. Of course, this is all conjecture and the benefits may well be negligible. However, we will not lose any investment in trying as the need to expand the current warehouse was unavoidable; the bonus of being able to see if a showroom facility is to our advantage is a benefit from combining the needs of two businesses. Watch this space..

The latest cotainer load of Oriental Furniture arrived at the warehouse this time last week. Due to the large volume of bespoke and standard Chinese Furniture orders in the January and February period this container had to be a 40 footer. To try and reduce the lead time for made to measure units we usually order 20ft containers and order once we have enough to fill the 28cbm that is required. On this basis we usually order six 20ft containers of Chinese Furniture  each year which usually gives a lead time to our customers of between 14 and 20 weeks for bespoke units. However on this occasion we had no choice but to order a 40ft container due to the number of bespoke requests that we had to fulfill. As a result, the Zenzu warehouse was absolutely stuffed with products on Friday afternoon with no room whatsoever for the area we usually reserve for customer viewings. This week our excellent delivery partner Motorlink Distribution, from whom we rent the Zenzu warehouse, have been fulfilling customer drop offs, and the amount of Oriental Furniture in the warehouse has been falling.

We estimate that 50% of the 40ft container is going straight out to customers who have ordered earlier in the year. The remaining 28cbm of Chinese Furniture  is made up of standard stock items and we are at the point where nearly the whole Zenzu Oriental Furniture range is in stock.

Stock keeping is always a fine balance between storage space, cash flow and ordering dead stock. When new Zenzu products are introduced to the Oriental Furniture range we usually order only a single piece. We then guage interest in the ensuing months and order more items on that basis. Of course, when there are three years of data available on a product such as a large wardrobe it should be relatively easy to ensure that sufficient stock is available. Unfortunately it doesn’t quite work like that: a large order from a hotel, although very welcome, can completely wipe out stock of a key item in an instance, while an article in a newspaper or household magazine publication can create a sudden surge of orders. To run a small company efficiently it is not feasible to have huge amounts of warehousing space and vast amounts of buffer stock. By keeping warehousing costs down, having slimline stock levels and focussing on our bespoke services we are able to meet the finite demand of the Chinese Furniture base that is available through are online marketing endeavours. 

Compared to our direct competitors, Zenzu’s prices for delivering Chinese furniture are relatively high; indeed customers often balk at the price we charge for delvery. However in practice we make a loss on delivery. Our competitors and other companies also make a loss on delivery and in fact cover the cost of delivery through higher product pricing. Call is a moral decision or an bug bear but we actually want to represent to the custromer an idea of some of the cost and value in the specialist delivery service that we provide. In our small way we want to show that delivery is not a two-penny worth commodity but a very high cost provision.

For some reason there is an expectation that delivery is a commodity that should be low cost or even free. When purchasing from a local high street a store can offer local delivery at a very low cost as their own staff can probably deliver and the cost of fuel is almost insignificant. However when running a web based Chinese furniture company that needs to deliver nationwide the cost of delivery becomes a huge part of the annual overheads. For some reason consumers in the UK have become used to or expect product delivery to be extremely low in cost; this may be a legacy from the era when delivery was only provided by local stores or may be the effect of the likes of John Lewis delivering for free with their own nationwide distribution fleet (a cost for them that is allocated elsewhere on the balance sheet).

However, for a small online Chinese furniture retailer such as ourselves the cost for each individual delivery is very high. We have an excellent partner, Motorlink Distribution, who provide a specialist service for us and we know for a fact that they charge very fair and reasonable rates. With our Oriental furniture it is not possible to use national courier companies or palettise deliveries as the products must be handled with care and delivieries must be made to residences. A fair comparison to give the idea of actual cost is the amount charged by removals companies. Bearing that in mind you can probably imagine the cost of providing a 2 person attended vehicle to load and unload; based on this fact it is not difficult to see how expensive it would be to employ two people to deliver a Chinese Wardrobe or any other price of large Oriental furniture to the North of England for example.

For this reason, to be able to make any profit whatsoever we can only offer a single person delivery service, even then absorbing some of the costs ourselves, and are also reliant on Motorlink to coincide our deliveries with those of other clients to the same regions. Chinese furniture deliveries to the South-East are of course no problem, but remote places, especially Scotland cause us great problems as customers often have to wait for long periods until there is a delivery run to their particular part of Scotland.

As a small provider of Chinese furniture we try to be as flexible as possible in our approach and would love to be able to provide a full 2 person delivery service to every part of the country within a few days. However to run a successful and profitable company it is unfortunately impossible to do so. What is more with the credit crunch now on and the concurrent rise in fuel prices, retailers such as oursleves are under a great deal of stress. We are sure our Oriental furniture sales will remain strong but delivery prices have almost doubled in the last year and that is not a cost we can pass on to our customers in the current climate.

We will survive the current economic downturn and the feeling is that we will emerge the stronger for it at the other end. With our low, flexible overheads we have the a business model for our chinese furniture company to survive and thrive.

Zenzu online Oriental Furniture store is about to branch out with a new website focused on solid wood doors handcrafted by a Chinese furniture supplier in the Zhejiang province. As yet we have not settled on a brand name or logo for the company and as with the naming procedure for the Oriental furniture business the process is proving to be an arduous task. Perhaps we are being a little too perfectionist in placing too much importance on a name, but it is something that we could be stuck with for many years and is somehow feels central to the marketing message that needs to be conveyed. The current process has served as a reminder of the methods we had to resort to in order to find a suitable name for the oriental furniture business. The first method is of course to sit and brainstorm brand names off the top of the head. However, unless you are of a particularly creative bent, it is surprisingly difficult to make the brain think laterally and focus seems to keep looping back to some relatively narrow confines. Having struggled with this method we decided that the Chinese furniture name choice needed a catalytic input from elsewhere. Firstly we tried the names of Chinese Kings and Chinese place names, and then we tried Chinese pinyin translations of classic English home furnishings nomenclature such as living, live, design, etc.

With a selection of almost 200 different pinyin words and goodness knows how many combinations that were filter through a spreadsheet we decided primarily to focus on something that simply had the most apposite sound to it; then hoping, given the type of names that were on the list that the combination would have a comprehensible and appropriate meaning. An added complication was that pinyin does not have an entirely intuitive pronunciation for English speaking peoples; thus, names that sounded fantastic pronounced correctly in the Putonghua mother tongue had an entirely different aural outcome when pronounced with a phonetic English language intonation.

We finally settled on a group of words which although not too imaginative seemed to conjure up the correct image for the niche Chinese furniture image that needed to be conveyed. Among these words were “Zen” which has obvious positive oriental connotations in the English language, Zhen meaning “really” and ‘Zhu’ or loosely changed to suit the English tongue ‘Zu’, meaning to live. We actually stumbled across the name of an ancient king Zhen-zu and having changed this to Zenzu we had a name which also meant “Pearl” any very loosely “To really live”. First and foremost the name was easy to pronounce by native English speakers, it conjured up images of the Eastern world, and also, rather fortuitously had a triple meaning all relevant to the marketing slant required for oriental furniture. After a lot of hard work we had our brand name.

Following a similar process for wooden doors we are hoping that the Chinese furniture brand naming methodology will save us a bit of time and effort. Our focus this time will be on Greek and Latin nomenclature for such words and phrases as “open door”, “gate”, “artisan”, “wood”, “forest”, “tree” etc. We don’t expect the process to be quick and easy but hopefully more efficient than our first effort for the oriental furniture market!

Following Zenzu’s recent business trip to see our Oriental Furniture supplier in China and also the Chinese Furniture manufacturers of solid wooden doors we are moving ahead with the launch of a new website focussed on doors. Separate to the Zenzu Chinese furniture website the new wooden doors website will be aimed at filling an online niche in the market. Google statistics and our own customer research has confirmed that there is high demand for high-end solid wood doors in the UK market place. Given this fact it surprised us to find a niche in the online market. Most UK suppliers online have a realtively low-end offering largely providing veneer doors without much stylistic website imaging and without value added service offerings. It is also almost impossible to buy doors online as you could do through our Oriental furniture website.

Now that we have established who our Chinese furniture supplier will be for wooden doors we have proceeded to the next phase and have had meetings with Roxxor our web developer and e-commerce advisor. Our aim is create a very stylistic interior design orientated website: to achieve this we will need to rely on our pohographer Martin Saban-Smith who has done an excellent job with our Oriental Furniture range. Martin will be responsible for close up shots, full length imaging and also in situ photo-shoots once we have installed doors at a trial location.

Of course the venture is still a launch in to the unknown, but we have run as many market analytics as is feasible given our resources and are confident that the business model which was so successfull when launching the Zenzu oriental furniture business can be replicated with equally impressive results. The aim is to launch a beta site in December so as to hit the January / February peak season in the new year. At the outset we are hoping to be offering unsanded doors, lightly stained doors and a bespoke staining service. We also hope to incorporate a range of handles and doors in keeping with the styles on offer. Initially these will focus on 4 panel and 6 panel colonial doors as well as simple ledge, frame and brace designs. At some stage we would also like to offer a door hanging service having established reliable regional contacts. We hope to bring to bear all of the e-commerce, warehousing, distribution and customer service experience that has been garnered over the last 3 years in running the Zenzu Chinese furniture business. We are looking forward with both eagerness and trepidation.

The Zenzu Chinese furniture website crashed 5 days ago and we are still not live. The database hosted by our internet service provider 1and1 has been spammed and the website corrupted. 1and1 have appalling service: on calling them to explain that our oriental furniture business was out livilhood and that we need to be up and running asap the useless individual on the phone informed us that the only way we could communicate with anyone technical would be to send an e-mail to their abuse / support team. An e-mail was spent and nothing was heard within 12 hours nor within 24 hours of for that matter 5 days later after sending repeated e-mails and making phone calls. Truly dreadul. Our excellent e-commerce and website development partnets Roxxor have been working tirelessly to move the chinese furniture site across to be hosted on one of their dedicated servers that have been recently installed.

Zenzu are probably going to lose about one month’s worth of business from essentially not having an oriental furniture shop front for 2 weeks: people tend to make a purchasing decision for items such as a chinese wardrobe over several weeks so with the website being down for 2 weeks the buying decision could have affected the natural buying cycle of many people who had visited the site in the weeks before hand.

However it could be a blessing in disguise as we are now migrating over to a much more secure environment with Roxxor who we will be working with in the future to expand from chinese furniture to develop more advance e-commerce website platforms. In addition to oriental furniture we should be launching sites for high send solid wood doors and for a high end designer barbeque. Watch this space. Of course that all depends on us selling oriental furniture which is not that easy without a live website! All being well, we will be back in action within a few days and then it is a waiting game while we generate more customer interest over the subsequent weeks.

Some of the Zenzu team have lived in South China over the border from Hong Kong which is an area that attracts people from all over China. Among these people are some from Sichuan province and the Chendgu area. Several of our close friends have family from that region but fortunately non were injured. The Zenzu team visited their Chinese Furniture supplier recently and it was remarkable to see what an impact the disaster had had on the nation. As a mark of respect all foreign / non-essential TV channels were taken off air for almost a week and several were only transmitted in black & white for a while.

During our visit to out Oriental Furniture suppliers our contact Ann said that she had put an offer in to adopt an orphan from the earthquake disaster. Apparently this was not unusual with people flooding in with offers from all over China. Stories abounded with hugely generous offers of monetary donations from officials and celebrities. Althought this focus was largely positive a murkier underside was the internet tittle-tattle comparing the amounts of money donated by film-stars, TV-stars, muscians and sportsmen. Singers deemed to have given selfishly have already seen sales of albums drop significantly, irrespetive of whether gossip-mongering was true. A real shame to focus on this in the contect of such a humanetarian disaster. In contrast though, it seems as if nearly every person in the population has donated a little and there was a heartening story of a beggar who had donated all of his meagre savings to the cause. As a company our chinese furniture suppliers had donated a huge amount of money to charities which we were quite proud of. A very nice company with a very nice attitude.

Really was fascinating to see the media response from within China with nearly every domestic channel dedicated to ongoing reports. While the European perspective tended to focus on the negative stories such as poor quality school buildings, the Chinese themselves seemed to have pulled toghether to focus on solving the immediate problems of food, water, shelter and resuce. Our Chinese furniture suppliers said they had heard of such rumours but were staying postive in the short-term. Of course we have no idea how much of this focus has been guided by the chinese state through the heavily controlled domestic media but the empathy did indeed seem genuine wherever we went.

Our Oriental furniture supplier is going to start increasing the number of Chinese furniture samples that they supply to us. Previously they were reticent to provide these in large quanities. Bizarely from a UK perspective, although perhaps typically from a Chinese persective, the owner of the factory had imposed a restriction on colour finish samples leaving the factory as he thought they would be liable for competitor copying. A rather unusual thought, but following our recent visit to China, our main contact has assured us that this mis-conception has been cleared up. We were also able to confirm during our visit that the beautiful dark red that we use for the Traditional Chinese Wardrobe would become the default red shade for the Zenzu collection. Samples are on the way to the UK. The red originated from a sumptuous interior design project that we were involved in and is truly stunning.

Our red range of chinese tables, oriental wardrobes and wedding cabinets do not sell in high numbers online, but when our customers visit the warehouse they tend to fall in love with the shades. The same goes for our rustic colour range and the dark purple that we use on our range of Hunan Trunks. The UK market is very conservative in this respect, with brighter colours being the most popular chinese furniture shades that are solid in Italy, Spain and Scandinavia. The U.S market is less eclectic in its choices but still far more liberal and open to alternative colour schemes that the vary conservative UK oriental furniture market.

Zenzu samples are made of jia-bam or ‘pressed wood’ with a very thin layer of Yu-mu veneer up on which the stain/varnish or lacquer finishing is shown. The construction of Zenzu’s actual pieces is of course in solid wood as much as possible. All jambs are made with solid Yu-mu (Southern Elm) as are wardrobe fronts and sideboard / sidetable tops. Most side panels are made with veneer finish and this is actually quite an important decision that we had to make because it prevents the likelihood of contraction and splitting. Chinese furniture can split in UK conditions when it is transferred from humid Chinese conditions into the dry homes of the UK. Even by kiln-drying furniture to 7% some homes are drier still than this and may contract down to 5% humidity. Veneer sections in combination with solid wood for the most visible areas reduce this risk. Lots of thought is given to this: in fact as all of our chinese wardrobes are made with solid wood doors they often contract and the construction of them is deliberately designed to accommodate this flex; however, this contraction can cause the doors to naturally swing open on their hinges once they are in a home so as a matter of course we added hinges to oriental wardrobes right across the Zenzu Chinese furniture range