We’re getting a lot of customers who come in frustrated and upset when they get a price quote of $20,000 or $30,000 from a big box store or local retailer, and they don’t want to spend their life’s savings remodeling a kitchen, so they come to us, where they can get the same (or better) quality product for a fraction of that price. And, to this day, roughly 65% of our customers are demo-ing and installing their kitchens themselves. “So, we began advertising on the DIY Network which brings in a tremendous amount of true DIYers. Not that they were afraid to do it, necessarily, they just didn’t know it was available. That was one of our biggest struggles – people just didn’t know it was possible to buy cabinetry online.
We knew we needed to let customers know that we existed, and that you could purchase a kitchen online. We service the entire country and also regularly ship to Canada and various areas in the Caribbean.Īckerman: “A big part of our success, early on, and what continues to drive the type of customer who purchases from us, is our connection with the Scripps Network and the DIY Channel. We also have a showroom at that location, but other than that, we’re strictly online. Rougeux: “We have 49 employees and one central location in Hopewell Junction, NY for our customer service, claims and door sample departments. We’ve been fortunate enough to continue to grow year over year since our inception, and have learned a lot of hard lessons: what to do and more importantly, what not to do. The rest of our siblings – there are five of us – began slowly coming into the business and now, our parents are in the business as well. A little before we hired Marie, we had stopped working for our parents and began running The RTA Store, fulltime. “We hired our first employee, Marie Bai, who is now in a top management position, in 2010. We were flooding Craigslist in different areas of the country to let customers know about us, and it took off. So, by early 2010, we had taken off all furniture from the site and strictly focused on cabinetry. But things started to take off a few months later and we quickly realized that the only products getting any traction were the kitchen cabinetry. We both had jobs and it was something we were working on when we had time. “We began to build out the site in January of 2009 and launched it in April 2009. I approached Samantha with an idea of putting all of our ready-to-assemble products – beds, tables, chairs, and the cabinets – online. My uncle had been importing cabinetry for the past few decades he’s a wholesaler and he ships them out to various retailers in the U.S. We had a lot of contacts in the furniture business, already we had a lot of suppliers we could reach out to. “In early 2009, I started researching online e-commerce sites. They eventually had to shut down in 2011. 2008 was not a terrific year to graduate because of the crash, and our parents’ furniture stores, as well as the rest of the furniture industry, were on the decline. I was working in customer service, and I wasn’t overly thrilled about the position it was just to fill time at that moment in my life, while figuring out what I wanted to do. They owned two furniture stores in Dutchess County, in upstate New York. After I graduated, I went to work for our parents. The following is an edited transcript of that conversation.īVM: Can you talk about the genesis of the company and how it managed to survive and evolve?Īckerman: “The company was founded in 2009 a year after I graduated college. Recently, Business View Magazine spoke with Tyler Ackerman, The RTA Store’s CEO, and his sister, President and co-owner, Samantha Rougeux, to find out more about this unique, e-commerce company. In 2009, The RTA Store dove into this lucrative market with a revolutionary business model – selling ready-to-assemble kitchen cabinets, online.
#Rta store upgrade
When remodeling a kitchen, about 80 percent of homeowners upgrade or completely replace their worn out or out-of-date cabinets. I t is estimated that over 10 million American kitchens are remodeled every year at a cost of approximately $50 billion. Business View Magazine interviews Tyler Ackerman and Samantha Rougeux of the RTA store, as part of our focus on best business practices.
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