Want a Williams-Sonoma Cookbook to Go With That $379 Toaster?
No retailer engenders guilty pleasure quite like Williams-Sonoma, the high-end purveyor of “home-centered” furnishings. Universally known for its $159 bottles of balsamic vinegar (“a unique viscosity and sumptuous flavor”) and $379 toasters (“this versatile appliance can also toast a sandwich”), Williams-Sonoma has invented a whole new genre of conspicuous consumption: decor porn. But the San Francisco–based retailer’s commitment to “furnishing every corner of our customers’ homes” has also left no bookshelf unfilled. With some 12 million copies of branded cookbooks in print — 7.5 million of those coming from the sprawling Kitchen Library series — the retailer’s cookbook collectibles have become the must-have kitchen artifact for a certain upwardly mobile demographic.
“They’re like Pokémon for the 45-year-old woman,” says Terry Newell, president of Weldon Owen Publishing, the packaging firm that over the last eight years has brought the likes of Williams-Sonoma Risotto and The Mayo Clinic Williams-Sonoma Cookbook to a solid-maple sideboard near you. It’s not just the compulsive collector, however, that gives this program its interest. Together, Williams-Sonoma and Weldon Owen have worked symbiotically to publish cookbooks that are both custom-tailored to the retailer’s target audience, yet easily repurposed by the packager for electronic or promotional formats. With 16 million people in Williams-Sonoma’s customer database — and the retailer’s growing nexus of catalogs, retail concepts, and websites — what Newell calls “branded packaging” stands at the busy intersection of direct-to-consumer retailing, book packaging, and cross-channel sales.
Beyond Shake-’n-Bake
The road to Pokémon luxe originated in the early 90s with the custom publishing division of Time-Life, as then VP Publisher Susan Maruyama recalls. She signed on Williams-Sonoma and Weldon Owen for the first such deal any of the companies had done at the time, and refers to the project as an “innovative, gutsy business collaboration.” (John Fahey, now CEO of the National Geographic Society, was then Time-Life president.) Maruyama, who is now CEO of San Francisco Internet startup The Hive Group, says that all of the companies made an investment in the joint program, but she and Newell credit the Williams-Sonoma gestalt to the legendary zeal of founder Chuck Williams — and his frequently plundered box of thousands of 3 x 5 recipe cards, assiduously notated over the years. According to Weldon Owen consulting editor Norman Kolpas, the octogenarian Williams remains “totally involved” in the publishing program, reading and approving every last soupçon of cookbook text.
More than 100 titles later, the cookbooks have splintered into series such as New American Cooking and the Savoring line, while the Williams-Sonoma empire has in turn racked up annual sales of $1.3 billion from all its product lines, and is heading toward the $2 billion mark this year. While the publishers like to credit the books’ lavish quality for their success, it’s clear that the Williams-Sonoma series benefits from the chain’s massive, multi-channel infrastructure and humongous brand presence. There are now five direct-mail catalogs (Williams-Sonoma, Pottery Barn, Pottery Barn Kids, Hold Everything, and Chambers), with 192 million mailed last year. Add to those over 350 retail stores — the principal distribution point for Williams-Sonoma books, followed by warehouse clubs and bookstore chains. Then there’s williams-sonoma.com, for which Weldon Owen helped create 500 recipes for the site’s database, and last August saw the launch of potterybarn.com. All in all, the company aims to sell $40 million worth of goods on the Internet this year — which may be possible, given an average browsing-to-buying conversion rate of 8%. The site’s cookbook pages sell both Williams-Sonoma cookbooks and those from other publishers, aiming to be a clearinghouse for cooking lore, and you can search the recipe database by course or ingredient. Each recipe, natch, is accompanied by relevant product suggestions.
All of the company’s books, in fact, are designed with cross-merchandising in mind to drive in-store sales. Bastille flatware, microplane graters, linens, practically everything but the cajun-style meatloaf itself can be conveniently purchased in stores — though the cookbooks almost never overtly refer the reader to Williams-Sonoma products. Cookbook lines also echo retail concepts: the new title The Kid’s Cookbook, for example, should fit right in with those $269 toy stoves available in the Pottery Barn Kids stores (two launched in California last month; observers dubbed them the newest leisure activity for “yuppies in training”), and a dedicated line of Pottery Barn Kids books is forthcoming. Cross-platform synergy is at play in marketing tactics as well — web kiosks are available in most retail stores, while the online services are promoted in catalogues. A customer database of 70 million purchases from 20 million households is just the icing on the old-fashioned vanilla-seed pound cake.
Nonetheless, only about a third of the cookbooks are sold through the retailer’s channels, a proportion that initially had store managers livid at seeing their own books heavily discounted right across the fashion mall at Barnes & Noble. The company says heightened brand awareness has been well worth the cost of selling to chains, and in fact store managers report customers tromping around with cookbooks in hand, seeking relevant kitchen accouterments. As for international sales, they’re split up depending on whether Williams-Sonoma is active in a particular market. Where the retailer operates stores, the books go out under the Williams-Sonoma mark; otherwise, Weldon Owen publishes without the brand name.
Collaboration between the packager and retailer also extends to market research. Store managers pass along observations about which products are moving, and comment on the life cycle of certain fads. Kolpas says that focus groups are de rigueur for books and magazines, recalling a memorable “store intercept” foray while researching the Kitchen Library series. In a Beverly Hills store, a woman was asked how many books in the 25-volume series she had bought. “Oh, I have 50,” she replied. “One set for my Beverly Hills home and one set for my Aspen home.” While perhaps an extreme example, the appeal of continuity-style publishing was not lost on Williams-Sonoma. “It underscored the collectibility of the series,” Kolpas says. “The old continuity clubs may be a dying breed, but the collectors are still out there.”
And that brings us back to the Pokémon phenomenon. “For almost everything we do, we own copyright,” says Newell, explaining that John Owen launched the company 15 years ago with the aim of collecting pictures and words that could be repurposed and reused. (Copyright is now shared with Williams-Sonoma, however, and the two companies have a long-term royalty agreement.) Typically, the packager creates and sells the initial books to Williams-Sonoma, while reorders go to the trade publishing partner. Weldon Owen also uses its Fog City Press imprint to reformat content, such as the recent 100,000-copy printing of Williams-Sonoma Simple Classics, which combined two Chuck Williams titles in a larger format. Fog City titles are printed to order and sold nonreturnable to the general retail trade; almost a million copies were shipped last year.
As for new series, look out for Pottery Barn House next fall and the Pottery Barn Design Library in 2002, while a partnership with The Body Shop is spawning The Body Shop Body Care Series and The Body Shop Make-Up Book, both due out next fall. Following changes at Time-Life in the wake of the AOL–Time Warner fallout, Weldon Owen is currently looking for new publishing partners, particularly to advance brand-specific programs. As Newell puts it, “There are a lot more lifestyle opportunities out there.”
Move Over, ‘Saveur’
And here’s one new twist coming at you. In November, Weldon Owen will be rolling out the new quarterly magazine Williams-Sonoma Taste, which will weigh in at about 75% food, the balance being entertaining and travel. UK-based magazine publisher John Brown Publishing will also have a hand in the project. Circulation for the launch issue will be 240,000 copies, with about 25,000 going to newsstands and the rest sold through the retailer’s distribution channels. Customers can buy a subscription at a Williams-Sonoma store and walk out with a discounted first issue in hand — perhaps the latest novelty the increasingly hybridized magazine biz.
Though Taste could easily be conceived as a sort of pay-per-view catalog, the publishers insist that the magazine is not a vehicle for Williams-Sonoma products. Chuck Williams — who takes the title of magazine founder and editorial adviser — wants the glossy to be of use to customers whether or not they frequent retail stores, and views the magazine as just another way to build customer relationships. Indeed, advertisers are courted with the proposition of reaching a “well-defined customer lovingly nurtured for over 40 years,” with a household income of $75,000. To top it all off, Weldon Owen hopes to carve out a visual niche with a “European-inspired format and design ethic.” In other words, its just the kind of thing you wouldn’t be the least surprised to find on your $145 coconut-fiber doormat.
