Snapping Up Sales. Placing Design Innovations outside of the lumberyard setting also has helped Franklin increase its sales to higher-end custom builders by providing a place where those builders’ customers could pick what they wanted in their home.

“We have high-end builders on the design and the building side that we couldn’t get in the door before,” Lierz says. “Design Innovations turned their head.”

But that has proved to be both a blessing and challenge. “Those people are doing change orders every day, and you need to be prepared to jump,” Frasier says. There also is a lot more talking with homeowners, a group that can have trouble remembering what it requested and what those requests look like.

One way Frasier adapted was to buy a digital camera. Now, while the customers walk through the showroom picking out what they want, she and her team take photos of the selections, print them out, and put them into a portfolio for the customer to take. All parties then have a solid idea of what’s going into the house.

But not all contractors welcome these opportunities to veer from the path they’ve plowed. “Some of our biggest customers are production builders who said “I’m not sure I want to send my customers here. This is too nice,'” Lierz says. “The production builders were afraid at the start, but they’ve become comfortable with the displays because it works as we’ve planned it.” In fact, one is designed for production builders to show affordable options that their customers can use in their homes.

Design Innovations also doesn’t try to be a truly retail showroom. It closes at 5:30 p.m. on weekdays and 1 p.m. on Saturday. The most notable feature on its website, www.designidaho.com, is a password-protected area that contractors can use to see what has been requested and examine possible purchases. Contractors also can decide whether their customers should be allowed in, Frasier says. “It provides a feeling of exclusivity.”

In a sense, Design Innovations complements the rest of Franklin Building Supply by providing stuff for the inside of the home–goods that aren’t part of Franklin’s traditional specialty, materials for the building envelope. It increases Franklin’s standing as a one-stop shop for just about everything you’d want in a home. It also has benefited the lumberyard side of Franklin; sales of finish products are outperforming the pace for overall sales by 10%.

Lierz advises other building material dealers thinking of building or expanding their own showrooms to “look at things through the eyes of their builders and the daily problems their builders have. That’s one of the things that led us to our conclusions.

“One of the biggest issues that builders and homeowners have is that when it takes time to make decisions, that’s a real mess–13 different stops across town,” Lierz says. “We tried to think about what’s the best way to solve that. We asked how we could be as much of a one-stop shop as possible … an actual asset to the builder in his sales process. That was a driving force, and it still is.”