Mix Of Furniture, Fun Is Just Ducky

When Buff Winderbaum converted a former automotive shop into a warehouse office furniture store five years ago, friends, competitors and suppliers scoffed.

They told him nobody would take seriously a business called Ducky's Office Furniture.

Outside Winderbaum's building at Stewart Street and Denny Way, a large logo centered around a painted duck didn't help. Neither did a succession of outrageous duck-oriented puns (this week offering "reDUCKulously" low prices) on the store's outside readerboard.

"A lot of vendors snickered at us at first," because of the name, said Winderbaum, 41. "But now they are waiting in line" to get Ducky's to carry their products, he said.

Last year, Winderbaum opened a second Ducky's warehouse store in a low-rent, high-visibility location beside Mercer Street, where about 39,000 vehicles pass on a typical weekday, mostly on their way to Interstate 5.

"If we were tucked away somewhere, we'd die," said Winderbaum.

He won't disclose the sales of his 12-employee operation but says 80 percent comes from business customers, the rest from residential. "We are fortunate enough to be able to buy in volume, enough to have it delivered by rail car," he said.

His store has no outside sales staff and no fancy showroom - just dozens of desks and chairs and tables.

Ducky's pays no sales commissions to employees and spends very little money on advertising. "That's how we can afford to make the same claim that everybody else makes - the lowest prices," Winderbaum said.

One thing Ducky's has plenty of is duck logos. Employees wear duck sweat shirts and sip coffee from duck mugs. Winderbaum often wears a duck-shaped hat. His store sells duck-handled umbrellas and gives away duck calendars and duck-shaped pencil sharpeners.

Customers who walk into the 10,000-square-foot warehouse at Boren Avenue North and Mercer Street pass an electronic eye, triggering a greeting of electronic quacks.

Why the ducks?

"When you think about it, office furniture isn't memorable. It can get very boring very fast," said Winderbaum. "They have been making desks and chairs the same way for years. A desk looks like a desk looks like a desk."

Winderbaum chose the name Ducky's after rejecting the advice of friends more experienced in business. They told him to adopt a name along the lines of Northwest Commercial Interiors or Office Furniture Discount Service.

Instead, he chose a name that seemed like fun. "I just love ducks," he said.

"This zany theme does two things: It makes selling office furniture fun, and it makes people remember us."

But Winderbaum says his business is built on service, not ducks.

"We are fanatical about service," he said. "People don't have to wait in long lines, they can come here and have fun, and every piece of furniture is assembled, not in a box."

Lacking the advertising budgets of superstores, he said, "We have to compete on the relationship with the customer . . . and after awhile people learn that they can trust us."

Winderbaum doesn't mind taking the time to teach customers to shop carefully by looking at the quality of hardware that makes desk drawers slide in and out.

His advice to start-up businesses: Establish a visual image that people will remember; have fun and don't be afraid to adopt unusual tactics to get the customer's attention.

But all those things will fail, he says, unless the business follows up with substance.

"I say this 80 times a day: If people stop to compare apples to apples and oranges to oranges, Ducky's will come out ahead of anybody. If we do a good job of educating the customer, that customer will probably come back here."