Connie Hallquist's search for a well-designed, stylish, one-of-a-kind gift for her 87-year-old grandmother led her to start her first retail venture — Gold Violin, an online and catalog shop that specializes in products for older people.
"My grandmother had mobility challenges and I wanted to get her a nice hand-painted cane," said Hallquist. All she could find was a basic utilitarian cane, which wasn't going to do the trick. "I ended up painting one myself. And that was the seed for Gold Violin."
Prior to starting Gold Violin Hallquist ran a brand strategy consulting company where some of her clients were Audi, Williams-Sonoma, and Levi Strauss & Co. While there, she helped several of these companies move to the Web, which gave her a good sense of what was involved. Working in the Bay area, she also worked with and kept an eye on smaller start-up companies.
"I've always been fascinated by start-ups," she said. "I'm always looking for a demographic that's not being served. The senior market is totally under-addressed by retailers."
Independent Living: Gold Violin provides a symphony of stuff for seniors.
When she launched Gold Violin in Charlottesville, Virginia in 2000, the site featured 180 products for people with mobility problems, poor vision, and hearing impairments, including computer keyboards with enlarged keys, ergonomic kitchen tools, and, of course, stylish canes. The site now features about 300 items, including body brushes, a gravity pepper mill, and sugar-free chocolates.
Because Hallquist had a relationship with New Media Merchants, the software developer for the e-commerce sites of Williams-Sonoma and Levi Strauss, she turned to them to develop her Gold Violin site. They also hosted and maintained the site. When New Media Merchants recently decided to focus on developing software for nurses, Hallquist went with Volusion.
"We took our design and worked it into their pre-packaged code," said Hallquist, who is pleased with the results. "For us, it was a little scary because we worked with the same team at New Media Merchants for six years, but we're getting used to it."
Ship Shape with Volusion So far her favorite feature of Volusion is the way it's integrated with UPS Worldship, so her customers can track their packages from the site. "It's seamless," she said.
To build her inventory, Hallquist went to medical supply stores, gift vendors, home shows. "It was like looking for a needle in a haystack," she said, because there was not one vendor who carried the items her customers needed.
These days she works with suppliers to develop products for her site, including the upcoming "Candy Canes," which she commissioned for the holidays. She has also developed her own line of Gold Violin products, which will be available at Walgreens, Longs Drug Stores, and Wal-Mart.
Her next step was considering how to reach her market, which is seniors and their adult children. When she started out, many of her senior customers were not used to shopping online, so she quickly decided to add a print catalog featuring her products. But over the years, more and more of her orders are coming from the site and the catalog orders are dropping.
Shout Out to Seniors To reach even more seniors, Gold Violin products are featured on QVC, the television home shopping network, and has a partnership with AARP, which offers a five-percent discount on Gold Violin products to its members.
Gold Violin customers do tend to prefer to place their orders on the phone, or talk to someone about their order, so Hallquist made sure that the 800-number is featured on every page of the site.
In another nod to its senior customers, the site features a simple navigation and uses high contrast, easy-to-read fonts. It never uses blinking images and limits pop-up screens. Shoppers can search for gifts by perusing several categories, including price ranges, "for him," "for her" and "thinking of you," or, simply check out the "sale" or "what's new" areas by clicking on a tab on the home page.
And, apparently, Hallquist's ideas and execution are working. "Over the past few years," she said, "older people are becoming much more comfortable online."
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