Image is everything

It’s hard to argue with more than 50 years of success, but Ron Cellura decided a few years ago that his family business needed a healthy dose of change.

It had operated under the Western Furniture Company moniker since 1947, but Cellura thought the name conjured images of cowboys and campfire songs more than it did the high-end custom furniture for which the business was known.

“The name made us sound like we made Conestoga wagons,” he says, only half in jest. “We found from a marketing perspective the name wasn’t a good representation of what we did.”

So in 1997, Cellura and his three business partners launched an image makeover. The entire process took a little more than a year to complete and cost several thousand dollars, but Cellura contends it turned out to be both an educational and profitable move.

Although he declines to discuss specific numbers, he says the change boosted the firm’s annual revenue and has “brought a new respect” to the company.

“You wonder sometimes, when you make such a drastic change, are people going to remember you? Are they going to be confused by it?” Cellura says. “We were pleased it went over very well.”

For those thinking about making changes of their own, Cellura shares his strategy for a successful image overhaul.

Choose your name wisely

Instead of building awareness from scratch, Cellura and his partners decided to fuse the industry-proven family name with the company’s new identity. They settled on Cellura Designs, a name that was instantly recognizable to long-time customers and worked for practical reasons as well.

“You run into less problems as far as registering a trademark when you use your own name,” explains Cellura, who says the name change also brought a new energy to the company’s small staff, which is largely composed of family members. “You find when you put your name to something, you have a little more interest in it. It’s not that we didn’t have an interest before, but you know your name is on it now and you want to make it right.”

Don’t get fancy

Coming up with a name was the easy part compared to the hand wringing that accompanied the selection of a new company logo. Cellura wanted to walk the line between too traditional and too contemporary, and hired a local graphics firm to design several logos for him, with mixed results.

“We paid out the money — which was thousands of dollars — to have it done,” he says. “When we all sat down and passed them around, we came to the one we all liked the most, which we didn’t like at all. It wasn’t bad, it just wasn’t what we were looking for.”

After dumping all of the designs, Cellura found a solution to his quandary in an unlikely place. During a visit to his sister and brother-in-law in Connecticut, he explained his problem and they offered to sit down at their computer and design several logos he could take back with him to Ohio.

In the end, it was one of the designs from that trip that was chosen as Cellura Designs’ new logo.

Make it an event

Cellura wasn’t willing to dump loads of money into a marketing campaign to announce the name change, but he didn’t want it to slip by unnoticed. Instead of buying advertising, he used the company’s longevity in Northeast Ohio as a way to generate media interest in the changes at the Bedford Heights-based business.

A few newspapers quickly bit on the story, while Cellura worked to make sure long-time customers received personal notice of the change before they read about it.

“We did direct mail to our client base announcing the change,” he says. “I think we actually sent them press releases that we were going to give out to the media. So our clients knew what we were doing as we were doing it.”

Create a recognizable product line

Once the bulk of the work behind the name change was complete, Cellura started work on a new project he hoped would help propel the company’s new high-end image. He commissioned a designer with whom he had worked before to design a new furniture line that would kick off a “Cellura Signature Collection” line of products he hoped to use to expand the company’s reach.

The response to the first series has been positive and Cellura expects to commission a second designer in the next several months. The hope is that this signature series will help establish an image for Cellura Designs and build business in markets outside of Northeast Ohio.

“We’re a company trying to grow,” he says. “We are looking for a specific product line that had a wide appeal to it.

“By showing people we could do the high-end, sophisticated product, it gives our company the connotation that we generate original designs — that we’re a company of innovators.” How to reach: Cellura Designs, (216) 464-6600

Jim Vickers ([email protected]) is an associate editor at SBN.