Spring 2020 Strategies

Currently, Brinkley says about 80 percent of Rockdale Building Material Center SKUs are loaded into Pointy. Moving forward, he sees an opportunity to highlight more seasonal products to capture people who are searching for lawn and garden items, such as hand tools, gardening gloves and seeds. “We don’t have to get 100 percent of our products into the system. It’s OK to start small,” he says. “If someone finds us because they were looking for a plumbing fitting online, for example, we’ve done our job because that one plumbing fitting has got their attention. When they need other products, they’re going to call because we already met their needs once before.” To learn how Pointy can help your business, contact your Blish-Mize sales representative or Cindy Kane in the marketing department at 800-995-0525, ext. 132 or ckane@blishmize.com.

we have, so when people in our area are looking online, for example, for a quarter- inch copper sweat cap, Rockdale Building Material Center shows up in their results because we’ve scanned it into our system,” he says. Pointy was recently acquired by Google, which will help further integrate the device’s capabilities into search results. For Brinkley, he’s already seen how the device has expanded his company’s reach. A shopper in Austin, which is about 60 miles from Rockdale, called the store to inquire about whether a product was in stock, not realizing the business was so far away. While that scenario didn’t end in a sale, Brinkley says that call coming through means Pointy is doing what it’s supposed to do. “He was closer to Home Depot or Lowe’s, but he knew we had that product because of Pointy,” he says.

Rockdale Building Material Center owner Greg Brinkley has been using Pointy in his operation in Rockdale, Texas, for nearly a year. He discovered the tool at a seminar at the Blish-Mize Buying Market last spring. “I went to the seminar at the Blish-Mize show, and to me it was a no-brainer. It’s something you don’t think about,” he says. “Pointy does all the work for you. They have their own database with UPCs, so when you scan a product, it populates a picture of it. It’s an economical way for us to get our products on the internet.” Brinkley says before he brought Pointy into Rockdale Building Material Center, they didn’t have an online presence, and since launching it, he has had customers find items online that they didn’t previously know the business stocked. “It gave us a lot of opportunity to get products that people normally don’t think

It gave us a lot of opportunity to get products that people normally don’t think we have, so when people in our area are looking online, for example, for a quarter-inch copper sweat cap, Rockdale Building Material Center shows up in their results because we’ve scanned it into our system. —Greg Brinkley, owner of Rockdale Building Material Center, Rockdale, Texas “

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28 Spring 2020 • Hardlines Strategies

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