WINNER: Greg Hughes
Imagine That! Furniture
Category: Retail Trade

MOST ENTREPRENEURS SET OUT TO BUILD A CUSTOMER BASE; Greg Hughes is building a community, a social club filled with sneezers and a clubhouse called Imagine That! Furniture.

“We hope that we are the purple cow,” he says — outrageous, different and unexpected as outlined in marketing guru Seth Godin’s book, Purple Cow. A lifelong learner, Hughes absorbs business and marketing books, enjoying the process of turning theories into business tools. As an entrepreneur, he’s a natural. He started his first company when he was 15, a lawn-mowing business that he stayed with for 19 years, steering it through partners and a merger, finally selling his interest in the company that had grown up to be Reno Lawn and Landscape.

Then in 2005 came Imagine That! Furniture. He teamed up with Jake Gordon, a transplant from Oregon who came to Reno with a business plan in hand for an unfinished furniture store. The partnership fell right in line with Hughes’ long-term goal of owning multiple businesses with equity operating partners — “a business for every day of the week,” he says with a smile. What started as a simple retail operation filling a niche in the Reno marketplace morphed into Imagine That! Furniture. “We don’t call it unfinished furniture,” says Hughes. Language shapes a business; words create expectations. “We have customizable furniture.” His store sells solid wood furniture, finishing the wood on-site, sending the upholstery out.

The store’s reputation is spread by sneezers. “All of our marketing money goes into the sneezers,” says Hughes. And sneezers are? Viral marketing. The store gives out plastic “virus cards,” each card worth $100 off a store purchase. The sneezer (who passed the card on to the customer) also gets a $100 credit toward purchase. After one year in operation, Imagine That! has about 2,000 registered sneezers and more than 20,000 virus cards in circulation. Hughes estimates that he’s spent about $25,000 on the marketing technique over the year’s time.

And does the future hold thoughts of franchising? “Ideally, yes,” says Hughes. “That would be a dream.”