Exec Suite: Bernie Sensale, Fortunoff Backyard Store

Bernie Sensale and Marty Merkur launched the Fortunoff Backyard Store chain of outdoor furniture stores in the tough economic environment of 2010, choosing to do what many companies weren't: hire a staff with decades of experience.

Sensale, Fortunoff Backyard's chief executive, said they recruited heavily among former colleagues who, like they, had worked at the old Fortunoff chain. Customer service, "white-glove delivery" and a wide assortment distinguish the Fortunoff brand, Sensale said, and delivering that formula takes the right employees. All but a handful of the company's 175 employees worked at the original Fortunoff chain, which filed for bankruptcy in 2009.

Customer service is important because the sales associate needs to understand the assortment and what the customer wants. Our sales associate has seen every problem in every way for the past 30 years, anticipates problems the customer may not have anticipated and works to create a great solution.

This is the first year we had the e-commerce part of the site up and running. Some people are buying online. Others are doing research online and then going into stores with an edited view of what they want to look at. Others will look around in the store, make a decision and consummate that decision online.

For us, the white-glove delivery service is part of the value proposition. What we mean by that is making sure the merchandise is beautiful, shined and spiffed up -- the internal word we use is "deluxed." And we manage the delivery time. As a result of that, we constrain deliveries out of the website to our existing trade area, because that's what we can control.

Having launched when we did was a blessing in disguise, in that we have learned as a group to do more with less. That's a requirement to be in the retail business today. We would prefer to be in an environment where the economy was growing at a 4 percent rate rather than a 1.5 or 2 percent rate. The general uncertainty doesn't help, but these are all things we cannot control. We control what we can, and we try to keep ourselves positioned so we can be flexible.

We have a breadth of assortment, which is exclusive to [us] . . . [so] to a large degree our product is not available elsewhere. Our assortment of sizes also makes showrooming significantly less likely to be a problem for us.

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