As brisk as RV sales have been, the management team at Youngblood’s RV & Outdoor decided to try a new twist at one of its Midwestern stores: Selling outdoor lifestyle products they feel will appeal to people who like RVing.
In fact, the company recently added the “& Outdoor” part to its name and updated its logo to better represent its new direction.
“We’ve added outdoor furniture, kayaks, fire pits, grills, outdoor kitchens, patio umbrellas, any kind of camping furniture you could imagine,” said Chase Youngblood, sales director for Youngblood’s, established in 1977. “We just took on a new brand, called Structure. It’s a pergola company – we build pergolas for people on their patios, over their outdoor kitchens, or pools, or whatever they have.”
A pergola is an outdoor structure similar to a trellis that someone might install to encourage climbing plants. Though not RV-related in any way, it’s the type of product that Youngblood’s has discovered its customers are interested in.
“So (we’re) just kind of venturing more into the outdoor lifestyle side of things. The RV business is still really important to us – that’s where we’re going to hang our hats, but we just felt like in our area there was a lacking for those kinds of products, quality-wise.
“You could go to the Lowe’s (Home Improvement) or wherever and get your $100 use-it-one-year-and-throw-it-out grill, but we didn’t feel like everybody wants to do that. Some people do like nice things and want to have things that are going to last a long time, so we felt like there was a need there,” Youngblood said.
So far Youngblood’s is only selling outdoor lifestyle merchandise at its flagship store in Mayfield, Ky. (Its other locations are in Paducah, Ky. and Cape Girardeau, Mo.) It is tricky, Youngblood said, because on certain items, you do have to compete with Lowe’s and Walmart or Home Depot and that means much tighter margins on those products. But his goal is to offer many destination-type products that most stores within a wide geographic area around him simply don’t stock.
“The Blackstone side of things and the Big Green Egg side of things, those two things have pulled people in like crazy,” he said. “And, we ran out of our first order of electric golf carts. And I hate to use the term golf carts – because they’re electric vehicles and they are street legal. We ran out of our first order and we’re waiting for our next order of 40. So, things are taking off really well.”
Youngblood said his company had probably discussed the idea of adding lifestyle products to its stores for around a year. Then when they brought on new General Manager Wes Williams last October, “he really kind of helped to spearhead that and put us on the right track,” Youngblood said.
“They had been thinking about it, but obviously a lot of pieces to the puzzle had to be moved to make this happen, because it was not something that we wanted to do haphazardly,” said Williams. “We wanted to make it right, do it right from the beginning, and offer quality product to our customer base.”
So far, what seemed like a good idea has exceeded expectations, the managers say. If things continue to go well, they’ll roll out the concept at their other two stores.
“Part of the plan is getting out in front of more people with the new name – It is not by any means to pull away from the RV business, but it is to provide more product that same RV customer is looking for, along with local people that, once again, in our area can travel some distance to find a quality product,” Williams said. “We don’t compete with inferior product. We handle nice lines, well-known lines, and that’s our direction.”