Home Shopping Network's America's Store has an agreement with DirecTV and plans for new sets and products.
By MARK ALBRIGHT
Published March 21, 2004
ST. PETERSBURG - Home Shopping Network is stepping up its commitment to America's Store, the network's second TV shopping channel and long a corporate stepchild.
"We're making onair changes slowly because in this business the merchandise dictates who we are and we don't want to lose our core customer," said Will Keller, who recently was named general manager of America's Store. "But our goal is to become the third largest TV shopping channel within three or four years."
That's a tall order. It would require leapfrogging past rival Shop NBC. QVC is the biggest volume shopping channel, followed by HSN's flagship channel.
Despite being on the air for more than a decade and a few fizzled attempts at reinvention, America's Store remains so small that HSN does not report its results. For the most part the channel has been a clearance center for leftover merchandise that didn't sell on HSN.
That's beginning to change. Flashy new sets and new onscreen graphics are slated to debut this summer. HSN has begun adding new house brand products and landing other exclusives that will be found only on America's Store.
"We're becoming a separate network with its own distinct identity," Keller said.
In a new agreement with satellite carrier DirecTV, the reach of America's Store has increased by almost a third to about 35-million homes. That's about a third of the main network's reach. But Keller said sales at America's Store are up "dramatically" as a result of the bigger audience and experiments with new products such as computers and a $1,000 Reebok Treadmill.
HSN's core audience is dominantly female. But the DirecTV viewership is half male, so America's Store programs have more electronics, fitness equipment and gadgets and less ready-to-wear, cosmetics and jewelry.
Many shoppers say they don't tune into TV retailing because they don't know what's on. So America's Store is trying to build audiences around fixed scheduling that begins nightly at 8 p.m. So far Sunday night is consumer electronics, Tuesday is home basics and Friday is a coin collector show.
A Harvard MBA who worked previously at the TV distribution unit of Walt Disney Co., Keller has been at HSN for eight years. He's credited with the developing the company's offair sales from scratch into $500-milllion in combined revenues over the past four years. Much of the new business came from call center clerks suggesting something else shoppers could buy while they are on the phone or signing them up for automatic resupply orders of cosmetics and health supplement products.
Keller is no newcomer to second channels at TV shopping giants. He learned some lessons earlier in his career as a planner at Q2, QVC's defunct second channel. What's going to be different at America's Store?
"Q2 was so separated from QVC that we not only had our own buyers, we were located in a different state," he said. "America's Store will be distinct from HSN, but we're leveraging the strengths of HSN, too. We are broadcasting from the same campus and using the sourcing skills of HSN's team of hundreds of merchants to find product for us. We also will have lots of cross-promotion on HSN and use HSN hosts who are experts in certain products as co-hosts."
