Compact Appliance provides small-format home appliances, while Living Direct provides a broader spectrum of home living products, including appliances, outdoor furniture and housewares. The combined annual revenue of the two brands is approximately $37 million.

Founded in 1999, Richlund Ventures is a privately-owned company that specializes in identifying niche and emerging markets and meeting the needs and challenges those opportunities present through multiple retail websites. The company's direct retail brands include Compact Appliance, Living Direct, EdgeStar, Portable Airshop, Hot Water Source and Richlund Supply. Richlund Ventures wanted an ecommerce solution that was easily customizable, included rich merchandising capabilities, allowed them to launch multiple sites quickly and didn't require a significant investment in IT infrastructure.

"Everything is better with Demandware", stated Jason Roussos, president of Richlund Ventures. "It has been a fundamental change in how we do business. We are projecting significant growth for our on-line channel and with Demandware we have an ecommerce platform that can take us to the next level."

Richlund Ventures selected Demandware because of the following differentiators:

• Full in-house control: Richlund Ventures needed to be able to easily customize their sites and make changes quickly. Demandware provides full control over merchandising promotions, search, catalogue, pricing and all other aspects of the on-line shopping experience.
• Continuous innovation through the on-demand model: Demandware's automatic upgrades allows Richlund Ventures to constantly innovate their sites, while eliminating the burden of maintaining costly IT infrastructure.
• Ability to launch multiple sites quickly, without costly services: Demandware's architecture makes it possible to quickly roll out multiple sites from within one environment. The second site, compactappliance.com, was launched with no assistance from Demandware and in less than 45 days.

"We are a retailer, not a technology company. We don't want to own the technology or the infrastructure, but we are fast-moving and it's important that we stay ahead of the innovation curve", stated Jason Roussos. "With Demandware, we can take advantage of the constant stream of new features that they provide, while we focus on our core competency of marketing and merchandising our product offerings."