News-Record.com

Talked to Scott Fleming over at Replacements Ltd. yesterday, following up on the company's announcement that it will open a mall store for the holidays.

Fleming, the company's president, said Replacements doesn't have any firm plans for future retail growth outside its showroom on Knox Road. But traffic at the 12,000-square-foot showroom has declined somewhat in recent years, he said, and the company is looking for other ways to appeal to shoppers.

Enter Four Seasons, which Replacements chose among all the area retail centers because of the mall's bustling holiday traffic. The mall's shoppers likely aren't making trips out to Replacements' full-time outpost, so Fleming is hoping Four Seasons will help the company capture some new consumers.

If the temporary Four Seasons experiment is a wild success, it's possible the company could open future outside retail stores. "Any plans to continue or to build upon this will obviously be driven by what success we have in this time frame," Fleming said, adding that "if it were successful, that presents us which another set of challenges and opportunities in terms of managing other locations."

Fleming said company officials have not had formal discussions about the nature of any future retail ventures - namely, whether stores would be franchises or company-owned. But "I can almost assure you they would be owned by Replacements," he said.

Though this marks the Greensboro-based company's first venture into a brick-and-mortar outside store, the company is not new to retail experiments. Take the company's adventure into listing tablewares on Amazon.com - a partnership Replacements ended in April. And Replacements already takes the bulk of its orders by mail, phone or online. Fleming said revenue growth driven by the company's online operations more than outweighs any losses in sales at the Knox Road showroom.

"We obviously think there's an opportunity for this company to grow more than it currently is growing in terms of sales," he said. "And we're open to trying all sorts of different things."