Energizer Stores
Owners: Louis and Hal Klipper
Woburn, MA and Merrimack, NH
The Crocker Sales Company has been in on the ground floor of a lot of innovations in the spa industry and even started a few themselves. But when your business has been around since 1919 that’s not a surprise. The family business’ current owners, brothers Hal, sales manager, and Louis Klipper, general manager, took over in the early 80s and they immediately saw an opportunity in the spa industry.
“As the market started to emerge we felt that this was an area that we could really specialize in,” Louis Klipper says. They developed a strategy unlike any other retailer in the Boston area, which started with the redesign of their showroom.
“[We] decided that we needed to display a lot of spas,” Klipper says. “So we have on display in either one of our [two] showrooms, anywhere from 30 to 50 spas all the time. We typically have at least between six to 12 of them filled with water.”
Crocker Sales Company was one of the first to make wet tests a fundamental part of their sales process.
“Instead of working off a picture or brochure we actually had the model on the floor, people could sit in it, they could see it, they could feel it, they could touch it,” Klipper says. “If they decided they wanted to see a specific model we didn’t have filled with water, we would fill that one plus a couple others that were similar so they could do a comparison of at least [a] minimum [of] two to three different spas. That really started to drive the message home that we were selling a better product.”