Land O Dreams

Land O Dreams first opened as a water bed store in 1976 and expanded over the years to carry all types of bedding, billiards, saunas, tanning beds and hot tubs.

Rick and Debbie Liskow say that hot tubs are now the biggest part of their business and growing. The Liskows have expanded to three stores with one more on the way later this year.

What has been your most successful promotion? // What has been working for us is our locations and doing a lifestyle TV commercial. We used very good, professional Sundance Spa commercials that were made by the company, we put them on there and just tagged them at the end. You can get your product, your store, the emotion – everything into their home on a TV. This spring we tried this in Rochester.

I think we’re competing with a lot of other products out there, not just ourselves. When you see boats they show people having fun, skiing behind it, barbecuing on the beach and all this stuff. You know we’re competing with people desiring that. I think the industry as a whole, manufacturers and retailers, [needs to] all put money into a pool and do a national ad campaign that covers the lifestyle. I think if everybody tries to get in the direction of marketing this product the right way as a group, which is a big task, it does take a council [like the Hot Tub Council] to do it. 

What I tried this spring, with the TV commercials, is one of the reasons the Rochester store is selling more hot tubs.

How do you measure your success when times are tough? // I’d have to say [we measure our success by our] margins because if you’re going after units you’re not focusing on the other profit centers in your store. You need to look at your service department as a profit center, not as a liability. We re-looked at everything that we were doing, trip charges, billing hours [etc.] and made sure that we were becoming profitable there and not a burden to the rest of the store. We also set it up so that our delivery personnel actually make money out there trying to sell new lifters, covers, chemicals, accessories and filters. We have brand new sprinters in our service department because they can hold all this extra stuff for these guys to sell. Before we were running around in these little vans, the gas mileage was half as much as it was with the new sprinters and we didn’t have any room. So on-the-road profit centers, especially in a large metro area where people have a harder time getting to your store [have been very helpful].