obert Randall does not ask his customers if they would like to try out a hot tub. Assuming they will, he always presents them with a brand-new swimsuit and directs them into the room at the back of the showroom.
There, amid a jungle of plants, customers can choose to soak in up to three hot tubs, full and bubbling under a magnificent, star-filled sky. Randall leaves them be as long as they wish.
“Eighty to 90 percent of the people who come out of the mood room buy a hot tub,” says the general manager of Tony V’s Sunrooms and Spas in Clinton Township, Mich., a 2002 Pool & Spa News 100 company.
Yet for other retailers, the “mood room” — an enclosed place that allows customers to privately test the hot tubs they might buy — is an idea that has lost its effect. When spas were less mainstream, they say, having the room guaranteed a sale. But now, with hot tub sales at an all-time high, the experience of warm water and soothing jets is so commonplace that people no longer feel the need to test the product before they buy into it.
That means the space allotted for the mood rooms and the time and money spent on maintaining them might be doing little for the bottom line. While not without its skeptics, the idea of showrooms without mood rooms is winning converts.
That ’70s show
Russ Scott, general manager at Arco Pool & Spa in Rockford, Ill., is one of the retailers who are pulling mood rooms out of their stores.
“The mood room was the sales technique of the ’70s and ’80s,” explains Scott. In those decades, the hot tub market was much smaller. Retailers could display five or six hot tubs and be in the business. Now, as proof of the increasing consumer demand over the years, each manufacturer offers 20 or more models of tubs to display. Furthermore, 2002 sales for many retailers were up 40 to 60 percent higher than the previous year.
More product out in the market means retailers are seeing more customers. And their buying behavior is evolving right along with the market.
“I think the original reason we had a mood room in the store was for people to try the hot tubs out. It seems like fewer people do that nowadays,” says Joe Mahoney, owner of Hot Springs of Washington in Clarksburg, Md., and a member of the National Spa & Pool Institute’s Hot Tub Council.
It may be because sales techniques used in the past aren’t necessarily impressing people now.
“We don’t make the spas of the ’70s anymore, yet we’re still using the same sales techniques that we used in the ’70s,” he says. “I defy you to go out today and find 10 people who haven’t sat in a hot tub. I doubt you will. So I don’t think mood rooms are as important as some people like to say they are.”
Because the overwhelming majority of people have been in a hot tub, and because the number of models and features has increased, Mahoney says that the customer’s decision-making process has changed.
“Hot tubs have become more of an appliance for the house in that customers are making a choice on which one to buy based on objective decisions [such as features] rather than emotional ones,” he says. “I think a lot of times what we, as dealers, do is to talk people into trying them out when they’d buy one anyway.”
Randall at Tony V’s says he believes his store has such success with the mood room because they “don’t hold anything back.” In addition to having three to four models in the room and the starlit sky and plants, Randall provides pitchers of water to the customers and makes arrangements for customers’ children to also enjoy the experience.
“We know that if they go into the mood room, they will fall in love with the hot tub,” he says.
For many other retailers, though, the mood room doesn’t quite live up to expectations, says Scott. Many can’t put as large an investment into it as Tony V’s, which boasts a 17,000-square-foot retail facility.
“I don’t think you’ll find many mood rooms out there well-ventilated and kept as nice as the showroom,” he says.
Space is money
As a result, the square footage that the mood room takes up in a store could be wasted space — and dollars.
Brian Dyches, a retail designer at the Retail Resource Group in Laguna Niguel, Calif., has worked with a number of pool and spa retailers and often is a speaker at industry trade shows. He encourages retailers to move away from the idea of the mood room— at least in the traditional sense — because he believes the space can be put to more profitable use.
“There’s a couple thousand dollars sitting there in product that’s not effectively being seen, closed off, for the most part, to the customers,” he says. “I think what retailers are realizing is that they have this room that they don’t see people go into very often, and they’re squeezed for space on the showroom floor.”
Mahoney recently made the decision to take out his mood room for those very reasons. He says he was lucky to have one person a week do a wet test and, with only about 2,000 square feet to work with, the 14-by-14-foot mood room made the store feel smaller than it really was. Using the footage to display more product in the showroom seemed a better deal.
“We’ve gone a year without the mood room, and we haven’t found that we really missed it,” Mahoney says. “It’s a nice tool to have, but I would say that you could live without it.”
Scott at Arco Pool & Spa says he wouldn’t have believed it only a few months ago. He felt then that mood rooms were an integral part of the sales process. When the decision was made to move the store into a larger location, Scott drew up elaborate plans for the mood room to be built there. His drawings included a bathroom at an estimated cost of $5,000. In addition, he wanted to display saunas as well as hot tubs within the room.
Then, he says, “Dyches flipped me. He asked if we get the return on the dollar for it that we do for product in other parts of the showroom. The answer was no. Out of every 100 hot tubs sold, I’ll only get about five or six people to test them.”
And only those five or six people are likely to see those particular hot tubs. Perhaps when there were fewer models in the product lines, mood rooms made more sense, says Dyches.
“But now that everyone’s got more than 10 models, at least, there’s more pressure and more need to see diversity on the floor,” he says.
Deciding to remove the mood room is a big step, says Dan Hyatt, owner of Northwest Hot Spring Spas in Burlington, Wash., and a 2002 Pool and Spa News 100 company.
He made the decision this past year, during a remodeling. “It’s a good tool to get people to test soak, and a tremendous amount of retailers still have them and design them into their stores,” Hyatt says. “But each store has to weigh the benefit of how many test soakers they get versus the difficulty of having the separate mood room space not part of the showroom.”
For Hyatt, who is in the process of installing a theatrical curtain around some of his spas, eliminating the mood room has been very positive for business.
“Having the spas in a more open showroom allows you to change spas around and try models that aren’t working,” he says. “The mood room was more restricting.”
