Linens That Last

Penny Murphy, President of Pioneer Linens, Discusses How Company Pivots Have Led to More than a Century of Success

In the 1990s, it was Murphy who spearheaded the move to get Pioneer online to serve customers all over the country, rather than just in its small corner of Florida. But the road wasn’t an easy one, and there were doubters.

“My father who was in his eighties at that time, he was pretty progressive, but I had to convince him and he was like, ‘I don’t want to hear it, just see if you can put it together and don’t let it cost too much,’” Murphy said. “So I did a little research and I got it going. But it was interesting because when I did it, a lot of the other people who were in the store did not understand how the sales would take place. And they said no one is going to buy linens online.”

Little did they know that online shopping was going to boom, and actually be a saving grace of the company when in-person shopping was shut down in 2020. Pioneer’s online sales skyrocketed, and, thankfully, the company was able to deliver when its customers really needed it to. And as Murphy knows, it’s the customer who matters most.

“Our customers are probably our best source of our story,” Murphy said. “We have so many people that come into our store and they say, ‘Oh, I heard about you from this person or that person.’ And my grandfather was active in the community, my dad, they called him the mayor of Clematis street, which is the street that we’ve been on now since the 1930s, so almost a hundred years on the street. And, and then I grew up here, so I have lots of friends and now my daughters are here. They also grew up here. So I would say our story just sort of gets out. We’re all involved in the community. So we meet lots of people. When people come in the store, they like to meet us. And we’re involved in the day-to-day operations of the store. We try to get involved with the customers. If they are involved in some kind of a charity or something, we get involved with that. We know their moms and we know their sisters. It’s just, it’s family. And I think that that’s one of the things that people really like is they feel comfortable and they’re not just a customer.”

—

Related posts:

Despite deployment delays related to local supply chain changes — now compounded by the COVID-19 outbreak, we have opted to immediately incorporate changes to the CADD Protocol and reporting…

Scrum takes its name from rugby, where a scrum is where a mini-team of players huddle together to push their opponents and take control of the ball. In a product delivery sense it is a framework that…