Home theater seating is one of often-overlooked profitable categories that professional integrators can offer their clients. As the home theater room trend has blossomed, there is an array of peripheral product categories that dealers can offer beyond just displays, projectors, screens and loudspeakers. Acoustical treatments, fiber optic starfield ceiling and most prominently luxury home theater seating can bring elegant refinement to both dedicated cinema rooms and multipurpose media rooms.
Fortress Seating is the leading manufacturer of home theater seating for the custom installation industry and the company relies on D-Tools to help it maintain that leadership position. By partnering with D-Tools, Fortress Seating is able to showcase its line of loungers, chairs, sofas, sectionals and more.
“We love working with D-Tools because they have such a vast database of dealers,” says Gabi Wolper, president of Fortress Seating based in La Verne, Calif. “It’s important for us to partner with them so we can get the information about our products out to the dealers. It helps them learn about us and then dealers can spec our products into their projects. It’s a really good collaboration between our two companies.”
The D-Tools Industry Insights & Information (i3) Partner Program gives suppliers access to a proprietary dashboard with insights into the sales activity among their dealers in D-Tools Cloud. Fortress Seating can also view download activity among its authorized integrators using the D-Tools System Integrator (SI) on-premises solution.
The D-Tools i3 Partner Program also enables suppliers such as Fortress Seating to approve their authorized dealers, view their market share in their particular product categories, and track in aggregate the status of proposals, signed contracts and orders placed by their dealers in terms of both number of units and dollar value. The information gleaned from the i3 dashboard helps suppliers manage their inventory levels more effectively because they can see the proposal and sold/booked business activity long before they receive the actual Purchase Orders.
The D-Tools Integrated Product Library contains more than 1.6 million products with integrator-level pricing from more than 220 suppliers representing more than 1,000 brands. In 2023, integrators using D-Tools Cloud alone created more than $4 billion in proposals for customers and booked over $777 million via the software. D-Tools Cloud data roughly represents about 10% of what is produced via D-Tools SI, meaning the integrators created an estimated $40 billion in quotes and booked $7 billion in business via the software.