Billiards Company Courts Women Buyers

ByABC News
September 29, 2003, 3:26 PM

Sept. 30 -- Brunswick Billiards President John E. Stransky still shudders when he recalls seeing tired billiards tables stacked three high in a fluorescent-lit showroom in 1998.

"You wouldn't see pianos or dining tables stacked like that," he says, shaking his head.

For decades Brunswick, the oldest division of Lake Forest, Ill.-based leisure-products conglomerate Brunswick Corp., encouraged its 320 dealers to stack their tables so they could shoehorn more into showrooms. The no-frills selling style also suited the brand's reputation as a favorite among rough-hewn billiards buffs. Buffalo Bill Cody, after all, chose Brunswick tables for his tavern in Cheyenne.

Now, stacked tables are as distant a memory as the night the famed buffalo hunter wielded a pool cue to clear a room of unruly longshoremen. Stransky is pressing retailers to install fancy $100,000 displays. The "pavilions," as he calls them, spotlight tables on polished hardwood floors, under flattering track lights and beamed cathedral ceilings.

Hold on to your Stetson. Hard-core players aren't the target. Neither, exactly, are the well-to-do men who made up 90 percent of Brunswick Billiards' $75 million in 2002 sales. Stransky, 51, is courting suburban women and interior designers with big houses to fill.

Male-Initiated, Wife-Approved

It's the marketing equivalent of a cross bank shot. But after playing to the man's man who likes to bond with his pals while bending over 158-year-old Brunswick's green felts, Stransky says it's time to cue up a different strategy. See, pool tables in homes on leafy cul-de-sacs are "male-initiated, wife-approved," or so Brunswick learned in recent market research.

Make that "disapproved." In focus groups women complained that Brunswick's weighty, carved tables didn't go with sleek home furnishings from Pottery Barn and Restoration Hardware. Add to that their usual concern that billiards is another macho pastime that would compete for their hubbies' attention.