Gazoontite Seeks Brand Awareness Offline

In the dizzying world of e-retailing, the “e” is becoming increasingly superfluous: It’s all retail, and the “e” is just another channel, albeit a quickly changing one.

Last week, San Francisco-based Gazoontite.com Inc., which sells allergy- and asthma-related products, opened its second store, in South Coast Plaza. The company’s online store debuted in May at the same time as its first bricks-and-mortar shop in San Francisco’s Union Square.

The company hopes to use the strengths of both online and offline commerce from the ground up, instead of adding one as an afterthought.

The strategy is particularly important for a company that has a difficult product message to convey, said founder Soon-Chart Yu.

“We have an opportunity to do for air what Britta did for water,” Yu said.

But explaining the need for an entire store devoted to “helping people breathe happier and healthier” can be difficult in any arena, never mind on the Internet. Just as people were perfectly happy with their tap water before Britta told them it was uncouth, Gazoontite needs to convince people that their air isn’t good enough.

“It’s hard to grow a brand-new category of noncommodity items on the Internet,” Yu said, explaining the need for a dual-channel strategy. “With this, consumers want to have a more experiential purchase process, to touch and feel things, and have someone to ask questions.”

After trying products in the store, sometimes people will buy them online, Yu said. An offline presence also gives an online retailer credibility, helps spread out marketing costs and, in the short term, provides margins as high as the Internet store, Yu said.

Gazoontite is by no means the first to realize the value of having a foot in both the real and cyber worlds. Computer manufacturer Gateway Inc., which used to sell PCs only via the phone or the Internet, hopes to have 240 of its Gateway Country stores around the world by the end of this year. Yahoo and eBay even have their own magazines.

And, of course, virtually every major bricks-and-mortar retailer is trying to convert itself into a bricks-and-clicks operation, with mixed results.

All that is well and good, but if this Gazoontite thing means we’re going to see grocery stores hawking plastic bottles of clean air for $2 a pop, I’m gonna slap someone silly.