Trident Home to Debut at High Point Market

September 18, 2011  by in UnCategorized   

By Home Furnishings Business in sourcing/importing on September 19, 2011

Home furnishings sourcing veterans Gil Sturtzel, Tony Smith and Tony Ferguson have partnered to form a new company, Trident Home Inds.

Trident Home will show at October High Point Furniture Market in space 210-212 of Center Point.

Sturtzel, Smith and Ferguson, have been involved in furniture importing since the '80s, and first worked together at PMI in the '90s, where Smith and Ferguson were product managers in Asia, and Sturtzel did sales, design and product development in the United States. At that time PMI was doing business with more than 20 OEM companies and shipping in excess of 1,000 containers per month.

Ferguson, who lives in Vietnam,  was later vice president of Asia operations for companies such as Standard Furniture(http://www.standard-furniture.com/) and Home Meridian International, and most recently was with Kimball Hospitality before joining Smith and Sturtzel.

Sturtzel served as senior vice president of imports for Bell Furniture Industries, worked at PMI for six years, and then Davis International for four years before going out on his own to work with Smith on OEM projects and with major retailers on design and sourcing from Asia.

Smith is based in Cebu, Philippines, while Sturtzel is based in High Point.

"Our vision is to develop products for the Home and market them to major retailers around the world direct from factories we have worked with for decades," said Gil Sturtzel, vice president of sales for the new venture, said in an e-mail. "We are not limited to the strengths and weaknesses of one factory, we can take advantage of a factories strengths along with our expertise in engineering and design to bring real value to the market place. We are working with factories that have on site warehousing so we can mix collections and ship Asia warehoused goods on a quick ship basis. Our design team is capable of developing special projects for larger dealers, and our goal is to be a focused, grounded supplier of home furnishings and take advantage of all of our experience in all parts of the business."

Trident Home has quality control offices in Cebu, Ho Chi Minh City and Muar, Malaysia; and staff on the ground in China.The company has logistics programs in place with Zenith and Schenker, financing available and a U.S. free-lance design team.

"Our focus this market will be value driven bedroom collections from Vietnam and Malaysia," Sturtzel said. "We will also have a small collection of accent pieces from the Philippines and TV stands from China."