Telling the Tale at Retail

April 30, 2006  by in UnCategorized   

By Home Furnishings Business in Furniture Retailing on May 2006 When Century Furniture found itself sometimes disappointed with how its goods looked once they hit retail floors, the company looked outside the furniture industry for an opinion on how to proceed.

Like many suppliers, Century spends a huge amount of time and money in preparing its market showroom to present new collections in an environment that makes the goods shine. Pinpoint detail from accessories and wall treatments, to paint colors and lighting creates the supplier’s own vision of how it would like to see the furniture sold.

Given the huge variety in store sizes and ages, and retailers’ own merchandising preferences and operational limitations such as amount of space available and floor plan, though, suppliers do end up believing their products might not be getting the best shot before the consumer.

For high-end companies such as Century, where romancing the goods to consumers is critical, that potential disconnect can mean missed sales for supplier and retailer alike.

These issues led Century to Callison Architecture, a Seattle-firm whose specialties include retail design, and whose clients include Nordstrom and Pottery Barn.

“If we want furniture sold as a luxury product, we have to provide a luxury experience. With Callison, we went outside the industry to see how an architectural design specialist would go about enhancing the furniture-buying experience,” said Ed Tashjian, Century’s vice president and corporate marketing director. “The fundamental conclusion Callison came to is that the High Point experience doesn’t translate to the retail level. What isn’t translated? First, the nature of the architectural elements in the showroom, as well as the accessories and flooring. Second, the story-telling aspect of how home furnishings can make people’s lives better is missing.”

Century and Callison developed a program called Compelling Retail Design (CRD).

After starting in late 2004, Century now has 14 complete installations of the program ranging from 2,500 to 5,000 square feet with various retailers across the country and another six in development. Tashjian anticipates a total of 25 CRD displays by the end of this year.

The program includes major architectural elements, story-telling point-of-purchase kiosks and other displays, consumer take-aways, flooring, paint selections, even ceiling treatments. The total investment for CRD is around $15,000, and Tashjian said Century splits that cost with the retailer. Design is case-by-case with each customer.

“This program focuses on the experience as much or more than the furnishings alone,” Tashjian said. “There’s a whole different level of architectural resplendence—it’s more than painting the walls. It’s new flooring, ceiling treatments and wall installations.”



I Want That

It’s not unusual for a retailer to come to High Point market and get excited about a new collection of furniture, and in the showroom say something to the effect of, “This the way I want it to look on my floor.”

Problem is, while the supplier has only its goods to worry about at market, with a showroom merchandising plan that was months in development, most retailers deal with an abundance of vendors, and re-creating what they saw at market can be pretty complicated.

More manufacturers are providing dealers with very specific merchandising plans for their goods, with paints, accessories and flooring all identified down to the source’s product number for each piece of the room puzzle.

Bernhardt’s Martha Stewart Signature Collection, for example, which operates as a separate brand within the company, has extensive merchandising specifications for retailers carrying the line.

Bernhardt, however, also produces style guides for each new collection. The more extensive guides include specific wall, trim and ceiling paints; carpets and area rugs; lighting and accessories and bedding. The company also provides elevations with architectural and structural details to create a setting appropriate for individual collections.

The most obvious disconnect between market showroom and retail presentations is space, said Heather Bloom, director of brand development for Bernhardt.

“Where we might show two or three settings of bedroom and dining, a retailer might have one or two, so that depth of presentation isn’t there,” she said. “Timing of a collection is another issue—the retailer might want to re-do their showroom just once a year.”

At High Point market in October 2004, Theodore Alexander got into the licensing arena with Althorp, a collection based on pieces in the ancestral English estate of the Earl of Spencer. As part of the introduction, the company put together its first retail merchandising package, which now shows up in 90 Theodore Alexander accounts.

That package was a key piece of the business plan for the collection, since Theodore Alexander was determined that retailers and consumers wouldn’t pigeonhole Althorp as just a “stately home” collection.

“The whole stately home thing has been cliched to death,” said Anthony Cox, group vice president and creative director. “The collection’s based on old furniture from a historic house, but one inhabited by contemporary people living a contemporary lifestyle. We wanted to give dealers a vision on how to set (Althorp) up on their floor.”

Theodore Alexander wanted to avoid overdone environments with Althorp.

“While it might look great in the showroom, it doesn’t translate to the retail floor,” Cox said. “The key is the support materials that allow retailers to create the atmosphere in a way that’s appropriate to their floor space and region—we have customers carrying Althorp from California to Minneapolis to the East Coast.”

For that reason, Althorp’s showroom environment is not estate-like at all—a minimalist space with white walls, and modern music in the background in an atmosphere more reflective of a New York Soho townhouse than a country manor. Each piece has a story tag with an acrylic holder on a metal stand for almost a museum presentation that focuses on the furniture. Banners give a taste of Earl Spencer and family’s modern sensibilities.

The collection has an 850-square-foot minimum retail footprint, but it takes 5,000 for a full-on presentation.



Merchandising Sophistication

Lexington Home Brands once had many thousands of retail accounts, and those didn’t always follow through on the company’s long-recognized showroom presentations. Nowadays, dealers have to commit to certain levels of merchandising sophistication to land brands like Liz Claiborne.

At April market, Lexington highlighted the Tommy Bahama Experience, a 4,000-square-foot retail model representing the six-year-old license’s existing collections and selections from this spring’s addition, Jimbaran Bay.

Some point-of-purchase images are the same ones consumers would see in a Tommy Bahama apparel store—an $800 million retail operation in its own right. The Lexington concept even uses scent machines to create the island/casual feel of the brand.

Linda King, retail development manager at Lexington Home Brands, spends a third of her time on the road visiting retailers, and said the company wants retailers to adopt an appeal to all the senses in merchandising its brands on the floor.

In translating Tommy Bahama, for example to retail, she said color is the most typical problem.

“There are a lot of random colors in Tommy Bahama, and sometimes the paints don’t really match up,” she said. “A lot of retailers have open floors now, too, and it’s hard to create an environment when a bed is sitting out in the middle of a huge space.”

The ideal retail Tommy Bahama Experience retail presentation starts around 3,000 square feet, but Lexington can help create an island environment half that size through suggested wall coverings, paints and selected accessories.

It costs money to refit a retail floor, but King noted that the program includes Tommy Bahama-licensed rugs from Shaw; top-of-bed goods from Sferra; and lighting from Emerson.

“These all are things the retailer can make money on,” she said. “A lot of the cost of the display involves items the retailer can actually sell.”

Cost indeed is one reason the market showroom vision might not make it to the retail floor—especially in a soft retail environment, many dealers are hesitant to invest in more detailed merchandising.

“When business booms and the cash flow is good, I don’t think there’s anyone who won’t spend the time and money for a powerful presentation on their floors,” Bernhardt’s Bloom said. “But when times are tough, that’s when you really need to set yourself apart. It’s a chicken-and-egg question.”

Retailers Know Their Business

It can be a fine line between offering merchandising support and telling retailers how to run their business.

“There are some retailers who make a better presentation than we do ourselves,” said Mike Spece, executive vice president of merchandising and design for Hooker Furniture. “If you look at someone like Robb & Stucky, they are the best lifestyle merchandisers out there, and there’s not a lot we can tell them.”

Spece knows both sides of the fence. Before joining Hooker eight years ago, he spent 28 years in retail with Gabberts, where he eventually became head buyer and merchandise manager for case goods. He said that although Hooker’s rolling out SmartLiving—a new merchandising program for the line already in place at a dozen retailers, with about 23 more installations expected by the end of the year—Hooker’s case is a little different from some of the high-end suppliers.

“Most manufacturers like to see all their product shown together,” he said. “We’re category killers, though, so we’re happy with retailers who want to show our goods by category. In my heart, I believe that’s the way consumers shop, for an entertainment center, or other specific piece. At times, the lifestyle retailers can make it more difficult to help the consumer buy what they need. I think our customers shop Hooker by category as well.”

For that reason, SmartLiving can set up by category as a “store within a store.”

Guy Walters III at SLF, an importer of promotional to mid-price case goods, is more emphatic about staying out of the dealer's way.

“We don’t consider ourselves to be in the retail business—our scheme is to make life easier and more profitable for retailers,” said Walters, group vice president and general manager of SLF’s Signature division. “We don’t have a brand name, and we don’t dictate price points. We’re trying to ship quick and put a screaming value on their floor. Some of the best retailers I’ve ever worked with are in our price spectrum. These people have great merchandising schemes, but when it comes to their price points, you’re not selling an $8,000 dining room.”

For those retailers who do want to re-create what they saw last month in High Point on their floors, suppliers make their staffs available. Century’s Compelling Retail Display program offers designer services to retailers and so do others.

“We do have an in-house designer that retailers can utilize to create strong in-store merchandising of our collections,” said Bloom at Bernhardt. “She handles showroom design, and between markets goes out to retailers to work with them free of charge.”

Hooker’s visual director, Patricia Adams, also spends time between markets working with retailers on their merchandising of Hooker product.

“She custom designs a display for each one, and she’s an incredible resource” Spece said. “In our case, concentrating on independent dealers, it’s more difficult to re-create (the showroom atmosphere). You’re dealing with the customer’s own space, and each one is different.”

The Althorp merchandising support program has worked well enough for Theodore Alexander to develop a similar package to help dealers better display last October’s introduction, Replica.

“The Replica support program will be ready after April market,” Cox said. “We know the template we created for Althorp works.”

Having a support program in place for Althorp from the get-go was a key to the collection’s success, and so far has kept Theodore Alexander pretty pleased with how it’s being floored in stores.

“I’ve visited 28 stores carrying Althorp, and the only issue I had was the misuse of the name—(the late princess) Diana, Charles’ sister, keeps cropping up every so often,” Cox said. “She lived there, of course and is part of Althorp’s history, but there is so much more to Althorp.”

Lexington’s King is working with dealers to get consumers in the mood for Tommy Bahama, organizing Tommy Bahama Experience parties on-site in stores. The next is scheduled for June 22 at Norris Furniture in Ft. Myers, Fla.

“Those get consumers and the retailer in the mood for the brand,” she said. HFB