Doing His Own Thing

June 30, 2008  by in UnCategorized   

By Home Furnishings Business in Furniture Retailing on July 2008 IT’S A FURNITURE STORE FATHER’S DREAM. Not only does the son want to go into the family business, the son actually has a rare talent for the family business, and ranks as a top-producing designer year after year.

Twenty-five years ago, that wunderkind was Bob Schoenfeld, and the parent was Ken Schoenfeld, owner of four successful Drexel Heritage stores in Washington state, where the Schoenfeld family had owned a furniture store, almost continuously, since 1865. More than a century later, Bob—who had grown up changing light bulbs and designing vignettes in his father’s stores—was proud to be the fifth generation of Schoenfeld’s in home furnishings. It was the mid 1980s, business was good, and Bob was happily managing one of his father’s stores south of Seattle.

Then Ken surprised Bob. He told his son that he was ready to retire and that the stores would be sold. Bob would be cut loose. Ken added that this would be the best thing that could happen to Bob.

“Really?” Bob remembers thinking.

Ken and Bob Schoenfeld can laugh today about how the family business suddenly became someone else’s business—perhaps because Bob now heartily agrees that his father actually did him a favor by selling.

“I wanted to do my own thing,” Bob said.

And Schoenfeld Interiors is about as “own thing” as it gets. President Bob Schoenfeld—who recently expanded from one location to two—jokes that his stores are actually a “design center with a furniture store attached,” with the center taking up triple the floor space typically allotted to design. “Most people would say I’m crazy because that’s showroom space,” he said.

ABOUT 65 PERCENT OF SALES ARE ASSOCIATED with design projects. Schoenfeld’s special-orders nearly everything, because Bob Schoenfeld believes that every customer has different tastes and needs.

“It’s a rare thing that’s bought the same way twice, even if it’s just the firmness of the cushion that changes,” he said. So the stores carry practically no inventory in their tiny—6,000-square-foot—warehouse. This can come as a surprise to a customer who comes in, falls for a sofa, and wants to take it home. The answer is always a polite but firm “no.”

“If we let you have this today,” Schoenfeld tells his customer, “then it’s not available to any other client for the next 10 weeks.” The vignettes, until Bob Schoenfeld is ready to change them, are there to stay. They are his masterpieces. When he walks into his store, he will notice if the pillow on the chair in the farthest corner of the room is out of place.

Schoenfeld caters, then, to the patient and the committed.

“When people order from us they can’t cancel us. It’s a slower process,” he said.

Schoenfeld has to have it that way. The thrill for him is knowing that customers received an extraordinarily high level of personalized service. “I like that clients enjoy their rooms,” he said. “It’s a rare thing that I get a phone call saying ‘I hate this furniture. Come and do something about it.’ Our designs have been so well-planned, they just work.”

Also different about Schoenfeld’s is the designers themselves. Bob Schoenfeld gets them right out of design school, and typically, they know next to nothing about home furnishings. That, Schoenfeld said, he can teach. He wants creativity, a willingness to learn, and a strong desire to work one-on-one with customers in their own homes.

“When I opened my own company, I wanted it to be a home for interior designers,” he said. “But it usually takes months of training until they’re ready to work with customers.”

THIS OFFBEAT FORMULA HAS WORKED FOR 13 years, since Bob Schoenfeld first leased 10,000 square feet in tony Bellevue, just east of Seattle. Growth, even in this rough economy, is steady. “I grew last year and I don’t expect sales to decline this year, though I have seen a slowdown in traffic,” he said.

But even he admits that it’s unusual these days to hear of a furniture retailer expanding. That’s just what he did this spring.

In June, Schoenfeld Interiors opened its second store in Pioneer Square, a historic downtown Seattle dining and shopping district bustling with tourist and locals. The concept at the new 10,000-square-foot showroom is the same as the flagship store’s: highly personalized design service. The furniture is basically the same—modern and transitional mid- to high-end pieces. But the Seattle store, gutted and built in six months for $500,000, has a more urban, loft-like feel. Schoenfeld describes the Bellevue store as more “spa-like”—with warm tones and sisal floor coverings throughout. Schoenfeld plans to hire five more designers for the new store, bringing the total design staff to 15.

And as he refrains from hiring designers with furniture experience, neither did Schoenfeld turn to a furniture expert when he picked an interior designer for the new location. Betty Blount, of Seattle’s Zena Design Group, had never done a furniture store before. But Schoenfeld liked her aesthetic, and thought she had a sense of where he wanted to take the downtown location. She also didn’t seem to mind that Schoenfeld would be her co-designer. For example, he recalled, “I laid out where the walls would go and where the furniture would go. She designed the cabinets and the reception desk.”

The new store raised some eyebrows. For one—who is opening up a new store these days? “I’ve got to be the only one in the country,” Schoenfeld quipped. But his atypical growth in this economy isn’t simply the product of a solid, unique business model. Seattle’s economy isn’t suffering as much as many parts of the country, he added. saying, “I’d like to take all the credit, but I can’t.”

FOR THOSE FAMILIAR WITH THE FURNITURE landscape in Seattle, the new Schoenfeld’s raised more eyebrows because it opened just blocks away from Masins Furniture, a high-end store owned by Schoenfeld’s cousins that has been a fixture in Pioneer Square since shortly after the end of World War II (and was recently profiled in Home Furnishings Business, June 2008.) Masins and Schoenfeld’s cater to a similar crowd.

“They have the same approach,” Schoenfeld said of Masins’s dedication to customer service. “We’re in friendly competition and they do a beautiful job.”

Masins and Schoenfeld Interiors are distinguished from one another by their merchandise—Masins sells at somewhat higher price points, said Schoenfeld. And where Masins is more mainstream traditional, and works with vendors such as Stickley and Baker, Schoenfeld’s is more classic contemporary and seeks out smaller West Coast factories, such as John Charles of Los Angeles and Bermanfalk of Vancouver.

Schoenfeld, even before the Pioneer Square location opened, already competed with Masins in Bellevue, where the Masin family opened up their second location in 1981. Schoenfeld picked Pioneer Square for his second location, he said, because he had always dreamed of doing business in the city’s most historic shopping and entertainment district, and the opportunity to lease there might never present itself again.

“I wanted to be downtown. I always did. And this building is owned by someone who is close to me. It was an opportunity and I took it because it wasn’t going to come up again,” Schoenfeld said.

Besides, Schoenfeld doesn’t consider furniture stores to be his most direct competition. “It’s small design firms,” he said.

Schoenfeld has no plans for further expansion. He can’t, he said, because he is so immersed in the look and feel of his business.

“Five stores would kill it. You would lose that design firm feel,” he said. “I have to be on top of things all the time. If the environment isn’t crisp and perfect, I’m not happy. And right now, I enjoy my business.”

But he wouldn’t be having a good time, he said, if he had stayed in his father’s business or someone else’s.

The opportunity had presented itself. The current owner of his father’s stores, the Greenbaum family—another venerable name in Washington state home furnishings—offered him a job when they bought out his father.

Bob Schoenfeld said he had always liked the Greenbaums but felt it would be awkward to work in a business that used to belong to his family. And working in the one store that his father didn’t sell to the Greenbaums, but to a partner, didn’t fulfill Bob Schoenfeld either. “My father told me not to reinvent the wheel. But my first week, that’s just what I tried to do,” he said.

And that’s when the son figured out that though he might keep the family name and stay in the family business, he needed to build his own business, one that would be uniquely his. Today, he looks around his stores and likes what he sees.

“This is not a spreadsheet-oriented company,” he said. “I guess I’ve carved out my own little niche.”