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Brought to you by Home Furnishings Business
June 30,
2007 by in UnCategorized 
By Home Furnishings Business in Retail Technology on July 2007
Time was, a lot of brick-and-mortar furniture store owners thought the chance that consumers would buy big-ticket items such as furniture online wasn’t worth their consideration. While a lot of shoppers still like to sit on that sofa or touch that finish, there are others who’ll get out their credit card in front of a terminal and make a purchase—especially if they’re comfortable with the amount of information offered not only about product, but delivery and terms.
Within a few years, consumers entering their peak buying years won’t remember a time without the Internet, and some furniture retailers are casting their lot with the Web for either all or most of their business.
Milan Rousset is founder and owner of furniturefromhome.com, a 3-year-old, Internet-only furniture retailer based in Newport Beach, Calif. Rousset grew up around a furniture store—his father owns Rogers Furniture, which has sold furniture in La Puente, Calif., for more than 30 years.
Rousset’s operation began as a marketing site for 10 brick-and-mortar retailers in Southern California, with the idea that he’d sell their goods on the Web site.
“At the time nobody thought people would actually buy furniture on the Internet, and I started selling on my own two-and-a-half years ago,” he said. “It had become increasingly difficult to deal with 10 separate store owners, and none of the stores really respected what I was trying to do for them.”
A lot has changed over the three years Rousset’s been in business, he said, and not only in terms of the number of people selling furniture on the Web. Rousset finds a much higher level of respect on the vendor side for the concept.
“You have to remember that my whole family’s in the furniture business, so I do know the industry,” he said. “Well, a couple of years ago I’d walk into showrooms at the Las Vegas market and introduce myself to a sales rep and tell them what I was doing. I can’t tell you on how many occasions the rep or the owner would come out yelling and screaming that the Internet was a worthless business for furniture. Now I go into showrooms, and while there are still companies that won’t work with online furniture retailers, a lot more are clamoring for our business now.”
Consumer Comfort Breeds Business
There’s also more respect for the Web where it really counts—among consumers.
“Web users are now much more savvy, and are used to doing everything from banking, car buying and even house shopping on the Internet,” said Adrienne Cregar Jandler, president of Atlantic Webworks, a Greensboro, N.C.-based firm specializing in Web site development, strategic planning and site lifecycle services including development, marketing, evaluation, maintenance and hosting. “These shoppers tend to be high-income, and they’re much more time-starved. They go online and shop around, and when they’re ready to buy, they really want to move on it.”
Online shoppers, she noted, have grown more and more comfortable with big-ticket purchases via the Web.
“With real-time credit-card processing and certified secure shopping environments, security has become less of a concern,” Jandler said.
Those companies already selling furniture on the Internet have come a long way this decade, and brick-and-mortar stores, whether or not they’re looking to sell on the Web, will find stiff competition. These e-merchants, Jandler noted, without the overhead of a retail store, can heavily market their online stores.
“The ‘click merchants’ have refined their policies and incentives, especially in terms of price guarantees and matching, and order tracking,” Jandler said. “Consumers don’t feel quite the anxiety they used to for big purchases on the Internet.”
Telling a Story, Setting a Mood
Josh Dorfman came out of a background in Internet marketing to found Vivavi, which began in April 2004 as an online retailer of high-quality, eco-friendly contemporary goods. Interestingly, the operation started with Internet-only sales at vivavi.com, not opening a brick-and-mortar showroom until December 2005 when a Vivavi store opened in Brooklyn, N.Y.
Vivavi has what Dorfman calls a “double niche”: home furnishings that couple strong contemporary design with environment-friendly materials and production processes.
“Because we were in that double-niche market, the Internet was going to be a very important way for us to reach that consumer, and it was really important to us to be able to sell through the Internet,” Dorfman said.
“With our positioning around eco-friendliness, we’re selling a real values-based product.
“Some people look at the goods, say, ‘It’s eco-friendly, and I like the way it looks—I’ll buy it.’ Then you have people who say, ‘OK, how is this product eco-friendly?’”
By using hyperlinks, consumers can easily delve as deeply as they want into Vivavi’s green story. Dorfman himself has a blog, lazyenvironmentalist.com, that focuses on trends in “Green” living—and yes, there’s a link on the Vivavi Web site.
“With the Internet, you’re able to offer people the level of information they want. I happen to feel very strongly about the environmental aspect of our business, but I don’t want to alienate a consumer by giving them too much information,” Dorfman said. “We also want to do that in the showroom, but it’s a lot more automated on the Internet.”
Paul Reitzin, who spent 25 years on the wholesale side of the industry, is president of rezon8 living, a specialist in contemporary whole-home furnishings and accessories that opened its Los Angeles showroom in April. The real focus of the business, however, is the rezon8living.com Web site it launched early last month. The Internet, Reitzin said, is the key to telling his company’s lifestyle story.
“We have 30 vendors, but we’re trying to build our own new national brand of quality mid-priced contemporary furniture geared to urban markets,” said Reitzin. “Our customer is typically a younger customer, say 39, living in or right outside a major metropolitan area.”
Rezon8 living seeks to provide a fully accessorized contemporary setting for a whole room or entire house, and the Web site is chock-full of realistic scenes that the retailer shoots in its own in-house studio, Avenue Six Studios. The studio also offers its services to other companies. Reitzin believes Avenue Six will go a long way toward selling an entire lifestyle.
“Not only do we have the store, we have this huge photography studio where we shoot everything the way we want to show it,” he said. “We can get realistic backdrops, a big city setting for instance, so we can take the right picture with the right look to the point the shopper says, ‘That’s what I want.’
“A lot of people doing e-Commerce don’t have enough forethought on the photography on their site. They get all the factories’ shots and label them by vendor. That way, (consumers) shop the factories and play one site of the other.”
The Web site itself is very atmospheric—visitors to rezon8living.com can even select music to listen to while they browse the site, and there’s plenty of browsing to do. For instance, having chosen an item of interest, shoppers can simply move their cursor over optional finishes or fabrics, and the image of the furniture appears in the selected finish.
There’s a full array of coordinating lighting, textiles and other accessories, as well as a “Design Tips” section written by the company’s stylist, and Reitzin’s wife, Barbara “Basia” Reitzin. The feature covers emerging trends in color, flooring and other home décor, and changes periodically.
Focusing on Service
Rousset at furniturefromhome.com said the key to growing Internet sales is to develop a site in a way that gets the store in front of a lot of people, so anyone thinking about the strategy needs to learn as much as possible about search-optimization on engines such as Google.
“There’s a misperception that you’ll set up a site and people will just come there and buy, but it’s kind of like the yellow pages,” Rousset said. “The more people that get into retailing on the Web, the thicker the ‘Yellow Pages’ get, and the harder it is for people to find you.”
Another factor is service—Rousset believes what happens after a sale is a big differentiator at furniturefromhome.com.
“We offer more service than what your typical online (furniture) retailer offers,” he said. “We ship, install and inspect our goods, and replace any problem items.”
Furniturefromhome.com contracts with a national network of shipping and trucking companies that stock items around the country for faster shipment. Those contractors operate according to a consistent service and delivery standard specified by the retailer.
That’s expensive, though, and the cost of contracting and warehousing creates a lower margin than one might expect from a retailer that relies purely on Internet sales. While Furniturefromhome.com has very low personnel overhead, it spends a lot of money elsewhere.
“The cost delivery and marketing in our particular model is very high, but it’s what we need for our service level,” Rousset said. “It costs us five, six, seven times more than a typical store to deliver, since we’re nationwide, and the cost of replacing a damaged item is huge. My (margins) typically are not really that much better than a retail storefront.”
Rezon8 living’s product assortment, some of which the retailer sources itself with private label original designs, lends itself to rapid, easy shipment.
“A lot of our goods are RTA, so we can ship to that loft that doesn’t have elevators,” he said. “We have real upholstery, for example, but it comes in a box and assembles with a couple of bolts.”
Customers can get threshold delivery to the door—a lot via Fed Ex or manufacturer drop shipments in addition to service out of rezon8 living’s warehouse. They also can opt for a “white glove” delivery that includes installation and assembly through a network of contractors.
See What’s Out There
Jandler at Atlantic Webworks offered some other examples of how online furniture retailers have refined their services incentives for consumers. Homefurniture2go.com (“selling furniture online since 1998”), for example, offers free shipping, satisfaction guarantees, free lifetime warranties, free color samples and free literature.
Onewayfurniture.com offers free shipping, price matching, 120-day price guarantees, order tracking, and client testimonials and feedback. Both sites, and numerous others, Jandler said, offer 0 percent or low-rate financing, simple return and cancellation policies, coupons and specials, live chat/help and low-price guarantees.
“While some of their incentives may be difficult for brick and mortar retailers to match, such as free shipping or price guarantees, brick and mortar retailers can take a cue from these sites,” she said.
One thing brick-and-mortar stores have in their corner is that brick and mortar itself.
“Use that storefront to tell your story on your Web site,” Jandler said. “That brick and mortar tells consumers you know the furniture business, and it does help increase their comfort level in many cases.”
Reitzin agreed that having a physical store can indeed reassure potential customers, and in rezon8 living’s case, it made sense to open a showroom as the company is headquartered in Los Angeles and Southern California is a strong market for contemporary furnishings. The company, however, remains firmly focused on the Internet as its major growth vehicle.
“Our customer base is used to things moving fast, and shopping and comparing on the Web,” he said. “We might open up more stores around the country, but it is our Web site and brand that we really look to build.”
Security concerns among consumers are much less of an issue these days, Dorfman at Vivavi noted.
“We haven’t had a security breach to date, and I attribute that to the fact that the technology and services available are really good” he said. “We use Geotrust for security, and Authorize.net verifies that all our transactions are not fraudulent. The costs have really come down to enable sites to become e-Commerce-capable.”
And Dorfman is convinced of the Web’s usefulness in projecting a retailer’s individual personality and niche.
“The Internet opens up more possibilities,” he said. “It reaches a customer who might not realize they should be your customer.”
June 30,
2007 by in UnCategorized
By Home Furnishings Business in Furniture Retailing on July 2007
This spring, Marty and Michelle Cramer, together, were honored with the National Home Furnishings Association’s Retailer of the Year award because their Washington and Idaho stores are prosperous, innovative models of what to do right. Marty is the CEO, the treasurer of the Western Home Furnishings Association, and by Michelle’s admission, the genius behind their remarkable expansion. She is his perfect complement, a whiz with numbers who kept their company on firm financial ground through its most difficult growing pains.
That is now.
This was then, 1988.
Michelle is a 22-year-old newly minted graduate, with honors, of the University of Washington’s business school. Marty is a former crab fisherman who studied theater in college. He is 10 years older than Michelle, broke, and fresh out of a drug rehab program. He drives a 1978 Dodge Aspen station wagon with a duct-taped fender to introduce himself to Michelle’s father, a prosperous engineer, who has one question for his daughter’s intended:
“Why are you such a mess?”
Marty’s response: “It’s a temporary thing.”
It was.
Cramer’s Home Furnishings opened its fifth store last year, in Idaho, marking its first venture outside Washington state. It boasted more than $7 million in sales in 2006, double-digit growth and 45 employees. Announcing the NHFA award—the Cramers won for a businesses with less than $10 million in sales—the association cited the chain’s rapid growth, top-notch customer service, service to the industry and support for charitable causes.
But Cramer’s is no textbook model for business students or would-be furniture retailers. Marty Cramer never had much of a plan, just a knack for sensing opportunity in out-of-the-way places and a desire to lead a very interesting life. He also had Michelle to hang tight to the purse strings. What Cramer’s really won the award for, Marty said, is its wacky story and strange cast of characters.
Marty, who had one big role in Seattle theater before deciding that he couldn’t make enough money on the stage, employs all his theatrical skills in the telling of this entrepreneurial tale. It probably has a lesson in it for fellow retailers, but that lesson may be to embrace your craziest ideas—and marry someone who will steer you away from the truly insane ones.
The Cramers didn’t start out in furniture. They started out working for a chain of Hallmark stores, in Seattle, near where Michelle grew up. She managed a store. He managed a warehouse, and was promoted to operations manager. Marty was bored. But he found a job two hours north, on an Indian reservation, as operations manager for the largest fireworks distributor in the Northwest. Michelle, a fervent anti-smoker, wound up managing the reservation smoke shop. They quit within a year.
But back in Seattle, Marty’s brother needed a warehouse manager for his successful trading card company. It paid less than Marty’s job with the fireworks distributor, but Marty didn’t care. Within a year he was promoted to vice president of operations, and was hobnobbing at the Super Bowl and Beverly Hills hotels with the stars of the trading cards. It was 1992, and he was making mid-six figures. The Cramers bought a house in a fancy Seattle neighborhood and Michelle spent her days volunteering at the local animal shelter before she too joined Pacific Trading Co. Within weeks of becoming credit manager, Michelle had the 90 days accounts payable down from $1 million to $200,000. She also got to schmooze with the likes of Mike Piazza, Cal Ripken Jr. and Nolan Ryan. It was a good life, with excellent salaries and enviable perks.
“I have to get out of here,” said Marty.
“Let’s go,” said Michelle.
Marty needed a challenge, something more exciting than the guaranteed paycheck. So to stave off boredom, and to start their business, Marty and Michelle quit. It was the spring of 1995, a nice time of year to retreat to a small cabin they owned on an island in the Puget Sound, and to ponder their next step as they renovated the place. It’s where they met the man who, while helping them with the renovations, clued them in to their entrepreneurial future. He is their former partner, now known as “the contractor guy.”
One day, as the contractor guy was working on their cabin, he told the Cramers that if he had enough money he would open a store in Ellensburg, a town 90 minutes southeast of Seattle at the base of the Cascade Mountains. The Cramers had some money.
People in Ellensburg and vicinity, the contractor guy continued, didn’t relish driving to Seattle to shop. But what to sell? Marty and Michelle thought a furniture store made sense. They wanted to ring up big sales, as compared to the small-ticket items they helped sell at Hallmark. Marty went scouting for their future furniture store and found no available real estate in Ellensburg.
But he did find an abandoned, freestanding gym in the center of Cle Elum, a short drive from Ellensburg. It was 6,000 square feet, and had been used by the local high school. But the roof was leaking badly. Marty offered to repair it for free if the school district would allow him to rent it for $500 for six months. The district agreed. So Marty, who had never fixed a roof, climbed atop with buckets of tar, sloshed the tar around with a mop, and was pleasantly surprised that the gym stayed dry in the next rainstorm. He and Michelle went into business with the contractor guy, knowing that the partnership would be short-lived. Marty wanted to go into business only with Michelle.
Inventory had to be acquired on the cheap. “Miss Moneybags wouldn’t let me have any money,” Marty explained. So he cold-called Emerald Home Furnishings, a local importer. “You don’t know me,” Marty told the importer, “but I’m a good guy and I know I can do this.” When the importer, now a close friend of the Cramers, didn’t say no, Marty kept talking, and eventually secured several truckloads of dining room sets and upholstery originally intended for a store that was going out of business. The Cramers hyped the August 1995 opening by hitting the radio with what Marty calls “big, obnoxious commercials.”
“We opened on a Saturday and damn near sold everything we had that day,” he remembered. “It was fun, wasn’t it Michelle?”
“Yeah, it was,” said the understated Michelle.
“People drove from as far as Yakima,” Marty continued. “We made a bunch of money.”
Small Town Marketing
The concept behind a furniture store in Cle Elum, Wash., population 1,770, is that people in small towns shouldn’t have to drive to big cities to find good, mid-priced furniture and excellent service. The idea worked so well in Cle Elum that the Cramers opened their second store the very next year in Ellensburg. Marty and Michelle were so busy that they hardly had time to notice that they lived in a rat-infested, $200-a-month studio apartment with drug dealers working the hallways.
That same year, the Cramers bought out their partner, but decided to follow through on another suggestion of his: open in Omak. He had been right about Ellensburg. Omak was another small town. Located in north central Washington, it had one high-end furniture store that was doing well. Marty discovered a former J.C. Penney there, an 8,000-square-foot building he considered perfect, and Michelle considered unaffordable.
“She would just not let me have it,” Marty said.
So he hit up Michelle’s father, who had decided that perhaps his daughter hadn’t married such a disaster after all. Michelle’s father and stepmother put up two-thirds of the cash, and the Cramers contributed the balance. They rushed to get the store open for the day after Thanksgiving 1997, and made it—sort of.
“I took out a double-truck ad in the paper that said, ‘We’re not quite ready but if you don’t mind stepping over a few boxes, come on in,’” Marty recalled. A line of 40 people stood waiting before the doors opened at 8 a.m. Later in the day, a very unhappy fire marshall told the Cramers that more people would have to leave the store before they could allow any more customers in.
“That weekend we did $60,000, and we only had $40,000 worth of furniture,” Marty said. “It was one of the funnest, if not the funnest three days of work I’ve ever done. Were you there, Michelle?” he quipped.
“I think I was back at the other store,” she chuckled.
The Cramers next move, five years later, brought them to Yakima. With 70,000 people, it is a large city by their standards. The industry was in the doldrums, and Yakima no longer had a La-Z-Boy dealer. Marty found a 30,000-square-foot building and bargained the owner down from $15,000 to $3,000 a month, and begged La-Z-Boy, which was looking for a more established dealer, to give him the line. The Cramers opened in Yakima in 2002. It and the Omak store are now their leaders.
More Momentum
By now Marty and Michelle had moved out of their drug den of an apartment building and into a decent house in Ellensburg. They picked another Ellensburg property, an old farmhouse, for company headquarters. They also opened, in 2004, a fourth store in Oak Harbor, near Seattle on Whidbey Island, which they purchased from a friend in the business. And last August, they crossed state lines on the advice of a friend and furniture representative who thought Moscow, Idaho, would be a good home for a new Cramer’s. Marty negotiated the lease on his first visit to the town.
Cramer’s also renovated its Ellensburg store—“the ugliest in the world,” according to Marty—with design guru Carmine Caruso. Marty had a hard time convincing him to come to Ellensburg, and Caruso wanted a hefty fee just to look at the place. Finally, he made the trip, agreed that the store was the world’s ugliest, and recommended a $500,000 renovation. Caruso said if it didn’t double sales, he would return his $15,000 fee. The Caruso renovation tripled sales. He is still a private consultant, but effectively Cramer’s director of merchandising, Marty said.
And that, to date, is the story of Cramer’s Home Furnishings.
So what’s next for Marty and Michelle? Can they be a Northwest powerhouse? A national chain? Are they going to sell the business and motorcycle across the country?
They might look to expand further once the market shapes up, said Marty, who is going to keep an eye out for hard-on-their-luck locations. “I like to go into towns where things are somewhat depressed,” he said. “The people are glad to see you, the buildings are cheap, and the government comes in on a white horse.”
And as usual, Michelle won’t have the most words, but she will have the last.
“We always thought we wanted 10 stores,” she said. “But we’re pretty happy now.” HFB
June 30,
2007 by in UnCategorized
By Home Furnishings Business in on July 2007
In an industry environment where global sourcing has made price a defining competitive factor for many furniture companies on both the manufacturing and retail sides of the business, Century Furniture Inds. has chosen the high road in terms of price emphasis.
Century didn’t make that decision without exploring other options. Earlier this decade, the company developed a new starting price point with Destinations, a container program combining original design and hardware with Chinese sourcing with the aims of appeal to upper-middle price points, and offering consumers entry to the Century line with the hope they’d trade up over time. The company found, however, that the move not only didn’t expand its customer base, but it also diluted Century’s premium-level presence on retail floors.
A few years later, Century reversed course, eliminating Destinations, and adding the ultra-premium Heirlooms by Century featuring luxurious materials and finishes on both in-line pieces and items developed for the program, as well as developing a very high-end outdoor business.
Bob Maricich, president and chief executive officer, and former chairman of the American Home Furnishings Alliance, talked with
Home Furnishings Business about Century’s evolved strategy; the company’s approach to licensed furniture collections; and what he sees as the challenges and opportunities facing the industry today.
In the past couple of years, Century has traded up in price points, dispatching its Destinations starting line, and introducing the premium price point Heirlooms program that has special appeal for high-end designers. Can you tell us how that’s affected overall sales, and give us an idea of the percentage of business with the design trade compared to a few years ago?
We thought, back in 2001 and 2002, that we could address our premium consumer and at the same time extend into the upper-middle market with global sourcing through Destinations. Frankly, we’d found a lot of the retailers were seduced by lower prices and traded down on their floors. We also found that designers weren’t interested in trading down.
Around 2003, we discovered it wasn’t bringing us new customers, and for us it was a failed strategy. In later 2003 and into 2004, we got back to the idea of emphasizing fashion, broad choice, customization—which we call “personalization”—speed and reliability. We found that those were big differentiators for us across price points.
Intitially after we made that change in concentration—and I’ll use 2003 as the benchmark—we saw a sales decline. Net sales since then are essentially flat, around a 1.4 percent increase, but our profitability has improved dramatically. Further evidence of our success is that our year-to-date 2007 purchase orders are up an eyelash away from double digits.
On the design side of our business, I really want to make the point that there are designers working in the traditional retail model we serve—a lot of our best retail customers are design-oriented, the Robb & Stuckys, the Toms-Prices.
All our business is design-driven. If you break out independent designers from our showroom business, it’s about 40 percent of our overall business, and that’s up markedly. Our point, though, is we want to drive our company based on the needs of designers, wherever they work or shop.
How has your traditional retail base reacted to the change?
I think we’ll end up with double-digit increases for the first half of this year. A lot of retailers were seduced by lower prices and the hope for higher gross margin percentages in recent years. That’s proven for a lot of retailers at the upper end to be a disastrous strategy. Operations with high fixed costs were generating fewer net gross margin dollars.
I have a sense that the pendulum has swung back, and a lot of retailers are saying, “We want to trade up.” They ended up making less on more units, and the high end really bore the brunt of price deflation.
Today, a lot of retailers are still about price, and if they believe value is all about having lower prices, we just aren’t the right guys for them.
It seems part of Century’s trade-up has focused on domestic finishing and customization capabilities. What percentage of your goods now made domestically, and how does that compare to levels over the past few years?
It’s a hard thing to measure because of the parts, carvings, fabrics and mixed materials. I’d say 85 percent of our goods are made in the United States, and that’s much higher than a few years ago.
Our head of marketing Ed Tashjian put it very well when he said that we don’t have a “made-in-America” strategy per se, but those things we talked about—fashion, broad choice, customization, speed, reliability—we can do better because we make it in the United States.
Typically, a made-in-America strategy involves putting the flag out there and appealing to patriotism, but in our case we believe we’re just better able to deliver on our overall strategy as a business by making most of our product here.
From your tenure as chairman of the American Home Furnishings Alliance, what emerged as the major challenges and opportunities facing the furniture industry, not only at the high end, but overall?
It’s not government, it’s not globalization, it’s not dumping. From my perspective, I don’t know whether the biggest challenge is the commoditization of furniture or the lack of differentiation. It’s probably a combination of the two.
We as an industry have a product that’s tailor-made to enhancing a home, at all price points. As an industry we’ve been focusing on price rather than how this product can be differentiated.
At the end of the day, the furniture industry has to learn how to focus on the shopping experience, service, how our products improve a home.
When you think about a trade organization, you typically worry about government regulations and other structural issues, when we’re really our own worst enemy when it comes to communicating our products real benefits to consumers.
Century has a foot in the licensing business, including programs with Oscar de la Renta and Kelly Hoppen. What are the benefits and challenges of licensing, and can you tell us how business is trending with your licenses?
The benefits are pretty straightforward. You have a really unique point of view on design, and from a perspective that’s not so close to the industry, so you have a chance for something really fresh.
We’re really looking for designers not endorsers—we’re not into renting a name. We have what we believe is a great combination with the designers and the Century brand.
As far as the challenges, it’s just bottom-lining the added cost. That’s always a challenge in this hyper-competitive environment, to bottom-line those costs, so the product has to be really good.
As far as trends, and this isn’t just at Century, licenses all start off with a bang, and then they tend to seek some level of sustainability.
With Oscar de la Renta, it’s just magic in the design channel, and it’s strong as ever there. It didn’t really work in the traditional channel. It is very high-priced, and not all traditional retailers attracted that ultra-premium consumer.
Kelly Hoppen was a different scenario that didn’t work on a sustainable basis in the U.S. market, but has been a blockbuster internationally, and continues to grow among our international dealers.
We also have a license with Richard Frinier in outdoor leisure furniture. The luxury outdoor business has the wind at its back. That started with a bang and has grown and grown and grown since.
For decades, housing starts and sales were a key indicator for the furniture industry’s prospects, but that didn’t really pan out for us during the housing boom in recent years. What do you see as the key indicators today for the industry?
When I was chairman of the AHFA, I was a champion of pulling together on the Web site all kinds of indicators we called the Dashboard from a huge number of sources.
As they relate to our business, I think indicators really differ by price segment. The first thing we look at for our business (at Century) would be consumer confidence. Second is the stock market—the global stock market, I might add. Our best years have been when there have been big bonuses on Wall Street. Lastly, we still look at housing starts. Our key indicators are a basket of all those things.
When you’re away from work, what do you do for fun?
I grew up in Montana, and I’ve been a lifelong fly-fisherman. I was a fishing guide a couple of summers in the West Yellowstone area while I was in college.
For me, fly-fishing is beyond an avocation—it’s a sickness. I still love it out there, and I get back there every chance I can find. HFB
June 28,
2007 by in UnCategorized
By Home Furnishings Business in Furniture Retailing on June 2007
El Dorado Furniture has decided to donate furniture to 40 needy families in South Florida to mark its 40th anniversary.
The 40 Years, 40 Families campaign was announced during an anniversary celebration earlier this week at El Dorado’s first store in Calle Ocho in Little Havana. The store opened June 27, 1967, and since that time, founder Manual Capó and his sons have grown the chain to 10 stores in South Florida.
El Dorado is accepting nominations from the community, and the applications will be reviews by a committee of local media executives and community leaders. Two families a week will be selected until mid-November. People may file applications for themselves or for others.
The winning families will be able to visit an El Dorado store to select up to $5,000 in furniture for their home.
Applications for the program will be available in all El Dorado stores and online at 40years40families.com Monday.
Applicants will be asked to explain in 250 words or less why the person or family needs the furniture.
June 28,
2007 by in UnCategorized
By Home Furnishings Business in Furniture Retailing on June 2007
Thomasville Stores of New Jersey, Fairfield, N.J., rewarded 16 of the retailer’s best performing retail sales staff with a group trip to New York City earlier this month.
“In a challenging economic environment, we’ve enjoyed some stellar performances from key individuals in our company,” said Michael Massood, president and chief executive officer of the four-year old franchise. “We think it’s important to recognize them.”
Collectively, the top writers, produced more $16 million in sales for the fiscal year ending December 2006, a 10 percent increase over the previous period.
“I’m looking forward to seeing more associates attain this level of sales in 2007 and beyond,” said Mike Trapasso, who was recently appointed to vice president of sales of the growing five-store operation. “Our goal is to support our sales team and provide them with the tools they need to optimize sell-through and customer relations.”
The employees, their spouses and several members of Thomasville Stores of New Jersey’s management team began the organized outing with breakfast at the company’s Paramus, N.J., store. They boarded a chartered bus, stopping at the Eatontown store for lunch, and drove across the bridge to New York City with tickets for the comedy/drama ‘Curtains’ at the Al Hirschfeld theater in the Broadway district of Manhattan.
After the play, the group enjoyed a late evening meal at Manganaros, a popular Italian trattoria dating from 1893 on Ninth Avenue, before returning home.