Daily News Archive
Brought to you by Home Furnishings Business
May 15,
2007 by in UnCategorized 
By Home Furnishings Business in High Point on May 2007
The High Point Market Authority board of directors voted unanimously Wednesday to return the bi-annual market back to its traditional April-October schedule after survey results indicated that more than half of retailers prefer that schedule over the March-September dates the Market Authority adopted in 2005.
A new 10-year schedule will be released on June 1. The fall event—scheduled for Oct. 1 to 7—will not change, but the spring 2008 event will likely be the first to shift from late March into April. The board expressed a preference for a Monday-Sunday schedule.
According to a press release issued immediately after the board’s vote Wednesday, 57 percent of retailers prefer October over September and 51 percent favor April over March.
Following this year’s spring event—the first in memory to begin in March—several exhibitors and some retailers urged the board to return to the April-October schedule, saying the earlier spring dates created conflicts with school spring break schedules that prevented some retailers from attending. In addition, some exhibitors said the earlier dates created a greater potential for poor weather conditions.
Market Authority President Brian Casey said the latest survey was conducted by a professional, third-party firm, Exhibit Surveys, that received input from more than 2,000 companies. “We continue to make decisions based on what the majority of customers are telling us,” Casey said. “We are very confident that the results of the surveys are reflective of market’s large and diverse constituency.”
He said survey respondents were less definitive about which days of the week they prefer, but Monday through Sunday had the most support, with 42 percent of respondents favoring those days
While there was virtually no discussion of the latest change by board members at the meeting, Steve DeHaan, executive vice president of the National Home Furnishings Association, told board members immediately after the vote that the latest change will present difficulties to associations like the NHFA that have scheduled meetings in coordination with the nine-year schedule the Market Authority adopted in 2005. He said numerous organizations have reserved hotel and meeting space for future events and added “they have contracts out there that have to be honored.”
In a press release, Skip Cox, president of Exhibit Surveys, said the percentage of buyers, exhibitors and sales representatives who responded to the Market Authority survey earlier this year is much higher than is typical. “All response rates were about twice what we normally receive and likely reflect the high interest of attendees and exhibitors in the issues we are addressing.”
The Market Authority hired Exhibit Surveys late last year to assess and analyze the city’s market to identify factors that would enhance the value of attending or exhibiting. The firm also sought to determine preferences on when the event should be held. More than 1,600 buyers, 200 exhibitors and 200 sales reps responded to the survey. “The high response rates gives us a low margin of error at a high (95 percent) confidence level,” Cox said.
The Market Authority board made a schedule switch to March and September two years ago after a survey it conducted showed strong support for the move. A press release issued at the time said “an overwhelming majority of respondents are in support of moving market to (March and) September.” Advocates for the change said the earlier dates would make it easier for retailers to receive new products in time for Labor Day and January sales, which are both periods when many furniture stores hold major promotional sales.
On Wednesday, Casey said the 2005 survey was conducted before he took the job, and he declined to comment on why its results were so different from the latest survey.
May 14,
2007 by in UnCategorized
By Home Furnishings Business in Furniture Retailing on May 2007
John Scarsella, a veteran of retail and manufacturing, and also of Vietnam (where he was a Marine Corps captain) doesn’t mind a challenge. His latest venture, Virginia Sterling, is a division of Vaughan Furniture and a collaboration between the manufacturer and Scarsella & Associates, the marketing company he founded in 1993. He and his son Michael handle all sales, marketing and product development for the solid wood case goods line, while Vaughan provides the manufacturing capacity.
The challenge? Starting a new case goods venture with domestic production. Scarsella said Vaughan was simply the best fit: “We just happen to manufacture in America. I can’t push that too hard, considering that product in stores comes from all over the world.”
What he is pushing is a tight approach to distribution and a commitment to training retail sales forces how to move the goods.
He knows both sides of the business, founding and running retailer Homestead House, as well as owning and operating three La-Z-Boy stores. He also handled product development at Durham Furniture, from 1994 to 2004, a period when the Canadian solid wood maker’s sales went from C$6 million to C$85 million. After honoring his noncompete agreement upon leaving Durham, he’s bullish on Virginia Sterling’s prospects.
You’re starting up a case goods resource relying on stateside manufacturing, and there are some out there wondering “What is he thinking?” Why do you believe Virginia Sterling can succeed, especially as a start up, in the face of Asian competition?
There’s always been intense competition in this industry, but there are more players in the wood business today than we’ve ever had. Before the influx of Asian products the wood industry was sort of a sacred cow in the U.S.—it was so capital-intensive to get into that not many people did.
Everybody also knew all of the players, who did what—there was a kind of natural order of things. We had the lower-priced or promotional makers, the middle-priced guys, and the high end like Henkle (Harris), Henredon, Baker, Harden and so on. Today, with so much sameness coming from overseas, you almost can’t tell who is who.
Virginia Sterling can succeed because we’ve found a particular niche in the marketplace. Somewhere along the line of furniture evolution, a serious gap opened up between the lower-priced producers and the upper end. We’re trying to fill that gap with outstanding designs and finishes and service. There are way too many guys at the lower end, and we felt the real competition was at the bottom of the heap.
About a year ago, I heard Bob Maricich, Century Furniture’s president, make a statement that 50 percent of the disposable dollars consumers have are controlled by 10 percent of the population. I found that very interesting and did some homework of my own, and found that Bob was pretty much right on the money. That got me thinking that there wasn’t enough attention paid to the middle and upper-middle price points.
We also have a very strict and protective distribution philosophy that should endear us to our customers. We’re militant about distribution—at Market I sold a retailer with three stores. A 12-store retailer, who’s a friend of mine, is in the same market and came in later. It broke my heart, but I couldn’t sell him.
(Retail) competition is really tough today, particularly with the evolution of electronic shopping and a younger consumer who doesn’t mind buying a sofa or bedroom suite online or over the phone. As a result, many more retailers are flooring more and more proprietary product in their store. I think that is a very smart move, and it is a major factor in our marketing approach.
Furniture manufacturers like to believe they’re brands but they’re not. In every market of the U.S., there’s a retailer who’s a brand. We don’t put our name inside the furniture unless the dealer wants us to, but we encourage our dealers to use us as a proprietary line. That appealed to a lot of the dealers we saw at Market.
Our very limited distribution allows for that. We don’t need to be a $100 million company. If we get to $25 million, $30 million, that would be great. That allows us to pretty much select one or two good accounts in a trading area and focus on them, sort of the bullet approach to marketing as opposed to the shotgun approach.
It also allows us the opportunity to work with our retail partners in developing product that they would like to have versus us sitting around trying to be great innovators of product development. Whenever you want to know what sells, ask a retail salesperson—they’ll tell you.
Your manufacturing partner is the Vaughan furniture plant in Galax, Va. Can you trace the development of the relationship Virginia Sterling established with Vaughan? We know you were looking for production—what was Vaughan’s motivation?
A mutual industry friend introduced Bill Vaughan, Vaughan Furniture’s CEO, and I to each other. We met and sort of hit it off as friends. As we talked, Bill was interested in learning if there were expanded markets he could approach with Vaughan’s extensive manufacturing assets and personnel.
My son Michael and I put together a marketing plan for a solid wood, middle- to upper-end furniture company and presented it to Bill and Taylor (Vaughan), Vaughan’s president, and their staff. They decided to embark on this course with Michael and I heading the division.
Vaughan’s motivation was to maximize manufacturing experience and physical assets by entering a new market and adding a customer base that, for the most part, Vaughan didn’t sell to in the past.
I think that everyone knows that most of the Vaughan line is currently made off-shore, and that factory capacity in Galax wasn’t running full out. We hope to change that in the next couple of years.
One of our advantages is that the Vaughan family’s been making furniture 85 years, and they have wonderful assets in place, including a tremendous amount of computerized equipment. We have 250,000 square feet of manufacturing space and a 150,000-square-foot distribution center attached to the plant.
The Valspar guys told us Vaughan has one of the best finishing lines in the South, so there’s a lot we can accomplish there. The main difference between what they were doing and what we’re doing now is materials and time—we use cherry instead of a lot of poplar solids and we redid the construction.
They build it and warehouse it, Michael and I do everything else. It’s a different approach to outsourcing—rather than outsourcing production, they’re outsourcing all the marketing, product development, sales and distribution functions, and concentrating on making a great product.
Where else did you look for potential manufacturing partners? Why didn’t those prospects work out?
The same friend who introduced me to the Vaughan family also introduced me to Jim Kepley, Dan Timberlake and Brian Starnes of Linwood Furniture in Lexington, N.C. We had a number of discussions that centered on the possibilities of domestic production being successful in today’s business climate.
We also discussed the possibility of a relationship between our two companies, Linwood and Scarsella Associates, but to be honest, they were way ahead of us in developing their new company. The folks at Linwood were looking at market penetration in a price range higher than we wanted to be in. I think they’ll do very well.
You’ve been around this business for a long time, both in retail and on the supplier side. What’s going to dictate the future of vendor/retailer relationships in furniture industry, especially as importers hone their logistics chops?
I firmly believe that relationship selling is still an important factor in this business. I just experienced seeing over 120 old dealer friends of mine come see me and my family in a tiny showroom in High Point because of that relationship we had in the past.
Being a realist, I do understand today’s retailer has countless vendors to choose from, and they all make the same products as my company. In order to succeed, we need to do what we’re doing—zero in on a segment of the business we can excel in. By excel, I mean that we need to make it better, ship it better, and assist our dealers in the sell-through, which includes having the proper training for their personnel.
I’ve long been a proponent of bringing the selling personnel to my factories to see how the furniture they sell is made. You’d be surprised to know how few retail personnel have been through a wood factory.
And value counts. You don’t have to be the cheapest manufacturer in the business, but you need to have a price-value relationship that your customers understand and believe in.
Then you need to offer service, and I don’t mean just having someone answer the phone and then send out parts for defective goods. I mean service that gets to the most important person in this whole furniture food chain—the retail selling person.
It isn’t enough to sell on price alone. The selling person needs to understand the features and benefits of what they’re selling, and that’s where we come in—to train them on how to sell our products.
For the average lady trying to buy a bedroom suite she’s going to own for the next 20 years, it’s a traumatic experience. She needs reinforcement that she’s making a good purchase.
I’ve always found it weird that our industry has never really impressed consumers with how much we improve their lives through our products, and really for peanuts. If you think about buying a bedroom suite for, say $4,000, and keep it for 20 years, it ends up costing you $200 a year, and yet we go out and spend 20, 30, 40 thousand (dollars) and up for a car and turn it over every three or four years.
Let’s talk about Spring High Point Market, Virginia Sterling’s debut. Without naming names, how many storefronts are you signed up to ship, how many companies, and when will they get their first goods from you?
As of today (late April) we have 63 accounts with orders in the house, and each of our first four collections passed muster. We’re cutting all of them.
Our first cutting will be complete May 31, so our dealers will begin receiving our first production in their stores in early June. All the collections will be runing through the plant during May and June, with our last group being shipped by July 20. HFB
May 7,
2007 by in UnCategorized
By Home Furnishings Business in Furniture Retailing on May 2007
The owners of Linder’s Furniture like to talk about the scary things the market has thrown at them over the years—changing tastes, unreliable suppliers, recessions—you name it.
CEO Phil Linder and President Eric Foucrier say they survive and thrive because they can see around the bend. Their clairvoyance—rather the ability to make sensible predictions by analyzing reams of data—has enabled them to avoid disasters that have destroyed competitors, and helped them to seize upon trends to maximize profits.
“We’re a very data-intensive company,” said Linder. “We spend a lot of time going over numbers—from every department, month-to-month and quarterly—so we know exactly what the state of the company is, and the state of the industry is.” And as Foucrier likes to say: “If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it.”
The retailer was recently named Retailer of the Year by the Western Home Furnishings Association. The WHFA award, announced in April, recognizes winners for their leadership in the industry, and their achievements in business and charitable work. As you might expect of the winning firm, Linder’s keeps prices low, boasts speedy delivery service, puts extra effort into employee training and generously supports Make-A-Wish and other national and local charities. And Linder and Foucrier have taken on leadership roles in both the High Point Market Advisory Board and Las Vegas Advisory Board.
But they also demand excellence in one further category, and doubt they could excel without it: the ability to set their 10 Los Angeles-area stores apart. Never discount, they say, the need to keep your business in the forefront of your customers’ minds.
Take, for example, the promotion Linder’s hit upon for the opening of two new stores this spring: “Fifty Rooms in Fifty Days.” That’s what they gave away in a high-profile, two-month campaign, and awarded the final prizes before 43,000 fans attending a Los Angeles Angels game.
“A lot of people run ‘no sales tax’ or ‘free delivery’ promotions,” said Foucrier. “We could have given away a car or a few sofas. But we try to come up with something different. ‘Fifty Rooms in Fifty Days’ brought in a lot of traffic.” To be exact, traffic increased 32 percent during the course of the promotion.
Or look at Linder’s unusual partnerships with big league and college sports. Not only does it have marketing relationship with the MLB’s Angels, but it also partners with the NBA’s Lakers and Clippers, the NHL’s Ducks, and college powerhouses UCLA and USC. The intention is to catch the attention of a group underrepresented in furniture stores: men. As Linder’s explained in its application for the WHFA award, such sports marketing enabled it to quadruple its sales of televisions and entertainment and home theater seating. Marketing itself with nationally recognized teams further lends the company a degree of gravitas normally associated with far bigger firms.
“By incorporating professional sports events into our marketing programs,” the WHFA application read, “and having our name appear alongside Coca-Cola, Bank of America, etc., we become, in effect, a national company, i.e., ‘you are judged by the company you keep,’ and it instantly increases the effectiveness of all of our other advertising vehicles.”
If Linder’s distinguishes itself in any one way, then, it’s with its full-service, in-house marketing and advertising department. Foucrier, Linder, marketing director Ross Steiner and company spokesman Tom Campbell are the heart of this group. Linder is the quieter one with all the numbers in his head. Foucrier, though he started out in life thinking he would pilot jets, has the outgoing, easy manner more often associated with preachers and politicians. Campbell, with Linder’s since 2005, is one of the Golden State’s golden voices, and has been hosting talk shows and selling products on the radio for four decades.
Weathering Early Storms
Foucrier and Linder began brainstorming opportunities together nearly 25 years ago when they both found themselves working at the same waterbed store, Eastman West, at a mall east of Los Angeles. Linder was general manager and Foucrier was a college student trying to make money between classes. He was on his way to a degree in aviation management, but proved a talented salesman in his part-time work. Linder, on the other hand, had known he wanted to be an independent retailer from the time he was a very young man.
He was born in Israel, and migrated to the United States when he was child. Growing up, he worked in clothing stores in Brooklyn, and from the beginning showed a head for business. A visit to a sister in California convinced him that he would be happier in the sunnier weather, so he settled in the Los Angeles area and worked for Eastman West until he was ready to open his own business. It would also be a waterbed store, and he called it “Linder’s.” The location was Torrance, just south of Los Angeles, bordering on the Pacific. When he let Foucrier in on the news of his impending opening, he also asked him to join his team. He and the outgoing California native had become good friends, and Foucrier was someone you wanted on the sales floor. Foucrier remembers his answer: “No, I’m making $40,000 a year here.” Linder promised Foucrier he would make at least that in the new venture. With Foucrier on board, Linder’s opened in 1984.
It wouldn’t be long before the man from Jerusalem and the California kid, 12 years his junior, faced their first crisis. Waterbeds, so popular in the 1970s and early 1980s, weren’t so hot anymore. “So we got out of it,” said Foucrier. They turned their attention to what was selling. With an emphasis on bedrooms, Linder’s dove into oak furniture—with great success. By the late 1980s there were four Linder’s furniture stores in Greater Los Angeles.
The next challenge was the full-blown recession of the early 1990s. As the economy slumped, it became obvious that Linder’s, without major restructuring, couldn’t survive. Linder and Foucrier took a long, hard look at the statistics, found two stores that weren’t performing, and closed them. Foucrier said it’s that kind of difficult but realistic thinking that has allowed Linder’s to see another day when so many others don’t. “We’ll adjust our operations to fit the size,” said Foucrier. “We are capable of managing the business up or down to survive.”
But that shouldn’t mean skimping on employees, Foucrier and Linder insist. Linder’s pays 85 percent of its staff’s health insurance, provides a 401K match of 4 percent and pays “a bit above average,” according to Foucrier. “A lot of companies say the customer is ‘number one,’” he continued. “We think the employees should be ‘number one.’ When that’s the case, they intuitively take care of the customer better than themselves.” The company has a 10 percent turnover rate in sales, and 2 percent to 3 percent rate companywide.
Having survived the recession that opened the 1990s, Linder’s needed more opportunities. Mid-decade, they found one. Before most of their competitors caught on, Linder and Foucrier realized how Chinese-made furniture could lower costs, savings that could be passed on to their customers. “We were ahead of the curve, looking to give customers a better value,” said Foucrier.
Customers appeared eager for the values from China, but Chinese furniture wasn’t necessarily ready for the American market. “The quality wasn’t there. We had some containers come in here with cracked-up furniture,” said Foucrier. “But we stuck with it and worked with the factories on quality control.”
Eye to the Future
By the time the company made its next big move, the acquisition of Legacy Home Furnishings in 2005, Linder’s had six stores to its name. High-end Legacy complimented Linder’s mostly mid-price offerings, and had established a strong reputation in the Coachella Valley, a group of fast-growing communities about 115 miles east of Los Angeles known as the “Desert Empire.” Legacy owner Arnold Belinsky was ready to retire.
The company, founded in 1991, was two stores—the Legacy flagship store and a store called Rooms Express. The latter’s vendors—which included Universal, Modus, Wynwood and Futura—more closely resembled Linder’s mix. Linder’s and Belinsky’s companies were approximately the same size, and had cultivated similar company cultures. The Coachella Valley was also attractive because television advertising is far more affordable there than it is closer to Los Angeles. Linder’s kept the “Legacy” and “Rooms Express” names and made plans for a second Rooms Express store, which opened in the summer of 2006 and became one of the chain’s top-producing locations.
“The merger of Linder’s and Legacy has made both our companies stronger,” Foucrier told a local newspaper at the time of the acquisition. “With our combined buying power, we can now offer customers the greatest selection and best prices in furnishings anywhere in Southern California.”
With the opening of a store in Costa Mesa this May, its 10th, Linder said the chain will take a break from expansion mode. The economy will not allow the double-digit growth the company enjoyed in the first half of the decade. To protect itself in the softening market, Linder’s within the past year switched to a complete rooms package, increased its average individual ticket price and focused on boosting its closing ratio. The strategy is designed to weather the current storm, and to prepare for the day when it will again be time to build.
“We’re out there looking,” Foucrier said. HFB
April 30,
2007 by in UnCategorized
By Home Furnishings Business in on May 2007
Standing in a near-empty store on the second-to-last day of a sale that marks the end of Miller Furniture’s 114-year-
history, Quinn Miller recounts what is becoming an all-too-common story for small furniture retailers today.
“There are no family members to follow (me). The closest is my 14-year-old grandson, and I don’t want to wait that long,” said Miller, who has worked in the downtown Greensboro furniture store for nearly 50 years. “I’m 62 years old, and I can still do just about anything I want to do (physically), and I love to ride motorcycles. I can either sit here for another 10 years and get to where I can’t get on a motorcycle anymore, or I can go on out the door and take off.”
Like many other furniture retailers who have made the decision to shut down, two factors weigh heavily in the decision. The first is that the neighborhood around Miller’s Elm Street store has seen a dramatic resurgence in recent years. Property values have risen to the point that Miller believes that his building will produce more income by renting the ground floor out to a new restaurant and creating 13 apartments on upper floors.
The second factor is expressed well by 70-year-old Larry Appelsies, an owner of another store that’s closing, Albert A. Slater Furniture in Merrilville, Ind. “It’s not as fun anymore,” said Applsies, who, in mid-April, was presiding over a going-out-of-business sale at the 57-year-old company. “I’ve enjoyed all the (35) years I’ve been here, but the kids are all grown up and are doing their own thing, and they don’t want any part of the retail business.”
Like Appelsies, Miller said competitive pressures made the decision to close his Greensboro store a relatively easy one. “For the mom-and-pop stores, it’s just getting tighter and tighter with the bolts being tightened down on them.”
Retirement Sales Increasing
Across the industry, nearly every day brings new headlines about another multi-generational furniture retailer opting to close or sell the business for retirement. One much-talked-about example came in March when 75-year-old Herschel Alpert announced he was selling his Alperts Furniture Showcase store in Seekonk, Mass., to Raymour & Flanigan, a Liverpool, N.Y.-based chain with 70 stores.
C.A. Roberson, whose Dunn, N.C.-based firm ran Miller Furniture’s going-out-of-business sale, said the vast majority of closing events he’s overseen in the past couple of years have involved owners retiring. “I’d say eight out of 10 are because they just don’t have someone in the family to hand it down to,” he said, adding that C.A. Roberson Management handles about 10 sales each year, mostly in North Carolina and Virginia.
The furniture industry does not track figures on store closings, but nearly everyone who spoke with
Home Furnishings Business said there appears to have been a surge of closings of independent furniture stores in recent years. Britt Beemer, chairman of America’s Research Group, Charleston, S.C., said 5,000 to 6,000 furniture stores have closed in the past two decades as more and more major markets have become dominated by large regional chains. “It’s a case of more baby boomers reaching retirement age,” said Sharron Bradley, executive director of the Western Home Furnishings Association. “They may be second- or third-generation retailers and have kids who don’t want to be in the furniture business because they’ve taken another avenue.”
Beemer said many small independents find themselves at a competitive disadvantage these days as they work in the shadow of better-financed large chains with enormous buying power and advertising reach.
“The rules have changed. Furniture stores can’t close at 5 o’clock anymore,” he said. “Most of them have to be open on Sunday, and you also have to buy better and advertise with four-color inserts. More of the people who have been hanging on by their fingertips are deciding to retire.”
Lucrative Going-Out-of-Business Sales
Retirement sales can also help retailers increase the size of their retirement nest eggs, if they’re well-run. Sales during Miller Furniture’s closing sale—which was concluded in eight weeks—equaled what the store typically sold in a year, Miller said.
Beemer said it was easier for independent stores to find buyers 20 years ago when the industry was going through a period of consolidation in which corporations like Heilig Meyers were buying up independent stores to create regional or national chains.
Among those actively planning an exit strategy for retirement is David Marks, owner of Finders Keepers, Tustin, Calif., who expects to close the store in four years. A second-generation furniture retailer, Marks said, “I have two (grown) sons who would have been likely candidates, but both had different passions ... and probably saw their old man come home a little bit on the frazzled side more than once.”
Marks, who has operated his own store since 1976, said, “They’re going to do better than I did by doing what they’re passionate about. I don’t blame them a bit. We pushed independence from an early age and that’s exactly what we got, which is great.”
After reciting a list of industry friends in similar circumstances, Marks said the challenges the furniture industry presents for smaller retailers today plays a role in the growing list of retirement sales. “I just don’t see the excitement in the industry that there should be. It’s changed so dramatically, and there are just not many stores like us anymore.”
Marks, who leases his store, said it’s unlikely he would sell his business, and he’s looking forward to an active retirement doing volunteer work after his store’s lease expires within a few years.
Fast-Forward: Helping the Next Generation Succeed
Concern about the lack of young people willing to go to work in multi-generational family businesses prompted the Western Home Furnishings Association to launch Fast Forward two years ago. The group is dedicated to assisting and supporting today’s sons and daughters who are interested in a furniture career. Lael Thompson, the 28-year-old chief operations officer of Broyhill Furniture Galleries in Denver, said, “It’s really easy to go to a (furniture) market and, with a quick glance, see that there’s not a lot of young blood stepping into the industry.”
Steve DeHaan, director of the National Home Furnishings Association, said there was rising interest in offering similar programs several years ago, but NHFA programs aimed at next-generation retailers were not well attended.
Thompson said Fast Forward started two years ago to encourage young people to pursue careers in the furniture industry. He said a networking event at the January Las Vegas Market attracted nearly 100 people. “We provide education tools and a platform to be able to network with one another to help them become successful more quickly,” he said.
Thompson believes that the relative lack of young retailers provides an advantage. “There’s so much opportunity, being that there isn’t as much competition with young people coming into the industry,” he said. “It’s an industry that welcomes young people and their energy and perspective. Because of that, there are more opportunities to achieve.”
The Most Common Mistake: Waiting Too Long
Roy Hester, vice president of Planned Furniture Promotions in Enfield, Conn., said more than half of the going-out-of-business sales he runs are “non-financial distress.” Still, he said, the most common mistake struggling furniture retailers make is waiting too long to shut down the business. “One trend I see are people in (the furniture) business simply because they own the real estate. If they were paying a full-market rent they would have been out of it years ago,” he said. “Most people wait too long and go through two or three years of losses. The result of a (going-out-of-business sale) might be the same if we did it today or three years ago, but the retailer can’t ever recoup those losses or have the inventory they sold off. It’s human nature to fight and to think it’s going to get better.”
He said he recently worked with an unnamed retailer who took a more proactive approach in launching a going-out-of-business sale with a profitable store. That retailer in New York had seen margins fall at the same time business declined about 15 percent to $2 million a year. “It’s very profitable, but he realizes that he’s got to change direction” by selling out.
Hester, who comes from a three-generation furniture store family, sold off his store 20 years ago, largely because of an influx of major chains. “It was a sea of independents in Central Florida at the time, but very few are left,” he said. “It was a relatively easy decision for me to say, ‘Let’s run a going-out-of-business sale and lease the property.’”
Miller, whose grandfather started Miller’s Furniture with a $52.66 investment in 1893, doesn’t have any misgivings about closing the last store in what had once been a loosely allied string of 13 stores, all owned by various family members. “I’m not going to pick up any furniture unless it’s in my house after this weekend,” he said. “I don’t want to be tied down (to a store) anymore. I’ve been tied down my whole life.”
Miller will continue to be involved in the furniture industry as a manufacturer. He and his brother, Richard Miller, are the long-time co-owners of a High Point-based high-end upholstery factory, Ashley Manor.
April 29,
2007 by in UnCategorized
By Home Furnishings Business in Home Office on April 2007
Denver-based OfficeSource, a wholesale distributor of office furniture, announced Monday that it has acquired Nashville’s NDI Wholesale, the largest independent office furniture wholesaler in the Southeast with more than 530 active customers.
With the acquisition, the fourth since OfficeSource formed in 2004, the company has expanded its coast-to-coast distribution network and has annual revenues of $120 million. “The addition of NDI Wholesale fits our business model and strategy perfect,” said Todd Elmers, chairman and CEO, OfficeSource. “It takes our coast-to-coast presence another step closer toward a full nationwide distribution network. Plus, the caliber of the people, service and relationships NDI Wholesale has built are right in line with our nationwide distribution model with a localized presence philosophy.”
NDI Wholesale serves seven Southern states from three distribution centers. OfficeSource has 280 employees and 15 distribution centers across the country.