Daily News Archive
Brought to you by Home Furnishings Business
June 30,
2006 by in UnCategorized 
By Home Furnishings Business in Furniture Retailing on July 2006
There’s no question that South Florida
boasts one of the most competitive retail
environments in the furniture industry.
While the state and its powerhouse lineup
of retail players continue to grow, the
growth brings with it challenges, including
the pronounced need of hiring and retaining
a top-notch team of sales associates.
For Tamarac, Fla.-based City Furniture, hiring, training and holding onto its retail salesteam has become a top priority. So much so, that the retailer started its Center for Excellence corporate university two years ago to ensure it puts the best people possible in front of its consumers.
Curt Nichols, vice president of human resources for the 21-store operation, said the goal in finding the right people is to be able “to cater to our customers.”
“We hire for attitude, and then teach them our approach and our business model,” Nichols said, adding that each new sales associates attends two weeks of Center for Excellence training before stepping onto the sales floor.
The training consists of classroom instruction, online courses, showroom observation and an indepth look at product.
“It basically gives the new hire everything they must know to hit the floor,” Nichols said. “Then, in the first 90 days, new hires come back in for once-a-week training and get the nice-to-know information. By day 90, they have a strong knowledge of product presentation, service programs and the like. The training really builds the success factor that in turn builds employee retention.”
Missed Opportunities in Training
With a sales team of about 480 people staffing City Furniture’s stores based on customer traffic and sales volume, the retailer takes hiring and training seriously—an approach many in the industry don’t take.
That misstep causes a good deal of missed opportunities in hiring and retaining strong sales associates, according to Carol A. Hacker, president of Carol A. Hacker & Associates in Alpharetta, Ga.
“Every business whether big or small, family-owned or conglomerate with multiple stores, needs to have a strong new hire orientation,” Hacker said. “I see businesses fall down on this all the time. Orientation should be an ongoing process, but typically it tends to be very superficial.”
Hacker said employees who are given a thorough orientation are more likely to remain with the employer for a significant time, and ongoing training ranks high in things that employees want from their employer.
“People want opportunities to learn,” she said. “If you, as an employer, are not offering theses opportunities, why would anyone stay? Just because you bring someone into one position, doesn’t mean that they might not aspire to have another one.”
Smart Hiring First Step
While all available training can turn good employees into great ones, hiring the right people from the start is crucial to success. Often many business, including furniture retailers, wait until they’re in crisis mode before launching the hiring process. By then, it’s too late.
Hacker’s top recommendation may be easier said than done—hire right the first time—but aiming for and meeting that lofty goal requires having the time to thoroughly and completely evaluating candidates.
“Be selective, take your time and don’t hire the first warm body that walks through the door,” she said, adding that the basics of checking references and work history should be at the top of the list of rules when hiring. “By doing so, you may find that people have hopped from job to job to job, and that’s a red flag right there.”
To make the process easier, maintaining a file of resumes and applications is a classic means of staying on top of hiring and ensuring the well is primed when the need for new employees arises.
City Furniture actively recruits employees, and typically Nichols avoids recruiting sales associates from other retail establishments. “A lot of times in those cases, you spend a lot of time retraining them,” he said.
Creative Recruitment
Instead, Nichols has established an incentive program for its existing sales associates for referrals. The program, which offers financial incentives to associates for successful hires, is a homerun for the company. Almost 32 percent of the retailer’s new hires are recommended by sales associates.
In addition to encouraging employees to find new hires, City Furniture, which also competes with Florida’s hospitality industry and the exploding real estate market for employees, has an active college recruitment program. “The college pool gives us a great employee base for promoting sales management,” Nichols said, adding that all of its sales management team has been promoted from within.
Those internal promotions speak directly to another of Hacker’s recommndations that employees are eager for other opportunities within companies.
One of Nichols’ key talking points during those college recruitment fairs is the retailer’s compensation plan, which City promotes as one of the benefits of working for the company. “Our job is to deliver on that promise,” Nichols said, adding that the retailer’s associate turnover is well below the retail average. “I’m fishing in a better pond for employees, and ultimately, I’m getting someone that’s better for my customer.” HFB
June 30,
2006 by in UnCategorized
By Home Furnishings Business in on July 2006
The impact of color was never illustrated more brilliantly than in the film
“The Wizard of Oz.” When Dorothy steps out of her house,
fantastically transported and dropped into a strange land, the brightness is wonderful and shocking. And the heart of the film only grows when she wakes up in Kansas, again in black-and-white, and learns that all of the elements that she so loved about Oz were with her all along.
This relates to how the psychology of color affects us as we live our lives. There are a million details our homes share about us to our visitors and guests. Just as a photograph tells a story, so do the books on the shelves, the music collection, furniture, objects of art. But lurking alongside--and inside--all these items, another story is being told. A story of color. And the story and psychology of color needs to come to the foreground as retailers continue to develop a lifelong dialog with their customers.
Leatrice Eiseman, the executive director of premiere color forecasters Pantone, says she often gets into random discussions with total strangers about color. And more often than not, she ends up turning them around to her way of thinking.
Brown Is Back
“My specialty is psychology of color,” said Eiseman. “I got into the whole brown issue with a guy on a plane, he said he didn’t like brown. He said he loved his home and the colors in it, and I asked them to describe them to me. He gave me a soliloquy about the cabinets in his kitchen; then I reminded him that wood is brown, and he was describing shades of brown. Mahogany, an armoire, people don’t think of it as brown, they think of it as a wood tone. They take brown for granted.”
Not only is brown a key player in Pantone’s color forecast for this upcoming season (Eiseman said chestnut is particularly key), brown and all the shades it consists of perfectly illustrate how Eiseman wants the average consumer to embrace seeing colors the way an artist or designer does.
“Brown has taken on a whole new presence, came on in the ‘90s. I call it the Starbucks phenomenon,” said Eiseman. “Just as Starbucks became a coffee experience, brown became a rich, robust, presence. Consumers had this whole new association with this chocolate shade that they didn’t have before.”
Just as espresso, café au lait, and café americano became a part of the vernacular, Eiseman hopes that people will recognize these colors as an important element of the stuff that surrounds us, instead of merely a caffeinated beverage.
“J. Crew did a lot for the color brown in their catalogues, as did Michael Kors with his cashmere sweater sets,” she said. “You have this whole new acceptance of brown, to the point where UPS decided to glamorize their image rather than change their uniforms. ‘What can brown do for you’ is a slogan people latch onto and recognize.”
“Brown is like black,” Eiseman continued. “People don’t really wear it head to toe. Even though people say not everybody can wear brown head to toe, if brown is going to be a background to claret red or blue, it’s fantastic. Think of all the values of brown. There’s umber, there’s sienna, there are blond woods and rich dark woods.”
Color Tells A Story
And let us never forget that the furniture industry is a fashion industry as well.
“Yes, we build a story with color,” Eiseman said. “You have a theme and try to expand on it as much as possible, providing as many points of entry to people as there are ways of looking at the world. my inspiration is not done in an ivory tower. I go to trade shows, and the entertainment world is a huge influence. We don’t say there’s a ‘hot’ color. That is not good business practice. The hot color is an old concept.”
Pantone’s collections of color palettes for the furnishings industry, the View Home 2007 is currently available on Pantone’s Web site, www.pantone.com, for the manufacturer’s suggested retail price of $275. Not only does Pantone design color collections, but they use beautiful language to help sell the colors. Like this selection: “A Light Touch suggests a soft impression–the deft use of softer colors that speak of quiet spaces in an increasingly noisy world. For many people, it is a comfort zone to return to again and again. The challenge is how to keep it looking up–to–date. Modernizing a pastel palette can be skillfully and easily done by re–inventing the colors and the color combinations. Take the classic pastels of foamy aquas and greens, pinks and lavenders, powdery blues, sun–tinged yellows and angora whites to the next level by infusing them with a touch of champagne, or by introducing the sophistication of a silvery gray or rosy taupe.”
Christine Chow, membership director for the The Color Association, has good ideas on helping retailers use color as a way to open a dialog between retailers and customers.
“Color trends help in two ways. One is in buying, which is more of an editing process,” she said. “The other is with with marketing. color is one of the first things that people notice, without even thinking. It’s the first thing they’re drawn to. It may not even be conscious. The color of your interiors is not the only way to think about it. It comes down to product, too. Customers now are very sophisticated and design-savvy. You’re not looking for something that’s just pretty, you’re looking for something that has a coherent message. Color is one of the fastest ways to establish a message. Color hues can establish whether a product is cheap, moderate, or expensive. It’s hard to trump color as a means to measure the overall worth of an item.”
One tip for retailers is to incorporate a color story in the store’s flow. Chow says her favorite stores have a focused color story, “so walking in one has a more cohesive experience.”
Lisa Jenkins, architechual account executive at Sherwin-Williams, says another big factor inspiring color trends is our digital lifestles. Need proof? Check out some of Sherwin-Williams newest color names: Online, Software and Cyberspace, a dark gray. But color is still king.
"We study the effects of LED lighting; when you think about how many times a day we look at LED screens, we are constantly exposed to the brighness of digital images. It has an effect on us. There's a clarity to computer screens, it certanly has had an effect to the direction color has taken. Color has become more acceptable. whether you're a kindergardener or a 50-something at work, we crave color." HFB
June 30,
2006 by in UnCategorized
By Home Furnishings Business in Customer Service on July 2006
You have a great-looking store, a knowledgeable and professional sales staff. A customer enjoys the shopping experience and selection you offer, and has found exactly what she wants for her home.
So far, it’s a great story, but the game ain’t over by a long shot. If the furniture doesn’t show up at your customer’s home when you said it would, and in good condition, all that goodwill can go right down the drain. Rest assured, she’ll tell all her friends about it, too.
No retailer would call delivery the fun part of the furniture business. Most store owners love the process of merchandising a compelling floor display and the challenge of closing a sale, but the work of getting that furniture to the customer on time and in good condition is a back-office issue that can make or break repeat business.
“We all tend to focus on the front end, because most of us are extroverted sales types,” said Giff Gates, president of Gates Home Furnishings in Grants Pass, Ore. “It’s easy for us as owners to avoid the back end of the business.”
Count Gates among retailers who’ve committed, with varying daily cutoff times, to same- and/or next-day delivery of furniture. The sheer process speed involved in pulling that off creates challenges that, if met, can carry over into more efficient delivery, whatever the customer’s time frame expectation.
Fast Times
When it comes to getting furniture to consumers fast, it’s hard to beat Gallery Furniture in Houston, where President Jim McIngvale has made quick delivery a cornerstone of his business for 25 years.
“If they want it today, they get it today—we don’t have a lot of bullshit asterisks, and you can quote me on that,” McIngvale said. “The warehouse is open every night till midnight. We do what’s good for the customer at their convenience, not our convenience.”
It takes 80 trucks, a work force that buys into the company’s philosophy, and some long hours for Gallery to deliver so quickly. Are there any employee incentives for those performance expectations?
“They get to keep their jobs,” McIngvale said. “Seriously, we never miss a payroll, and they never miss a delivery. It’s just what we do, it’s not special training or incentives—it’s just taking care of customers, and our people understand what our company’s about. You can’t make same-day delivery at 10 p.m. if you’re at home asleep.”
Gallery also relies on tight relationships with suppliers who’ll meet the retailer’s shipping expectations. Cresent Furniture, for example, ships to Gallery every week, said Richard Tomkins, director of sales and marketing at the case goods importer.
“They order from us every Monday,” he said. “We have it ready to roll on Tuesday for a Thursday delivery in time for the weekend sales. They don’t always order the same quantity every week, but we know it’s coming. We know what their commitment is to delivery, and we try to support that.”
While the Gallery approach sounds simple—and it is when talking in terms of company culture—the actual execution of same-day delivery involves a mix of factors, including efficient systems, supply chain management, and even pricing. And those aspects of the business are key to retailers living up to the delivery time frames they give consumers, whether next week or next month.
Putting It All Together
In June 2004, Tamarac, Fla.-based City Furniture began offering same-day delivery at a single store, and rolled the concept out over the course of a year to all its locations in South Florida. City offers same-day delivery for shoppers closing their sale by 3 p.m., and next-day delivery at its six licensed Ashley Homestores in South Florida.
“In 2005 our success rate on delivery was close to 100 percent,” said Keith Koenig, president of City Furniture. “The only time it doesn’t happen is when the truck breaks down. The product leaves the warehouse on schedule 100 percent of the time.”
Close to half of City’s customers who close their sale before the 3 p.m. cutoff for same-day delivery choose that option, and Koenig said most of the remainder opt to receive their merchandise the next day.
“The most challenging part is labor management scheduling, if you’re going to really provide (same-day delivery), not just advertise it and then talk the customer out of it,” he said. “You need good integration from point-of-sale into your routing system and into your warehouse management system. It is not cheap, and it is not for the faint of heart. Next-day delivery is no easy trick either.”
City’s delivery planners keep track of when most business takes place, and divide each week into “waves.”
“We group the deliveries and have certain cutoffs during the day,” Koenig said.
City relies upon a proprietary POS package integrated directly to its ARC Logistics routing system, which then ties into the warehouse management system.
In-stock positions on merchandise are fundamental to quick delivery.
“The supply chain we’re dealing with is global, and if you’re going to stay in stock you have to order in a planned method that matches up with your sales and deliveries,” Koenig said. “Make it real clear to your suppliers that you’re trying to stay in stock at all times. If you (as a supplier) can’t deliver when you say you will, let your customers know, and that doesn’t matter whether it’s six weeks, eight weeks or 10 weeks. Whatever the commitment, we’ve plugged that product into the system to be here that day.”
Pricing policies are another consideration for retailers trying to plan ahead to be in-stock. Koenig said retailers typically can take two approaches to promotion: a sale, or percentage-off sale; and everyday low price. At City, the latter approach makes order-planning easier.
“Take a look at Wal-Mart—Wal-Mart doesn’t have any sales (promotions),” Koenig said. “I’m not saying we’re Wal-Mart, but if we’re $499 on a hot-selling sofa, during the next month we can count on doing at least 90 percent of the current month’s business on that piece, and no more than 110 to 120 percent. If we were to run it ‘on sale’ at $499, that skews the pattern. That’s one of the fundamental reasons our industry tends to be out of stock.”
Watching the Back End
The operational aspects of delivery are a part of a retailer’s business that shoppers might never see, but they are a key to customer satisfaction.
“The first thing you have to overcome is a lack of desire to really look at the back end of the business—that’s a problem with many retailers in general,” said Ron Wanek, chairman of Ashley Cos. “Too many retailers let (delivery) happen; they don’t make it happen.”
Logistical excellence has long been a priority for Ashley as a supplier—the company operates one of the largest, if not the largest, privately held intermodal shipment hubs in the United States. That focus carried through into its efforts at retail, where it has built the fast-growing Ashley Homestores network of licensed store fronts, the majority run by independent retailer licensees; of some 250 current locations, 12 are company-owned.
Wanek believes that when it comes to employee training and recognition, retailers sometimes give short shrift to the people working in their warehouse and on their trucks.
“Those workers need a store owner’s attention, and they need recognition, training and inspiration—at too many stores, they’re viewed as a bunch of grunts, but we certainly don’t see them that way,” he said. “If customers go out of their way to complement your delivery people, you should recognize that.“
Koenig said hiring delivery personnel who understand the importance of their role to the store’s success is vital to the completion of a sale—getting the product into a consumer’s home.
“People want to be part of a winning team, and in our case, they want to be part of the process,” he said.
Koenig related the importance of speedy delivery to customers through the example of a friend whose resume includes serving as chief executive officer of Mercedes North America, which found some surprising results when it queried consumers on their purchase priorities.
“They were doing consumer research on car purchasing, and asked, ‘Which would you prefer: your first choice of color in 11 days, or your second choice today,’” Koenig recalled. “Guess what—everyone chose today. They were shocked that consumers were willing to give up what they want to get a car more quickly. A customer’s biggest concern is not getting exactly what they say they want, but getting it when they want it. We’ve hired (delivery) associates that understand what we’re trying to accomplish.”
Back-end software systems can help retailers track where problems occur, whether personnel- or product-related.
“You need accountability in the process, so over time it’s important to collect that data that gives you information on which preppers, which product pickers and which drivers have issues—anyone who touches that product during the (delivery) process, who does well and who doesn’t,” said Lee Goodman, chief operating officer at five-store San Diego-area retailer Jerome’s. “You need to know which product has the highest rates of refusals, which needs special attention; which drivers do well for you, which product does well for you. That gives you a starting point on working on exceptions to a good customer experience.
“Whether they’re buying a lamp or a full room, they’re a customer. I track customers, not product. You do it right, or you do it wrong—there’s no in between.”
That kind of tracking is key to getting deliveries done right the first time around—with today’s gas prices, follow-up visits to consumers’ homes eat into profitability more than ever.
Goodman said that while he believes he has a top-notch retail software vendor—in Jerome’s case GERS Retail Systems—that understands the data-mining needs of furniture retailers, it’s up to the retailer to use it properly.
“It’s absolutely our responsibility to understand what needs to be tracked,” he said.
It doesn’t hurt to have non-competing retail colleagues take a look at your operation, said Gates at Gates Home Furnishings. Gates participates in a group of around 20 furniture stores that swap best practices and other advice.
“My group gave us high marks on merchandising and the front end, but dinged me when it came to my clearance center and warehouse,” he said. “I’d encourage anybody to participate in that kind of group. The independents who’ll stay alive are in these study groups.”
Gates also retained warehousing and delivery consultant Dan Bolger to examine his operation.
“We realized we needed an operations manager,” Gates said. “We had an office manager and a sales manager, but we didn’t have a level of management that dealt with the logistics of delivery—shipping, receiving, cycling inventory.”
Paying At The Pump
Fine-tuning the back-of-house aspects of delivery is even more important these days, considering the price of fuel—return visits to a consumer’s home, not to mention regular deliveries, cost a lot more than they did a year ago. Some retailers are finding consumers more understanding about delivery charges than before, since the price of gas affects everybody every day.
“Gas prices have eaten into profitability,” said Koenig at City Furniture. “Our entire delivery area is all of South Florida every day. When you get well into the Keys, which we hit several times a week, we charge a premium (on delivery).”
Wanek said that Ashley licensees develop their own delivery policies for the most part.
“There are a lot of factors that vary: expense of delivery, congestion, the geographic spread of their market,” he said. “In New York City, it’s certainly a lot different from Bozeman, Mont., when you look at delivery issues like that. In general terms, not just at Ashley Homestores, some dealers have put surcharges on delivery, and I haven’t heard where that’s really caused much customer push-back on merchandise. Most people haven’t complained about it to my knowledge since they understand those (fuel) price increases themselves.” HFB
June 30,
2006 by in UnCategorized
By Home Furnishings Business in Delivery on July 2006
In our business, the most important delivery you will ever make is the next one.
In today’s competitive world, perceptions about home delivery are changing. Once considered a necessity and a burden, delivery into the home is now viewed as an event for the consumer. It is also a service retailers can use to enhance their brand, along with in-home design consultation and other services, to gain a competitive edge in the marketplace.
Research shows that the average consumer makes a major furniture purchase about every seven years, which means that the consumer will experience an in-home furniture delivery only about six to eight times in a lifetime. That said, there is a limited window of opportunity for a retailer to reverse a negative experience. If the delivery goes badly the customer has years to regret where she made a purchase, and to complain to her friends and relatives.
Statistics show that consumers are much more likely to let others know about negative experiences than positive ones. Retailers invest millions of dollars and countless hours on things such as store location and design, product selection and merchandising, hiring, and sales training. Often overlooked is that all the effort made on the front end can be completely wiped out by bad delivery experience.
The delivery event needs to reflect what the customer experienced when she was in your store—where the expectations are set. Many retailers recognize the importance of creating a total experience for the shopper. This may include coffee and snack bars, play areas for small children, multi-media areas for older children, and perhaps a sports viewing area for the men.
You can take this one step further and have the driver deliver fresh-baked cookies or a logo-imprinted coffee cup with the furniture! If you want the customer to leave your store with a warm-and-fuzzy feeling, it follows that she should have the same feeling when the driver delivers her furniture into her home.
Even though this may sound like a reach, it just may be the difference between a negative and a positive delivery—as can roses on Valentine’s Day or Mother’s Day. Women, after all, make 80 percent of the home furnishings purchasing decisions and are usually the ones who are at home when the delivery is made.
Keeping it Safe
Another important aspect of home delivery is security. It is not enough to just do criminal background checks on personnel—you need to create a sense of security with the consumer. This is especially true when you deliver to a woman who is home alone or with young children in the house.
Have your delivery people wear identification badges and introduce themselves at the door. Advise the customer during the confirmation process who will be arriving at her home by name, and then have the dispatcher call to let her know the driver is on the way. Also important is the delivery team’s awareness of specific rules and policies while making a delivery. Of course, ensuring that the driver is properly qualified to drive a commercial truck is essential. All are part and parcel of the ethical obligation we all have to our customers and the general public.
A good rule of thumb is to ask yourself if your delivery team members are people you would invite to your own home for dinner. If the answer is no, why would you want them in your customers’ homes?
Arm Delivery Team with Knowledge
Since furniture is the third-largest purchase, after a home and a car, the average consumer will ever make, and a fashion item, you can assume that the customer will be happy and excited about the delivery. What you do to ensure that the last step is a positive experience rests with the kind of training you give your drivers. It goes beyond how to deliver furniture and includes how to communicate, resell the furniture once it is in the home, and how to answer questions.
Because the customer views drivers as experts, she will ask them questions, which they will answer, prepared or not. It is better that you prepare them to deliver the message conveyed in the store so everyone is on the same page. One tool that may be useful is a tri-fold, laminated card of Frequently Asked Questions that the driver can keep. This ensures that your customers are told the same things, whether they are speaking with a sales associate, customer service representative or driver.
Additionally, put your sales associates on the delivery trucks, and get your drivers into your showrooms. Use cross-training between sales associates and drivers at every opportunity, and have a clear and simple way to measure driver performance. Reward a driver’s performance in the same way you do sales associates. Once each quarter, set up informal workshops with your drivers, sales associates, customer service reps, and key warehouse staff. Develop five or six topics of discussion, then let them speak among themselves. You will be amazed at what you learn, and what they learn from one another. They key is that people will feel that they are part of the solution, not part of the problem.
It is worth noting that on a good day, your rainmaker sales associate may close three or four sales. Your worst delivery team, on the other hand, will interact with 10 to 12 of your buying customers in their homes, without anyone watching or monitoring the interaction. When your worst delivery team is interacting with three to four times the number of customers than your best sales associate on her best day, who has more influence?
Track the Returns
In general it costs three times as much to handle a returned piece through a facility than a new piece, not to mention the disappointment and inconvenience the customer surely experienced. Spend time on the return dock and talk to the drivers to learn what went wrong.
It is good policy to call behind deliveries to see if customers are satisfied. Such a tactic is not designed to reach the customer who will complain, but to reach the customer who is unhappy. It is better to risk complaints, though, because never forget that the goal of your delivery operation is to increase sales and to bring business back. Every delivery made represents your store. The look of your drivers and their uniforms and your trucks, as well as your provisions for safety and security, all matter.
As my grandfather used to tell me, “In our business there are only two things of importance, the customers and the furniture. If you take care of the customers, they come back. If you take care of the furniture, it doesn’t come back. HFB
June 29,
2006 by in UnCategorized
By Home Furnishings Business in on June 2006
The U.S. Department of Commerce has accepted requests from a number of Chinese manufacturers of wood bedroom furniture that their names be withdrawn from the list of companies that are candidates for DOC’s administrative review of Chinese factories.
Chinese manufacturers who’d requested a review had 90 days from the initiation of the administrative review, which was published in the Federal Register on March 7, to withdraw their request. The review will examine manufacturing operations at wood bedroom plants in China from June 24, 2004, through Dec. 31, 2005.
DOC is rescinding reviews of the following manufacturers:
* Art Heritage International Ltd., Super Art Furniture Co. Ltd., Artwork Metal & Plastic Co., Ltd., Jibson Industries, Always Loyal International.
* Dalian Guangming Furniture Co., Ltd.
* Dalian Huafeng Furniture Co., Ltd.
* Dongguan Cambridge Furniture Co., Ltd., Glory Oceanic Co., Ltd.
* Dongguan Lung Dong Furniture Co., Ltd., Dongguan Dong He Furniture Co., Ltd., Engmost Investment Ltd.
* Dongguan Sunrise Furniture Co., Taicang Sunrise Wood Industry Co., Ltd, Shanghai Sunrise Furniture Co., Ltd., Fairmont Designs.
* Dream Rooms Furniture (Shanghai) Co., Ltd.
* Ever Spring Furniture Co., Ltd., S.Y.C. Family.
* Gaomi Yatai Wooden Ware Co., Ltd., Team Prospect International Ltd.
* Jiangmen Kinwai Furniture Decoration Co., Ltd., Jiangmen Kinwai International Furniture Co., Ltd.
* Lacquer Craft Mfg. Co., Ltd., Samson Holding Ltd., Samson International Enterprises, Legacy Classic Furniture, Universal Furniture International Inc.
* Langfang TianCheng Furniture, Huari Furniture.
* Leefu Wood (Dongguan) Co., Ltd., King Rich International, Ltd.
* Locke Furniture Factory, Kai Chan Furniture Co. Ltd., Kai Chan (Hong Kong) Enterprise Ltd., Taiwan Kai Chan.
* Nathan International Ltd., Nathan Rattan Factory, Nathan China Group.
* Ningbo Furniture Industries Ltd., Ningbo Fubang Furniture Industries Limited, Techniwood Industries Limited, Techniwood (Macao Commercial Offshore) Limited, Ningbo Techniwood Furniture Industries Limited.
* RiZhao SanMu Woodworking Co., Ltd., RiZhao SanMu Woodworking Group.
* Rui Feng Woodwork (Dongguan) Co., Rui Feng Lumber Development (Shenzhen) Co., Ltd.
* Sunforce Furniture (Hui-Yang) Co., Ltd., SunFung Wooden Factory, Sun Fung Co., Shin Feng Furniture Co. Ltd., Stupendous International Co. Ltd.
* Tianjin Sande Fairwood Furniture Co., Ltd.
* Tradewinds Furniture Ltd., Fortune Glory Industrial Ltd. (HK Ltd.) Nanhai Jiantai Woodwork Co., Ltd.
* Wanhengton Nueevder (Furniture) Manufacture Co., Ltd., Dongguan Wanhengton Industry Co., Ltd.
* Yihua Timber Industries Co., Ltd., New Classic Home Furnishings, Inc.
* Zhongshan Golden King Furniture Industrial Co., Ltd., King Group Furniture.
Those companies had received the separate, or Section A, duty rate of 6.65 percent in the original antidumping investigation. A number of manufacturers who are subject to the 198 percent “all-China” duty rate also withdrew their requests for review, and as such could be subject to the all-China rate that results from this year’s administrative review.
Those companies include:
* Birchfield Design Group, Inc., Birchfield Design (Asia), Ltd., Dongguan Birchfield Gifts Co., Ltd., Donnguan Longreen Birchfield Arts & Craft Co., Ltd.
* Chiu’s Faithful Furniture (Shenzhen) Company Limited, Faithful International Trading (Hong Kong) Company Ltd.
* Dawn Smart Furniture Co., Ltd.
* Fujian Senda Foreign Trade Co., Ltd.
* Honest Furniture Company Ltd.
* Maestro Wood Product Factory.
* Million Kind Co., Ltd.
* Million Kind Furniture Co., Ltd. Million Kind Co., Ltd.
* Placetech Co., Ltd.
* Protrend Metal & Plastics (Shenzhen) Co., Ltd.
* Senyuan Furniture Group.
* Trendex Industries Ltd., Trendex Industries Ltd., (BVI), Dongguan Chunsan Wood Products Co., Ltd., Kunshan Junsen Furniture Co., Ltd.
* Triple J Furniture (Shenzhen) Co., Ltd.
* WBE Industries (Hui-Yang) Co., Ltd.
* Yixinglong Furniture Co., Ltd.
* Zhongshan Fine Furniture.
* Zhongshan Winly Furniture Ltd.