Sprucing up with decorating franchises

Nation's Business, August, 1987 by Don Shipley

Sprucing Up With Decorating Franchises

When today's homeowners want to spruce up their homes, they don't want to run around town with furniture swatches, paint chips and carpet samples.

Faced with limited free time that keeps them from shopping at do-it-yourself home centers, many of these homeowners are turning to custom home-decorating and accessory franchises. At least that is what the franchisors of those businesses say.

The franchisees provide a blend of merchandise and services: window treatments and bedroom accessories, unfinished furniture and greenhouses, cabinets and bathtubs, carpeting and shelving, candles and fragrances, wall-paper and tile.

Their marketing strategy is based on offering design consultation and installation.

"The Future of Franchising,' compiled last year by Megatrends author John Naisbitt and his research group for the International Franchise Association, projects that the remodeling and home-services franchise industry will enjoy 20 percent annual growth, taking the industry from the current $5 billion annually to over $9 billion by 1990.

Custom home-decorator franchisors see personal service and high quality as the keys to expanding their 10 percent share of this market.

"The customer wants service in the store today, and that's an obvious reflection of demographic changes in our society,' says Houghton Hutcheson, vice president of franchise development of WNS, Inc., which has 650 franchise units in three segments of the decorative accessory and gift market, including candles and fragrances (Wicks "N' Sticks), wall hangings (Deck the Walls) and wallpaper (Wallpapers To Go).

More than any other demographic trend, the emergence of families in which both husband and wife work-- and the resulting lack of spare time-- has fueled the growth of the industry, according to Hutcheson.

James Bugg, president of Decorating Den, the only full-service decorating franchise, agrees: "Married women who work are just too darn busy to run around doing the shopping as they once did.' Bugg's 600-unit Bethesda, Md., franchise calls itself America's first affordable shop-at-home decorating service.

Decorating Den's franchisees do not have shops; they have vans containing samples of fabric, wallpaper and floor covering that they can bring to a customer's house.

Like Decorating Den, other franchised specialty home decorators are emphasizing convenience as well as merchandise.

"We're selling more than product. We're selling service,' says Joe Esposito, vice president of Four Seasons Greenhouses in Holbrook, N.Y. "We have salesmen who will come to your house, and they'll generally have the ability to make a drawing that shows how our product would fit.'

"We're different from home centers,' he adds. "They'll replace products if they're defective, but that's about all they'll do. If you buy the product that's inappropriate, that's your problem.'

Home centers are large warehouse-type stores that sell furnishings and home-decorating supplies--usually at a lower price--but generally offer none of the extra services, such as planning and installation.

Custom home-decorator franchisors call their salespeople "design consultants' and train them to provide customers with advice on how to use what the franchise offers.

"The stores are choregraphed. The products are put in actual room environments, and the people in the store are there to demonstrate,' says Michael Boehm, whose Space Options stores provide space-planning services and merchandise for homes, offices and automobiles.

Bill Streb, vice president and CEO of Naked Furniture, says its salespeople receive extensive training in using visual aids to demonstrate product quality and service options.

"I think the average consumer would opt to spend more money and buy a quality product if he or she really knew the difference,' says Streb, whose franchise offers finished and unfinished furniture and a full range of finishing services.

Though home-decorator franchisors tout this higher quality and personal service, interior decorators and other groups in the industry have raised questions about the franchisors' levels of expertise.

Decorating Den's James Bugg counters such questions by asserting that home-decorator franchises have filled the middle ground between pricey interior designers and what he terms impersonal home centers.

"At the American Society of Interior Designers convention last year, their president talked about the many people out there who need $100 curtains and who are being completely ignored by members,' says Bugg, whose wife is a member of ASID.

Home-decorator franchisors take account of economic realities in another way: When the economy makes buying a home difficult, they orient their marketing towards remodeling existing homes, as opposed to work that is tied to housing starts

"People are not as easily able to buy a new home as they were in the past, and once they get into one, they have to stay in it longer,' says Hutcheson.