2000 Ad

Bobbin, July, 1999 by Kathleen DesMarteau

Reflections on a trip to the world's largest home furnishings market -- the place, the people and the products.

Two cities. Eight million square feet. One hundred and sixty buildings. Two thousand and four hundred exhibitors. One hundred and sixty acres. Seventy-four thousand and five hundred people. Ninety years in the making.

The statistics don't say it all about -- the 1999 International Home Furnishings Market, but they do convey the enormity of the event, which completed its spring performance this past April 15-23 in the world's furniture headquarters of High Point, NC, and neighboring Thomasville, NC.

On a quest to learn more about what's making the home market tick as the industry counts down to the new century, I came away with a mind full of furniture business trends and data, as well as unforgettable memories of the place and its people.

There was the distinct character of each of the 10-plus large furniture exposition centers, and the streets lined with smaller furniture boutiques, showrooms and aged warehouses. Especially memorable was the massive International Home Furnishings Center (IHFC(R)), a six-wing structural maze of showrooms for many of the furniture industry's largest players, plus a burgeoning crop of home accessories suppliers. (The IHFC is so large that street signs are posted along its many passageways to help visitors navigate the 14-floor, city-block-sized structure.)

However, High Point, the physical place, is only one aspect of market week. The peopie who make the biannual journey to the furniture capital of the world have an undying passion for the furniture business, which they live and breathe 24 hours a day during market week, if not year-round. And it was the interesting people at the most recent High Point market who enlightened me with their inside views of what's happening in home furnishings.

Take Frankie Daniel, a designer with the Carrollton, GA-based interior design firm Classy Cricket. While on break with colleagues on an IHFC lobby bench, Daniel quickly pondered a question about the evolution of the home market into the next century, and summed up his clientele's mindset as: "The sky's the limit! Money is no object. People used to buy expensive furniture and never use it. Now it's used -- and it's not going to have any plastic over it either."

Daniel's observation was reiterated throughout the market by attending buyers and furniture exhibitors alike, who discussed how their customers are buying bigger homes, building more new homes and investing in higher-end pieces of furniture. While this trend has meant that consumers may be spending more to buy less, the record pace of new home startups, combined with high-flying economic indicators in the past year, boosted furniture industry sales across the board.

The upward sales swing is expected to level off somewhat this year or next. Or as well-respected furniture industry investment analyst W.W. "Jerry" Epperson Jr. put it during a standing-room-only market presentation: "Trees don't grow to the sky."

Still, the sales increases, combined with other factors, such as increased competition from non-traditional furniture channels (i.e., Crate & Barrel, interior designers and to a lesser extent, the Internet), have made the industry's mainstream furniture manufacturers and retailers more aware of the need to provide faster deliveries and to inject more excitement into the furniture buying experience.

The delivery issue surfaced time and again as I sought feedback on the greatest challenges facing the furniture industry from leading upholstered furniture makers nd suppliers of other sewn goods for the home. In sharing his firm's five-point strategic plan, for example, Lane president Jerry Ruff told Bobbin that "responsive service" is a prime objective. The firm is focusing on the products consumers are buying, he said, and on "taking the hassle out of doing business" for both the consumer and the retailer.

Among Lane's recent investments to address the age-old problem of delivery uncertainties: an interactive voice response system that allows dealers to dial in and determine what goods are in stock and to check the status of orders -- any time, any day of the week.

Upholstered furniture manufacturers, like their sewn products cohorts in the apparel industry, also are streamlining their SKU mixes in order to improve customer service, namely by simplifying the manufacturing cycle and speeding delivery.

This is certainly the case at Clayton Marcus, a division of the mammoth LADD Furniture Inc. family, which offers case goods (wooden furniture, such as dressers, desks and china cabinets) as well as upholstered furniture across a range of price points. After giving me the grand tour of the new Bob Mackie Home upholstered line, Clayton Marcus' director of merchandising operations, Suzanne Fisher, emphasized the importance of the firm's reduction in the number of upholstered fabrics used in its lines, which in the past have included up to 1,300 styles. The SKU reduction has been instrumental in getting delivery times down to two weeks, an impressive turn time considering that many furniture firms still are chiseling away at six- to eight-week (or longer) delivery times.