Big-box furniture in RP
Wisconsin-based manufacturer, retailer’s store second of 12 planned for Bay Area in move to ‘dominate’ sagging market
Anna Kock of Santa Rosa checks out the displays at the new Ashley Furniture Homestore in Rohnert Park.
JEFF KAN LEE / The Press DemocratPublished: Friday, January 5, 2007 at 6:08 a.m.
Last Modified: Friday, January 5, 2007 at 6:08 a.m.
ROHNERT PARK - In the midst of the worst slump in the furniture industry in years, the nation’s largest furniture maker is bringing its aggressive expansion to Sonoma County with a cavernous retail store that threatens to shake up an already fragile, fragmented market.
Ashley Furniture Homestore, which opened its first Sonoma County showroom in Rohnert Park last month, is betting it can weather the soft furniture market better than smaller rivals by keeping its costs down, service high and designs fresh.
“Our goal is to dominate our market,” said Edward Corn Sr., one of four owners behind an investment group that is planning as many as 12 Ashley Furniture Homestores in the Bay Area.
The company will employ 100 people at the Rohnert Park store and a nearby warehouse.
Few Sonoma County residents had likely heard of Ashley before Corn and his partners opened the 47,000-square-foot showroom across from Costco. The store is only the second of its kind in the Bay Area. The first opened in Fairfield in August, and another is opening soon in Fremont.
But consumers seem to like what they see.
“Their marketing seems to be right on,” said John Redfield of San Clemente. “They have some very astute buyers.”
Redfield and his wife, Kathy Redfield, were in town Thursday to attend their daughter’s basketball game at Sonoma State University, and stopped in the store to look at bar tables, which are smaller and taller than dining room tables and made for casual entertaining.
Both marveled at the size of the store, inspected several styles of bar tables and predicted they would be returning to the store on future visits to Sonoma County.
“Next time, we’ll be bringing the Suburban,” Kathy Redfield said.
The couple had never heard of Ashley before seeing the store under construction last month.
But Ashley Furniture Industries is well-known in the furniture industry, primarily as a manufacturer. Founded in 1945, the Wisconsin-based company now has several factories in the United States and Asia.
The company has long sold its furniture through a network of independent retailers, but in the late 1990s it began launching retail stores stocked solely with its own products. Its first retail store opened in Anchorage, Alaska, in 1997.
Today the company has more than 300 retail stores in the United States and Canada, most of them owned by independent licensees like Corn and his partners.
That translates to an average of 30 new stores per year, which in turn has fueled the growth of the parent manufacturing company. The privately held Ashley Furniture Industries is now the world’s largest furniture manufacturer, with revenues of more than $3¬billion last year, said Corn’s son, Edward “Roy” Corn Jr.
Furniture Today, an industry publication, has named the company the fastest-growing furniture retailer several years running, and it calls Ashley “the Wal-Mart of our industry.”
Roy Corn, who formed the partnership with his father, his mother, Christine Corn, and friend Darrin Marthens in 2003, takes the comparison to Wal-Mart as a compliment. It refers not to the quality of Ashley’s products but the efficient way the company moves them with sophisticated supply chain management systems, he said.
The furniture in Ashley showrooms is all display models. When a customer buys furniture from the showroom, a replica is delivered to the customer’s home from a distribution hub in Southern California. Deliveries usually take one to two weeks.
This frees the retail stores from having large amounts of capital tied up in inventory, he said.
That makes the company much more nimble when it comes to changing with the market, Edward Corn said. Furniture retailers with large inventories of couches, bookcases, dining room sets and media centers are tied to that inventory, even well after styles change, he said.
And furniture styles are changing faster than ever. Today’s society is more mobile than ever, and many people no longer view furniture as heirlooms to hold on to for generations, Roy Corn said.
Not all retailers agree. Bob Maddigan, sales manager of Drexel Heritage Home Inspirations in Santa Rosa, said summer sales were soft but he is still seeing strong demand for handcrafted, U.S.-made furniture meant to last a lifetime.
“Being in Sonoma County, we are fortunate,” he said. “The impact (of the softening market) I don’t believe has been felt as greatly in Sonoma County as in other regions.”
But the downturn in furniture sales has squeezed many smaller retailers. John Colburn, who opened Colburn’s Wood Furniture store on Santa Rosa Avenue in 1996, is going out of business and liquidating his inventory.
“I obviously didn’t adapt enough for the changing times,” Colburn said.
More and more furniture is being made in Asia, where labor costs one-tenth of what it costs here, and Colburn said he probably stuck too long with higher-priced U.S.-made products.
He agreed that styles are changing faster than ever, and Ashley’s designers seem to be offering the products people want today.
The Redfields, for example, said they are always on the lookout for new furniture designs that fit their home and lifestyle. The credenza inherited from Grandma may be beautiful, but if it’s too small for the new flat-screen TV, it’s going in the basement, they said.
“Sometimes those old pieces just don’t fit the new lifestyle,” John Redfield said.
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