By Deborah Gates
DELMAR — Once thing is certain about a residential growth boom. Homebuyers, as the thousands across the Lower Shore, need furniture.
Ask Larry Barnes, who with his wife, Beth, three months ago opened an Ashley Furniture showroom store just across the Maryland line in Delmar.
Barnes has earned several “Best Furniture Store” awards by area media; and “Best Retail Store” citations by the regional Home Furnishings Association. Not bad for a company in business since late March nearby a string of competitors including his own, FurnitureLand, from which the Ashley showroom sprung.
Anniversary year
Driving the Ashley Furniture mantra is the brand itself, manufactured by Ashley Furniture Industries Inc.
“It got to be such a big brand — we sold the Ashley brand at Furnitureland — I decided to give it its own store. It’s a No. brand, of exceptional value.”
According to a corporate statement by Ashley Furniture Industries, products are designed by an in-house team and shipped directly from strategically located regional warehouses on a large fleet of trucks.
The concept has helped put the Arcadia, Wis.-based furniture manufacturer founded in 1945 among the top in the home-furniture manufacturing industry, producing quality products for Ashley companies at affordable prices, corporate officials say.
As a sanctioned dealer of the brand, Barnes is a leader in home-furniture sales on the Eastern Shore. This year, he celebrates 15 years as a business owner, having opened Furnitureland in 1991 with a variety of brand names, including Ashley.
“I had my foot in the door a decade ago and established a foundation,” he said. “I built a distribution center last year north of Delmar.”
An acre dream
Barnes met the business years earlier, on a stint in New Castle, Del., at the Furniture Barn, owned by his brother, David Barnes.
After eight years, he yearned for the Eastern Shore, where he grew up. So in Delmar, on an acre of land, “I put up a cheap, pole shed and developed a thriving business,” Barnes says.
That was FurnitureLand.
“I’ve been in the furniture industry 22 years,” said Barnes, who, respectively, earned an undergraduate and a graduate degree at Towson and Salisbury universities. “I wanted to get back to the Eastern Shore — home.”
He credits Beth Barnes, his wife, “as a major force” in the business who left a career as an administrator in the poultry industry after 12 years to help him sell furniture.
Barnes, himself, gave up teaching in Somerset County public schools and a job in the poultry industry to pursue furniture sales.
In the earlier years, the couple worked the store by day and delivered furniture at night.
“It was a rigorous life, and trying to raise two children,” he said.
No place like home
Ashley was such a top seller at Furnitureland the couple decided to give the brand a store of its own. The Ashley Furniture corporation does not award franchises, but rather, sanctions sellers of the product, Barnes said.
What’s more, Ashley products’ fabric and colors cannot be altered, Barnes said.
“There is no customization; their value is world renowned and a model for others,” he said.
By comparison, other brands offer options in fabric or color or wood type. And unlike Ashley products, merchandise at Furniture-land is selected by buyers who shop worldwide. The process, Barnes said, is called “global sourcing.”
Combined, FurnitureLand and Ashley Furniture employ 134 people, Barnes said. He did not discuss store profits.
Timing, Barnes says, is perfect.
“They are building thousands of homes a year in this area. With all the stress in the world, people retreat to that one place — home,” he said. “There’s no place like it, and it needs furniture.”
dgates@salisbury.gannett.com.
