Jay McIntosh
MONROE, Mich. — At the close of his remarkable career, Pat Norton leaves the furniture industry with two great legacies.


Neither was achieved easily or without some measure of controversy.

* In the 1960s, he and Nat Ancell pioneered the industry’s first chain of stores dedicated to a single brand, Ethan Allen. Many companies have copied the concept, from Ashley to Bassett to Thomasville to La-Z-Boy.

* At La-Z-Boy over the past quarter century, he helped build a one-time chair specialist into a diverse home furnishings manufacturer with nearly $2 billion in sales.

In August, the now 84-year-old Norton retired from his final job, the chairmanship of La-Z-Boy’s board of directors, although he still occasionally goes to the office and travels to company facilities as chairman emeritus. He says he kept working long after normal retirement age because he enjoyed it and was still effective.

In an interview, he reviewed some highlights of more than six decades in the furniture business.
He was 17 years old in Depression-era St. Louis in 1939 when he began working with furniture, loading it onto trucks at a department store warehouse. Two years later, he joined the Army Air Corps and served with distinction in World War II.

After his discharge in 1945, he returned to St. Louis and entered the business segment where he would make his mark: sales and marketing. He worked in furniture sales, managed a store, helped run a wholesale distribution business and, in 1954, became a partner in a new venture called Shamrock Furniture, which opened three stores in the St. Louis area.

But running a retail business didn’t quite fit.

“I just felt I wasn’t accomplishing what I was capable of accomplishing,” he recalled. “I made up my mind in about ’61 that I wanted to become a rep. I no longer wanted to be responsible for an organization; I wanted to become my own organization.”

He wound up joining Baumritter & Co., the manufacturer that several years later would rename itself Ethan Allen. After about three years as a rep and a territory and regional manager, he became national sales manager and eventually vice president of sales.

He thus became part of the crusade of Nat Ancell, who was running the company with his brother-in-law, Ted Baumritter. In 1962, Ancell began to open stores specializing in one of Baumritter’s most successful product lines, Ethan Allen. Two of the early stores were in Norton’s Southeast territory, so he was deeply involved from the beginning.

“The idea of having totally committed dealers was certainly there when I got there. That’s one of the things that drew me to the company,” he said.

But since Ancell was by training a lawyer and not a retailer, he didn’t really understand all that was involved in what he was setting out to do, Norton recalled.

One challenge was that the product line was limited to a single wood, maple. Soon after Norton arrived, the company branched out into other wood species and also acquired an upholstery company. (It also tried to buy Pennsylvania House in the early ’60s, but that didn’t work out.)

The company took its time opening stores and recruiting dealers who could make them successful.
“By the time we got to the fifth or sixth store, we knew we had a winner, and all we had to do was execute,” Norton said. But, he added, “The execution was tough. Convincing the retailer to totally commit to one company was not an easy proposition in 1964 or ’65.”

And when an Ethan Allen store opened, other retailers that were carrying the line in the same market objected.

“It was absolutely detested by the retail community in general and to a great degree by the reps,” said Norton. Other manufacturers called the company “crazy” for doing so much work for the retailers.

Ancell, who was consumed by the branded-store idea, and Norton put their formidable personalities behind finding the right retailers, building the product line and improving the concept. Meanwhile, the company began publishing and distributing millions of copies of the Ethan Allen Treasury, the glossy catalog that helped make the brand a desirable one, even for people who had to scrimp and save to afford it.

“It wasn’t a walk in the park by any stretch of the imagination,” said Norton. Because it required substantial investment in money and effort and a delayed payoff, he said, “we couldn’t have done it if we were a public company. We paid a price for it.”

He stayed at Ethan Allen nearly two decades, but the strong-willed Ancell grew difficult to work with. Norton started talking to La-Z-Boy in 1980 and joined the Michigan-based company in 1981.

La-Z-Boy, then mainly a recliner specialist, had begun opening its Showplace Shoppes stores several years earlier. But it wasn’t going well.

“I really felt that it was a great name and a great company, but everything they were doing on the sales and marketing side of the business was wrong,” said Norton. Many of the stores were “awful,” he said. They were a hodgepodge of sizes, none over 6,000 square feet.

“They were not adequate to power the company. The first thing we did was upgrade them,” he said.
By the mid-1980s, dealers weren’t opening any stores smaller than about 6,500 square feet. In 1989, the company took another leap forward with the first La-Z-Boy Furniture Galleries store in Las Vegas, which was 15,000 square feet.

Many dealers embraced the moves to larger stores, but some couldn’t hack it.

“It took people who understood how to furnish a living room rather than sell a chair,” said Norton.

During the 1980s and ’90s, La-Z-Boy changed dramatically. With sales of $156 million in 1980, the company expanded into non-recliner areas, partly through a series of acquisitions — Burris in 1985, Hammary in 1986, then Kincaid, England/Corsair, Sam Moore, Bauhaus, Alexvale … and, in early 2000, the multi-company manufacturer Ladd.

“Part of that (acquisition binge) was absolutely great,” Norton said. Many of the new products sold well and filled gaps in the La-Z-Boy retail lineup. Then it was not so great.

“Probably the biggest smirch on my career was the part I played in the acquisition of Ladd,” he said. “We just walked into it at absolutely the wrong time, and we just missed what was going to happen in China in the next three years.”

The impact of China

La-Z-Boy executives were hardly alone in not realizing that Chinese factories would soon be able to ship huge quantities of decent-quality case goods to the United States at prices most domestic producers would be unable to match.

La-Z-Boy’s sales peaked at just under $2.3 billion in fiscal 2001, soon after the Ladd deal, then declined as the company was forced to close or sell many of the wood furniture plants it had just acquired. In the fiscal year that ended this past April, sales were about $1.9 billion.

Earnings also suffered. After peaking at $87.6 million in fiscal 2000, they’ve averaged $32.5 million over the past six years, including net losses in 2004 and 2013. Much of the downturn stems from charges the company has taken to close and sell the Ladd plants.

“It’s boiled down now to companies we think we can manage,” said Norton.

On the retail front, he believes La-Z-Boy still has a winning strategy — basically an updated version of the same one it had when he joined the company, which recognizes the power of nationally branded stores but doesn’t rely on them entirely.

“There are too many parts of the country that are not populated enough to support a store, where perhaps there is a good general dealer that can put in an 8,000- or 10,000-square-foot gallery and be very successful,” said Norton.

He remains committed to the approach and, even as chairman emeritus, pledges to do what he can to help the company succeed and help CEO Kurt Darrow in particular.

“I just still feel a member of the family,” said Norton.