Merchant with a high-end name tries low-cost, pop-up approach


By Bill Banks
The youngest of five children, Ben Haverty was born into one of the bluest of blue-blooded furniture clans.

In fact, he spent 25 years working for Havertys Furniture, the company founded in 1885 by his great-grandfather James Joseph Haverty.

So it comes as something of a surprise that at age 45 Haverty chose, more or less, to cut the umbilical cord.

Last month, he opened FurnitureXpress in Chamblee with, he notes in his mission statement, the goal “of making quality home furnishing affordable.”

He actually left the family business 10 months ago, and opened his first FurnitureXpress last April in Carrollton. This second store, in DeKalb County, is located about a mile inside the Perimeter on Peachtree Industrial Road.

“Of course, it was tough to break away from the family,” Haverty said recently. “But there are others within the fourth generation, specifically my older brother and two of my first cousins, who are playing important roles within [Havertys]. So that made it easier for me to leave.

“Second,” he said, “I felt it was time to step out and take a chance. For a long time I’ve been asking myself if there was a different way to sell furniture from the way Havertys does it.”

Generally speaking, Ben Haverty’s philosophy consists of two crucial components. First is an almost obsessive trimming of overhead, and second is what he calls “a unique real estate strategy,” by locating his stores in transitional shopping centers.

“Most good furniture stores follow the same formula,” he said. “That is, fancy showrooms, expensive store displays, high-rent location, large warehouse facilities and a fleet of delivery trucks.”

FurnitureXpress, he points out, virtually eliminates all of these. The Chamblee store has no fancy decor, and the furniture itself resides on a scuffed tile floor. Although Haverty offers a professional delivery service, most customers take their purchases home themselves.

In short, he’s offering much of what the boutique outlets sell —- living room, dining room and bedroom furnishings, with a stylistic range of traditional to contemporary —- but he’s going for the middle-level customer or “somebody who wants quality product and doesn’t mind the lack of frills.”

Perhaps Haverty’s most innovative touch, and what truly separates him from his family’s business, is where he plans on putting his stores.

“I look for old shopping centers with a lot of space to fill,” he said. “In some cases, the landlord might be in the process of redeveloping the site. So we will fill the space for a short time until they get the long-term solution they’re looking for. Then we move out.

“In the industry, these are known as pop-up stores,” he said. “In our case, we come into a shopping center when a landlord has vacant space. We’ll generate instant revenue for the landlord, we’ll bring in more traffic, which helps the smaller tenants who are already here. Meantime, we get very reasonable rent.

“My plan,” Haverty said, “is that we will always be in the Atlanta area, we just won’t always be at the same location. We’ve already moved our Carrollton store once. We shut down on a Friday, and opened up a half-mile down the road the following week. We’re lean and quick, like light infantry.”

Haverty grew up in Buckhead with a devout Catholic upbringing.

“With us,” he said, “the three most important things were faith, family and furniture.” He majored in history at Vanderbilt.

After college he spent a year working for a large nondenominational church in Franklin, Tenn., and eventually traveled to the border area of Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of the Congo) and Uganda, where he aided a church missionary.

“There weren’t a whole lot of business opportunities in Uganda,” Haverty said. “You either went into the military where you got a gun and took what you wanted. Or you went into the black market, or you were a subsistence farmer.

“What happened while I was there,” he said, “is that these guys came in and started a painting company. Suddenly, a number of people in the region had career options.

”These painting people created real value, because their employees matured both professionally and in their character.”

In retrospect, this idea that a strong business profoundly uplifts its community was the primary motivation for Haverty striking out on his own.

But he’s never forgotten the lesson of his father, Rawson Haverty, who believed, Ben said, “in carefully preparing employees for strong leadership roles. For Dad, it was implicit that you grow the people before you grow the business.

“You know,” he said, “I could have stayed [at Havertys] and been comfortable the rest of my life.

”But this was a calling I needed to do. And I don’t want to compete with them. I think Havertys is the best in America at what they do. I just want to be second best.”

FURNITUREXPRESS

> Address: 5508 Peachtree Industrial Blvd., Chamblee

> Phone: 404-364-8098