Clint Engel — Furniture Today
ATLANTA — Looking to boost exposure of its furniture lines and grow its business, sales representative group

TradeWinds Partners has opened a showroom, training center and headquarters here.

Last spring, the eight partners purchased a 10,000-square-foot building on DeFoor Avenue for what has become Studio 4, a gallery showcasing the lines they carry. That includes Hooker and affiliated companies Bradington-Young and Seven Seas, and Paoli and its affiliated Whitehall line in contract.

The rep group, which covers Georgia, Alabama and northern Florida, soon expects to add goods from Sam Moore, which is being acquired by Hooker.

The partners have invested about $1.3 million in the project and received favorable terms from their supplier companies for some $200,000 in samples, said Johnny Tingle, TradeWinds president. The showroom hosted an open house, largely for its residential customers, last week.

“A lot of the best looks we sell are not presented as widely … or exposed to the public as much as we think they should be,” Tingle said. The new showroom gives TradeWinds the opportunity to change that without stepping on the toes of its dealer base.

“It’s not our intention to sell anything out of the showroom,” he said. “It’s simply a place to show and tell the best looks from all of our manufacturers…. All we’re selling is romance and training.”

That’s not to say the showroom isn’t open to the public. TradeWinds is encouraging consumers to walk through anytime Monday through Friday. The group will make presentations to anyone, Tingle said, and if they want to buy, it will refer consumers to dealers.

He noted that TradeWinds for years has made presentations in contract, starting with the end user and working backwards through designers, who take their selections to dealers.

“We always felt that would work in residential just as easily,” Tingle said, and the new showroom gives TradeWinds a chance to prove it. “If we can sell the consumer (on the product) and deliver that consumer to one of our stores, we should be ahead of the competition.”

Tingle’s partners in Trade-Winds and investors in Studio 4 are Rick Ferguson, Bruce Kenny, Bob House, Thomas Nolfa, Henry Fitzgerald, Powell Cooper and Matt McBride.

In Studio 4, TradeWinds aims to cover every category, including home office, living room, bedroom, dining, occasional and home accents. It has set aside 3,000 square feet of the 10,000-square-foot space (currently leased to an unrelated tenant) for what it hopes will become a Hooker Showplace prototype gallery, Tingle said.

 Near the entrance, Trade-Winds has carved out an area for new product, special prototypes or proprietary goods for major retailers, perhaps saving them a trip to High Point.

The group also has started hosting half-day “lunch and learn” sessions for “all the questions that come up in a store everyday” that salespeople don’t have the time or resources to answer, Tingle said. “It’s our mission to try to train salespeople by getting them away from the store to where we have their full attention.”

This summer, TradeWinds plans to offer a one-day seminar led by Leslie Carothers, owner of The Kaleidoscope Partnership. It also expects to use the facility for a kick-off barbecue in conjunction with TradeWinds’ annual charity golf tournament.