Owner: Company has done well amid industry slump
By Fran Daniel,JOURNAL REPORTER
Dynasty Furniture has opened a second furniture store in Winston-Salem.

Deidra Thompson, the owner and president of Funky Furniture Inc., which does business as Dynasty Furniture Inc., opened a second store covering 23,000 square feet in a part of the North Carolina Arts & Antiques Mall on Peters Creek Parkway. The arts and antiques mall occupies the rest of the building – 20,000 square feet.


The additional space is across the street from the 6,000-square-foot Dynasty store at Marketplace Mall. The stores sell furniture and accessories, including lamps, pictures, statues, vases and mirrors.

Thompson expanded Dynasty at a time when her business is good, but retail sales for the furniture industry are in a slump.

According to a recent report by Smith Leonard PLLC, a financial-services company in High Point, the value of furniture orders declined 4 percent to $2.3 billion in March, compared with $2.4 billion in March 2013.

Thompson said she is amazed by how well her stores are doing. She declined to give sales figures but said that Dynasty’s business was up 25 percent in 2013 over 2012 and that people are patronizing the new store.

“I’m so thankful and so blessed,” she said.

Thompson credits a combination of store programs and services for Dynasty’s success, including layaway, special orders, customer service and competitive prices.

Layaway, a financing plan in which retailers set aside merchandise for customers until they have finished paying for the items in installments, has practically become a program of the past in the retail industry, but not at Dynasty.

“It is a lot of extra work to do that, but it is a service that’s needed,” Thompson said.

Dynasty does a lot of special orders for customers. Furniture is typically stocked in the color shown on the floor, but customers have the option of ordering the merchandise in whatever color they want.

Thompson said that customer service is important in her stores.

Several times customers have made a mistake and ordered a chaise lounge on the wrong side of sectional furniture, realizing too late that it would not fit in their homes.

Thompson said that Dynasty employees have on occasion reordered sectionals under these circumstances.

“You could be strict and steadfast on orders, but it’s not good business,” she said.

Dynasty also offers competitive prices, Thompson said.

“We do not sell the cheapest furniture in town,” she said. “We sell the best quality furniture available for the best price.”

The price of sectionals such as a sofa and chaise lounge, for example, is $788 to $2,000.

Dynasty tries to sell as much furniture made in North Carolina and in the United States as possible, but it’s getting harder because of Chinese imports and the fact that so many American furniture-manufacturing companies are going out of business.

Thompson estimates that 80 percent of her merchandise was made in the United States when she got into the furniture business in 1987 but is now at about 40 percent.

Her company tries to stick with manufacturers that provide timely deliveries.

“We’ve had to go, ‘If you can’t get us shipments in three weeks, we’re not buying it from you because people will not wait,’” she said.

Her company works with more than 100 manufacturers around the world.

“Even if we can’t get American-made, we try to use companies that have warehouses in North Carolina for their distributorship,” she said.

Thompson also said that Dynasty’s 20-year reputation in the furniture business has helped attract and retain customers. The retailer does business with three generations of families.

“Kids that I used to carry around while their moms were shopping are now coming in and buying their own furniture,” she said.

â–  Fran Daniel can be reached at 727-7366 or at fdaniel@wsjournal.com.

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