Clint Engel — Furniture Today,

BATON ROUGE, La. — Kornmeyer Furniture is shutting down after 127 years in business and a remake last year as Kornmeyer’s HomeSmart, a move the retailer initially said was boosting business.

“Over the past 16 months, the company has been working to overcome a severe liquidity crisis by reducing costs, working with its vendors and negotiating a forbearance agreement with its primary lender, J.P. Morgan Chase,” the company said in a release.

Despite its efforts and the help of vendors and the bank, “the company could not overcome the loss in sales resulting from a failed software conversion,” the release said.

Planned Furniture Promotions, which the company hired earlier this year to conduct a high-impact sale, will now run the GOB sale. It starts Friday and is expected to wind down by mid-December, said Jacques Pourciau, recently appointed Kornmeyer’s president.

 “The prolonged software difficulty, the resulting financial strain along with the inability to replenish our inventory to meet our customer needs, forced us to close our store,” Pourciau said. “We thank all of our loyal customer for their support and patronage and our employees for their years of dedicated service.”

He declined to identify the software company used, but said that the retailer is not pursuing any legal action against it.

For the liquidation, the company is discounting goods from suppliers including Lane, Barcalounger, Hooker, Hancock & Moore, Sherrill, Bernhardt, AICO and Sealy.

Pourciau said vendors have not yet been paid in full and, “we are pursuing settlements.” He added that the company is in the process of selling its 90,000-square-foot store of an office supply company.

“There are no plans to file for bankruptcy,” he said.

Dave Carpenter, director of La-Z-Boy Financial Services-Greensboro, said the GOB news was not totally unexpected but “is certainly a severe loss for their loyal employees.”

“Kornmeyer’s has been an excellent customer of La-Z-Boy companies for many years,” Carpenter said. “The company made a concerted and sincere effort to reorganize, but evidently the current economic environment in the furniture industry prevented a successful result.”

La-Z-Boy is a Kornmeyers creditor and has filed a legal claim against the retailer to recover its money, he added. Meanwhile, it is shipping sold orders to the retailer through Planned Furniture Promotions.

Pourciau said Kornmeyer’s intends to fulfill all orders during the GOB and urged customers to contact the company if they have questions about prior orders.

Kornmeyer’s, a fifth-generation family-owned business founded in 1880, was spotlighted late last year at Furniture/Today’s leadership conference with then-President Rose Mary Williams discussing margin and other improvements for the company since it rebranded itself with the help of Grid2.

“The name change was the result of some extensive market research that I think would have been very success with the right marketing,” Pourciau said. “We were just never able to implement that because of the financial difficulties we were having.”