Carole Sloan — Furniture Today,
NEW YORK — Thomasville brought its new Lumine collection and marketing program to a hotel ballroom

here for a dramatic debut to several hundred dealers.

At an event called “The Celebration of Change,” Thomasville President Nancy Webster detailed the raisons d’etre behind the year-long development of Lumine, and outlined the changes ahead.

Webster, who joined Thomasville in September 2012, said the company has used 2013 to retrench and regroup.

“These moves represent the fashion leadership and product differentiation that we are focusing on for the company,” she told Furniture|Today. She said New York was chosen as a launch pad for Lumine “because we are not North Carolina-based. We are a global company.”

Underlying all the new activity, she said, is the need to “get people excited about the brand again.”

It’s not that the brand has faded. She told the dealers it has “an incredible 90% awareness. Product attributes and quality ratings are second to none.” But there’s also bad news, she said.

“We have low awareness and relevance levels with women who are 25 to 34. These are the women who are at the peak of their home furnishings buying years. Our awareness goes up with both age and income,” she said. 

She said the Lumine collection of living room, dining room and bedroom furniture — as well as a Thomasville-designed collection of top-of-bed goods, rugs, decorative accessories and lighting — is ready to ship and will be in stores for the key January/February sales period.

A catalog showing Lumine and other products will be mailed to 5 million targeted homes around every Thomas-ville store. Webster said the purpose “is to give consumers the opportunity to take another look at Thomasville and drive them into the stores.”

Newspaper ads, circulars and broadsheets will complement the marketing efforts, she said.
And in a radical departure for the furniture industry, the company will include published prices beginning Jan. 11 on its www.thomasville.com Web site.

“We want any consumer who goes into a Thomasville store or on the Internet to see the same price,” Webster said. The site also will gain a fresh look reinforcing the company’s fashion and design expertise in January, responding to consumer requests for the “indispensable tool for decorating the home of their dreams.”

Internet marketing efforts also will cater to consumers who shop online, although the company will not make sales online.

“We’re not yet prepared for e-commerce, but we have to be in that category of the two or three stores they visit after they do Internet exploration,” she said. She said the company’s Web site already has “traffic rankings significantly higher than Ethan Allen and La-Z-Boy.”

She added that the company will double its advertising spending beginning in January, including a national TV commercial. The “So You” print campaign that began this year will be continued.

Lumine will be featured in the marketing.

Webster said the collection is “soft modern with fluid lines and uses exotic materials and veneers, and boasts lots of velvets and silks for the upholstered pieces.” The company’s creative staff designed and sourced the fabrics, she added.

Pricing is in the best tier of the company’s price range.

Lumine is the result of a research project on consumer design preferences, undertaken soon after Webster joined the company. “We saw a trend to soft modern,” she said.

The Lumine presentation here followed an “upholstery road show” the company conducted in the early fall, taking product to four locations for two-day sessions with retailers.

“We presented macro colors directions, a texture story, a pattern story and then showed the actual product,” Webster said, describing results from the shows as phenomenal. “We wrote more business in those two weeks than we do at a market.”