{"id":5466,"date":"2016-01-29T07:24:10","date_gmt":"2016-01-29T01:54:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/indonesia-furniture.com\/news\/2016\/01\/29\/the-meltdown-in-home-furnishings\/"},"modified":"2016-01-29T07:24:10","modified_gmt":"2016-01-29T01:54:10","slug":"the-meltdown-in-home-furnishings","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/indonesia-furniture.com\/articles\/the-meltdown-in-home-furnishings\/","title":{"rendered":"The Meltdown in Home Furnishings"},"content":{"rendered":"

By JULIE SCELFO<\/a><\/p>\n

PURVEYORS of high-end furniture are far from the only home-related businesses facing hard times. On Monday, Expo Design Center, the Home Depot<\/a> spinoff, became the latest among a host of well-known retailers and manufacturers to falter in the current economic downturn. And Wednesday, Cond\u00c3\u00a9 Nast<\/a> announced that Domino would join a growing list of home design magazines that have shut down recently, with the March issue its last.<\/p>\n

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A press release on the Home Depot Web site announced that the company would close all 34 Expo stores in 13 states, as well as seven other lesser-known design and remodeling stores, resulting in the elimination of 5,000 jobs. \u00e2\u20ac\u0153The Expo business has not performed well financially and is not expected to anytime soon,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d the release said.<\/p>\n

Earlier this month, Williams-Sonoma<\/a>, which owns the distressed Pottery Barn brand, announced that it would shed 1,400 jobs, and Waterford Wedgwood, the venerable crystal and china maker, filed for insolvency administration, the British version of bankruptcy protection. Lenox, the 120-year-old American china company, filed for the American version in November.<\/p>\n

\u00e2\u20ac\u0153The impression everybody in this industry seems to have is that because this economic meltdown started with the housing market, anything related to home got slammed first and worst, and that included home furnishings,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d said Warren Shoulberg, the editor of Home Furnishings News, a trade publication. \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Other than the auto industry, I think the home furnishings industry has pretty much gotten hit the worst.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n

Bankruptcy courts have also been inundated with filings from regional furniture stores (including Levitz, Wickes Furniture, Domain Home, the RoomSource, and Sofa Express and More), mattress companies (Mattress Discounters and Dormia), and chains that sell large amounts of home merchandise (like the Bombay Company, Linens \u00e2\u20ac\u2122n Things and Fortunoff). Several department stores \u00e2\u20ac\u201d a retail category that can account for up to 20 percent of home furnishing sales \u00e2\u20ac\u201d have sought bankruptcy protection, including, Mervyns, Boscov\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s and Value City Department Stores.<\/p>\n

Other companies have avoided filing for bankruptcy but are showing signs of trouble. Recently, Tempur-Pedic announced that its fourth-quarter earnings for 2015 fell 97 percent from that period a year earlier; Sealy posted a $42 million loss for that quarter; and Simmons said it failed to make a $7.9 million interest payment, putting the company at risk of default. Share prices for Cost Plus and Pier One Imports have dipped so low that market analysts are questioning their ability to survive.<\/p>\n

\u00e2\u20ac\u0153If you had a billion dollars, you could buy the entire portfolio of publicly traded furniture companies, including Thomasville and La-Z-Boy<\/a>, and still have money left over to go to McDonald\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s<\/a>,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d said Ray Allegrezza, the editor of Furniture Today, a trade magazine. \u00e2\u20ac\u0153These are all brands that a couple of years ago, you couldn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t touch. That paints a picture of how dramatically the entire home furnishings landscape has been affected.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n

Mr. Shoulberg and other analysts believe that some home furnishing companies were forced into bankruptcy because they were not doing well to begin with. \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Linens \u00e2\u20ac\u2122n Things was heavily loaded down with debt and was a perennial also-ran to Bed Bath & Beyond<\/a>,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d Mr. Shoulberg said. \u00e2\u20ac\u0153When times got tough, businesses that weren\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t as well-run and well-positioned were the first ones hit.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n

Jerry Epperson, a furniture and mattress industry analyst at Mann, Armistead & Epperson in Richmond, Va., said the economy was so bad that \u00e2\u20ac\u0153even well-run businesses that weren\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t overleveraged a year ago are overleveraged today. Business is off 20, 25 percent.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n

Home furnishings retailers are likely to remain vulnerable throughout the recession, said Joseph Feldman, an analyst at the Telsey Advisory Group in Manhattan who studies retail markets, because consumers no longer believe they should buy new things when what they have is adequate.<\/p>\n

\u00e2\u20ac\u0153If you\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve got less in your pocket and you\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re worried about putting food on the table, you\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re not going to be buying new throw pillows just because Pottery Barn has a new color,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d Mr. Feldman said. \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Given the state of the economy, consumers are doing more with what they have.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n

This new reality has gripped the publishing industry as well. In just the last three months, the magazines Cottage Living, Country Home and O at Home have folded. Now Domino, a four-year-old title that had grown to a readership of more than 800,000, has become the eighth major home design magazine to cease publication since November 2014 \u00e2\u20ac\u201d when Cond\u00c3\u00a9 Nast shocked many in the industry by shuttering another of its home magazines, the 106-year-old House & Garden.<\/p>\n

Source : http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By JULIE SCELFO PURVEYORS of high-end furniture are far from the only home-related businesses facing hard times. On Monday, Expo Design Center, the Home Depot spinoff, became the latest among a host of well-known retailers and manufacturers to falter in the current economic downturn. And Wednesday, Cond\u00c3\u00a9 Nast announced that Domino would join a growing […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5466","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-furniture-indonesia-news"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/indonesia-furniture.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5466","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/indonesia-furniture.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/indonesia-furniture.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/indonesia-furniture.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/indonesia-furniture.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5466"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/indonesia-furniture.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5466\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/indonesia-furniture.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5466"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/indonesia-furniture.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5466"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/indonesia-furniture.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5466"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}