Search Results for:

Minnesota furniture retailers have until Dec. 21 to ask to be included in a free and voluntary product-testing program for regulated flame retardants. The offer was issued in October by state government’s Chemicals in Products Interagency Team. “The CPI Team is offering assistance with testing a selection of your products for levels of restricted flame […]

Innovation pays off for Synchrony and its retail partners As part of Synchrony’s “Envision” conference in Chicago earlier this year, Home Furnishings Association CEO Sharron Bradley and I had the chance to visit the Synchrony offices and Innovation Station. There are apparently four of these “Innovation Stations” across Synchrony that use new ways of working like […]

Global markets might be breathing a sigh of relief this week after President Trump and his Chinese counterpart, Xi Jinping, agreed to a cease-fire in their escalating trade war, but HFA members are not so confident. Many say the truce only delays the inevitable: Another tariff increase. Under the handshake agreement , which came at […]

Raise your glass to our 2018 Emerging Star winner Home Furnishings Association (HFA) member Greg Rich wasn’t always a furniture retailer. In another life—one that seems blissfully far removed these days—Rich recruited IT workers for large companies. It was a nice-paying gig. It was also one Rich desperately wanted out of. “I needed to do something that, […]

With little time to celebrate in 2019 First came President Trump’s much-heralded tax reform, which permanently lowered the corporate rate for furniture retailers and other businesses from 35 percent to 21 percent. Next came the Supreme Court’s ruling in South Dakota v. Wayfair Inc., a huge victory for retailers who long complained they were working […]

Rob Burnette might not be a Badcock by blood, but members of the furniture empire think of him as family. The feeling’s mutual. Four years ago, Badcock Home Furniture & More had a problem, one that any freshman business major could spot, but a little harder to fix: Same-store sales for the company, one of […]

Despite the attention furniture manufacturers and retailers have given it, the furniture tip-over problem remains an epidemic in the United States. Someone in the U.S. is injured every 17 minutes by a furniture, television or appliance tip-over, according to the Consumer Product Safety Commission. After declining for a few years, estimated tip-over injuries for children […]

HFA member James Johnson remembers walking through his furniture store, Fowhand Furniture in Panama City, Fla., last month assessing the damage wrought by Hurricane Michael and making a promise to his family and staff. “It was a mess, but we made the decision right there that come hell or high water we were going to […]

This Cyber Monday, furniture retailers probably aren’t seeing a big benefit from sales-tax collections by online competitors. “I haven’t noticed an uptick with customers saying so,” Ryan Redman, chief operating officer of Priceless Mattress and Furniture in Augusta, Maine, said on the Monday after a Thanksgiving weekend that saw good business. He added that, “I […]

The fire jumped over the highway and went straight up the mountainside, Julian Jeppe said Wednesday, recalling the harrowing experience of living through another natural disaster in Southern California. HFA members Jeppe and his wife, Dru, own Reeds Furniture, which has stores in Agoura Hills and Oxnard. The Woolsey Fire spread over nearly 100,000 acres […]