Furniture Sag

CONSUMER GOODS Furniture Sag

In a self-critical mood, 30,000 furniture makers and dealers swarmed into Chicago for their annual summer show last week and gave out some sad statistics. Retail furniture sales sagged 4% last year to an estimated $3.7 billion, are down another 10% so far in 1958. This year the average U.S. family will spend less than $62 on furniture, and 83% of all families will buy no major piece of furniture at all.

Furniture has been particularly hard hit by the durable-goods recession because furniture purchases are usually postponable--until the chair breaks down. Business began to slide early in 1957, several months before the recession started. "We had become spoiled," says San Francisco Retailer Harry Jackson. "There was very little urgency or excitement in our field until two years ago, because houses were going up so fast that we had a built-in market. The only creative part was modern furniture, and that was mostly Scandinavian."

Low Style & High Price. One of the problems is that U.S. furniture is low on style and high on price. But there are deeper reasons for the slump, as the biggest furniture maker, Kroehler Manufacturing Co. (1957 sales: $90.5 million) learned in a broad market survey released last week. The U.S. housewife, reported Kroehler, believes that her reputation for "good taste" depends greatly on her selection of furniture. But she does not know for certain what "good taste" is, and the furniture industry has done little to help her learn. In choosing furniture, the American woman "must do credit to her husband's taste in 'wife choosing.' She is proving herself in a completely visible way, and she finds the idea frightening." Concludes Kroehler: "The American consumer approaches the purchase of furniture much as she approaches a visit to the dentist. She must go sooner or later and will probably feel better afterward, but it is such an agonizing experience that maybe it could be put off for a few weeks, a month or even a year."

The market is cluttered with so many different styles that the homemakers often do not know what to buy. On the production level, there are some 4,000 different manufacturers, each with styles of his own. On the retail level, complains Executive Vice President Jim Best of the Southern Retail Furniture Association, there are many fast-buck artists who high-pressure consumers into buying furniture that does not suit their taste. Says Best: "The American housewife has lost her confidence in all but a few established furniture dealers. But she is still so confused with the wide choice that she often takes home something that she neither needs nor wants."

Stylish & Sensible. Furniture men feel keenly that something must be done. What they did last week was to form the Home Furnishings Council of America, with a budget of $1,000,000. Among other things, the council will try to educate the housewife on the basics of furniture buying, will send speakers and films to women's clubs, farm and teen-age groups, Parent-Teacher Associations and firms that employ many women. It will also train salespeople--many of whom do not have the best taste in furniture--to help the housewife find out what she really wants, show her what new pieces will fit in best with her old furniture.

The promotion drive is long overdue. As in the automobile business, salesmen have become order takers waiting for customers to come in; seldom have they gone out and solicited the most likely customers--newlyweds, new parents, new homeowners. Yet furniture men are the first to admit that promotion alone is not enough. The real remedy for the industry's ailments is to produce better-styled, lower-priced furniture. Kroehler recently brought out a medium-priced line (see cut) that follows the new trend of matching pieces for all rooms, and it is selling well. With it, a family can furnish a two-bedroom house for less than $2,000. Furniture men will have an increasingly tough time trying to sell cheap but poorly made or cheap but flashy furniture, known in the trade as "Borax." Said Indianapolis Retailer Harry Schacter, co-chairman of the new council: "Manufacturers and retailers who stay with Borax will go down the drain. The taste level of Americans is being raised."

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