Decorating the ‘Yuppie’ Way : Retailers are enjoying a boon from versatile ‘life style furniture.’
Young urban professionals in Southern California who are too poor to hire an interior decorator and too busy to patiently collect home furnishings suddenly have a host of one-stop, “life style” furniture retailers clamoring to serve their needs.
Storehouse PLC opened a Conran’s store at the Beverly Center this week; next month, International Furniture Inc. will open a third Southern California Stor outlet at the Del Amo Fashion Mall, and Inter-Ikea Systems BV, a giant Scandinavian furniture and housewares company, is eyeing the Southern California market and hopes to open a store in Burbank next year, according to a spokesman at company headquarters in Vancouver.
“There doesn’t seem to be any end to these life style furniture stores,” said Joe Richardson III, chairman of the American Society of Furniture Designers in High Point, N.C., and executive vice president of Richardson Bros., a Sheboygan Falls, Wis., furniture retailer. “It’s no secret anymore that everyone is catering to yuppies.”
The furniture industry’s interest in young urban professionals is easy to understand. They make good money--the group includes, by some accounts, an estimated 3.5 million yuppies whose personal incomes average $51,000 a year--but often aren’t well off enough to afford a good interior decorator, a service that can run five figures or more.
Meanwhile, many harried yuppies have grown tired of casual living with inexpensive furnishings acquired during their college days. So, experts say, they suddenly are in the furniture market in a very big way.
“Most of our stuff is geared toward the 25- to 42-year-old age group--the furs and station wagon urban elites,” explained Pauline Dora, president of Conran’s/Habitat USA, the U.S. subsidiary of London-based Storehouse. “We absolutely have a lot of (busy) yuppies come to our store, but we have some couch potatoes, too.”
The demand has been a boon for the three leading marketers of so-called life style furniture. The term applies to European-inspired household furniture known for its clean symmetrical lines and black or monochrome color schemes and that can be easily mixed or matched with other household items--the quality that, in the eyes of many shoppers, makes interior decorators unnecessary.
Shoppers say they are drawn by the trendy, eye-catching design of the home furnishings and the one-stop convenience of being able to buy everything, from ash trays and lamps to sofas and dining room tables, under one roof.
Rivals Growing Fast
Conran’s sells furniture for as little as $69, but it is generally considered the most upscale of the three retailers, with most sofas priced over $300 and dining room tables over $500. By contrast, although Stor sells a leather couch for $1,400, it offers mainly more inexpensive merchandise. It sells collapsible chairs for as little as $9 and sofas for as little as $150.
Although their annual revenue pales next to that of the industry’s largest furniture chain, Levitz, which racked up 1988 sales of $921 million, the three challengers are growing fast. The trade magazine Furniture Today estimated this month that revenue at Stor jumped 500% to $60 million in 1988, that revenue at Ikea climbed 21.3% to $97 million and that Conran’s U.S. revenue grew nearly 6% to $57 million--a figure that Conran’s executives say is too low. They say the company grossed about $70 million in the United States.
Stor’s 200,000-square-foot outlet in City of Industry, where the company is headquartered, is about the size of four football fields. It is so large that it has become a tourist attraction for out-of-towners who want to gawk at the giant maze of bargains in trendy, unassembled furniture.
“I think the big selection is a plus,” said James D. Stadtlander, Stor’s president. “Traditionally in the furniture market, you can’t always get what you want in the same place.”
Ikea, which will open its fourth U.S. store near Pittsburgh in July, also favors large stores. Indeed, it viewed its retailing philosophy as so similar to Stor that it sued Stor in Los Angeles federal court last year, alleging that Stor copied its “unique concept” of furniture retailing “in virtually every material respect” right down to the design of price tags, shopping carts and jackets worn by employees.
Neither store officials nor company lawyers would comment on the lawsuit, which is pending.
At 50,000 square feet, Conran’s Los Angeles store doesn’t resemble the giant facilities favored by Ikea and Stor. Nevertheless, Conran’s entry into Southern California is being watched closely by its competitors.
Drawn by Design
Conran’s ground-level Beverly Center store, stuffed with nearly 6,000 items, is the largest of the company’s 17 U.S. outlets. And Conran’s officials, who have plastered ads on more than 70 Southern California billboards as well as in local newspapers and magazines, are betting mightily on the store’s success.
“Ikea is concerned with price, price, price,” said Sir Terence Conran, chairman of Conran’s parent company, Storehouse. “But we think we offer more interesting design. We are one of the leading (design) influences in the American market. That’s what will draw people to our store.”
“As California is the largest mail order state for our quarterly catalogues, we have been wanting to expand to the West Coast for some time,” added Dora. “We chose the Beverly Center because it is such a successful shopping mall. . . . It attracts people who want good value and appreciate good design.”
But some American designers say the furniture being marketed by the life style furniture retailers has drawbacks in terms of aesthetics and comfort. In particular, they complain of manufacturers’ emphasis on so-called QA furniture, or quick assembly furniture, which--in its unassembled form--is small enough to fit in a car.
“They won’t accept a design you can’t haul away in your yuppie car,” said John Caldwell, who heads his own furniture design company in Pasadena. “I think their furniture is fun and great to see,” he said, referring generically to all life style furniture retailers. “It’s the kind of thing our office has been asked to design on occasion. But the food has to be awfully good or the girl has to be awfully pretty for you to sit in some of this stuff for a long time. Big guys like me like sitting on nice big leather couches.”
“Conran’s and those kinds of stores are followers of design, not leaders,” sniffed Michael McDonough, who teaches architecture and design at the Parsons School of Design in New York. “They look at the high end of the market and come up with a low-cost version of those designs.”
Officials admit that their marketing efforts are built around selling furniture that is affordable and easily transportable by car. But they say consumers prefer such convenience.
“We are extremely proud that we were among the first people to sell furniture in QA or quick assembly,” Conran said. “Americans want instant gratification. They will never buy something they have to wait weeks for. There are examples of badly designed QA furniture, but there are also plenty of examples of badly designed furniture that is made to be sold fully assembled.”
