By David Gill

The agreement between J.C. Penney and Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia (MSLO), announced last month, is seen by both companies as a crucial step toward meeting their individual business goals.

By Andrea Lillo

It started with a single retail site: racksandstands.com, with an abundance of entertainment furniture for sale.

Almost ten years later —  and having grown to a portfolio of more than 200 product-specific sites, such as bedroomfurniture.com and cookware.com – the company formerly known as CSN has recently relaunched itself as Wayfair.com.

Last month, LaZBoy held an event in Manhattan where reality show celebrity/designer Jillian Harris showed off various La-Z-Boy products. Nine hand-selected vignettes were designed to showcase La-Z-Boy’s wide range of customizable furniture with over 900 fabrics and 100 leathers options available on sofas, loveseats, and ottomans and chairs-allowing for a perfect fit in any home. Key trends showcased were preppy, menswear-inspired, and hot colors including blues, grays and deep greens and reds.

Pantone continues on a bold and bright path, having annointed Tangerine Tango, Pantone 17-1463, as its color of the year for 2012.

This follows the equally vibrant warm hue of 2011, Honeysuckle. “Like Honeysuckle, Tangerine Tango, a spirited reddish orange, continues to provide the energy boost we need to recharge and move forward,” said Leatrice Eiseman, executive director of the Pantone Color Institute. “It’s a real attention-grabber on the selling floor or on a website.”

Walgreens has repositioned the responsibilities of its general merchandise managers and divisional merchandise managers, and has appointed Shannon Curtin general merchandise manager for beauty, personal care and seasonal.

By Andrea Lillo

Gilt Home may officially be only about a year and a half old, but its rapid growth has already resulted in a relaunch this past October, offering its devotees editorial content, a large, everyday assortment and designer profiles, among other features.

Macy’s will invest $400 million in a remodel of its flagship store at Herald Square in New York.

The anticipated four-year project will include additional selling space for expanded assortments and upgraded presentations in key merchandise categories, the company said, including shoes, handbags, cosmetics and fashion brands.

Doug Scovanner, Target’s executive vice president and chief financial officer, will retire on March 31, 2012.

Scovanner began his career with the mass merchant in 1994 as senior vice president of finance of what was then known as Dayton Hudson Corp. (renamed Target Inc. in 2000). He became chief financial officer later in that year, and was named executive vice president and chief financial officer in 1999.

Adesso Inc., the contemporary home furnishings brand, is returning to High Point Market this month after a two-and-a-half-year hiatus. Located in the International Home Furnishings Center, space G262, the new showroom is more than 3,000 square feet.

“We’ve been developing our new and recent products to focus on our independent furniture and lighting retailers who may not attend some of the other trade shows, and we’re so excited to get back to High Point to share them,” said Lee Schaak, chairman, Adesso.

By David Gill

Last month saw the grand openings of Lord & Taylor Home’s first two stores, in Paramus and Shrewsbury, N.J.—marking what could be the most dramatic development in the home specialty-retail segment in many years.

The Paramus Lord & Taylor Home is located adjacent to the full-line Lord & Taylor department store in the Fashion Center mall. The Shrewsbury store sits three miles away from the Lord & Taylor store in the Monmouth Mall. Both stores measure about 22,900 square feet.

In a financial sense, Sears Holdings has a lot of ground to make up.

The parent company of Sears and Kmart was whacked with a $316 million net loss for the first half of its fiscal year, compared with a $23 million loss in the same period last year. Sales and margins have been declining since the beginning of the fiscal year, while expenses have risen in both dollar terms and as a percentage of sales.

Some of the hottest places for home goods are online flash-sale sites.

Designated for “members only” but easily accessible to anyone who wants to opt in, flash-sale sites borrow from some of the oldest tried and true retailing techniques, but package them in such a sophisticated way that affluent, web-savvy consumers are flocking to them in droves, and the sites themselves are popping up faster than mushrooms after a summer rain.

Attendees to Tendence, scheduled for Aug. 26 to 30, 2011, in Frankfurt, Germany, will not only see worldwide trends and products in home furnishings, but also new show features, such as the debut of a new Home&Trend Award, as well as special focuses on Austria and Africa. More than a month before the show opened, show organizer Messe Frankfurt announced that Tendence was already fully booked up, with 2,100 international exhibitors registered for the show.

By David Gill

Trade shows, like people, do a lot of growing up in their first 25 years, and that’s what Surtex has done.

The trade show marks its first quarter century this month. In that time, it has grown from a small show featuring European artists and designers to—as GLM, its owner and manager expressed it—“the only business-to-business marketplace in North America devoted to the sale and licensing of original art for a range of products across all product categories.”

By David Gill

Retailing is fun again for Pier 1 Imports.

For its most recent fiscal year, which ended on Feb. 26, the home-furnishings specialist posted some very enjoyable numbers. It reported an operating profit for the first time in six years, which brought the bottom line to a 15 percent jump over the last fiscal year. Net sales, on both a total and same-store basis, rose impressively as well—8.2 percent and 8.9 percent, respectively.

For designers of home furnishings, color inspiration is absorbed from many sources. 

Known for his bold looks, designer Raymond Waites loves the colors found in such movies as Gosford Park, for example. “I’m an old movie buff,” he said, and the walls portrayed in many of these films have “such a great, warm background for traditional furniture”—his raison d’etre. 

By Duke Ratliff

Despite my rapidly graying hair, I don’t usually think of myself as particularly old.

The annual trek to Chicago for the International Home + Housewares Show, however, makes me acutely aware of the passage of time.

I attended my first housewares show nearly 20 years ago, and the annual event brings back a slew of memories of Chicago in January, long-gone executives and long-defunct companies.

By David Gill

Bed bugs have become a major health crisis in some American cities, and not surprisingly consumers are looking for solutions.

Infestations have been reported in various media, in marquee locations such as the Empire State Building, and unexpected places such as the Cincinnati Public Library. Aside from the nation’s bedrooms, they have been reported in hotel rooms, clothing stores, public schools and even movie theaters.

With a new tagline “Modern. Southern. Style.” along with a new corporate logo and color palette, Belk looks to update its corporate identity to better reflect its restated mission statement, “to satisfy the modern Southern lifestyle like no one else, so that our customers get the fashion they desire and the value they deserve.”

With its 125th anniversary less than three years away, Belk began its re-branding process a year ago, and is the first time the company has done so since 1967.

By David Gill

Next year, the iPod will become ten years old.

It hardly seems possible that a product that has become associated with the newest in technology for consumers could have already reached double digits in age. In point of fact, however, Apple Corp. first unleashed the iPod in 2001—and has since updated it with the introductions of the iPod Touch, the iPod Nano, and the iPod Shuffle.

In literature it’s called a perfect storm. But in the cold, cruel, real world of international business, it’s called a perfectly miserable storm.

The costs of doing business with Asia—specifically in China—have gone up over the past year at rates that practically jump off the spreadsheet. Depending on the specifics and the period of time you are talking about, individual elements of the worldwide economic matrix have increased anywhere from 10 percent to 200 percent. And they are not done rising by most accounts.

“When I started at Bloomingdale’s I knew that the customer in Brooklyn didn’t buy patterns with birds.”

By Warren Shoulberg 

Sue Kronick has never been bashful about speaking her mind. Whether she was detailing to a vendor why a certain decision had been made about that company’s products or telling a cub reporter why the story he had written was off-base, you always knew where you stood with her.

Spanning all the way from couture to Kohl’s, the iconic bridal brand marks its 20-year anniversary

The special occasion Vera Wang is most often identified with is a wedding, but this year is different: the most special special occasion for her is an anniversary ... as in the 20th anniversary of the designer’s debut in fashion.

How do you celebrate your 180th birthday?

If you’re Woolrich, the venerable brand that traces its roots back to a 19th century woolen mill in the hills of Pennsylvania, you do it by doing what you do best: expanding the brand into more product categories and more channels of distribution.

Even though Woolrich is probably still best known for its signature casual outdoor apparel, it has built a sizeable home business over the years and in 2010, it has expanded that into new areas with more to come.

By David Gill

With a number of recent layoffs of in-store personnel, U.S. retailers have begun to look increasingly toward outsource providers of in-store inventory services and product demonstrations.

A soft real estate market and retailers looking for low-cost, low-risk solutions: Put them together and they spell Popupinsider.com.

The new Web site, which bills itself as a “national online exchange,” is designed to connect real estate owners with retailers, wholesalers and others looking for short-term space to test new concepts, unload excess inventory or even set up a showroom for a trade show.

By Andrea Lillo
Going through some old Bombay Company catalogs recently, Wil Hollands saw that the furnishings styles sold during its retailing days would still be relevant today.
“That is what I love about Bombay—the furniture can stand the test of time,” said Hollands, the chief merchant of Otto International, which handles the U.S. licensing for Bombay Brands LLC.

TEXTILES
As usual, the 2010 textiles trade-show season kicks off with the most all-encompassing show for home and contract textiles, Heimtextil, which is scheduled to run Jan. 13-16.
The 2010 show will have the theme “Take a Walk on the Style Side.” The “Let’s have a look” section of exhibits will focus on architecture and materials, and the “Let’s talk about it” lecture forum will spotlight trademark and license-management issues, export and market-entry strategies, and the contract business.

HFN Staff Report
Consider, if you will:
1 China’s currency has risen in value perhaps as much as 20 percent over the past few years, making imports from the country more expensive. There have also been acute shortages in both labor and manufacturing resources as the marketplace matures.
2 India’s political situation remains troubled and the country is still woefully behind in the kind of infrastructure needed to support large-scale exports.

If there was ever a year for America’s retailers like 2008, it must have happened a long, long time ago in an environment far, far away.
All up and down retailing, companies suffered from shell shock of a magnitude never before seen in a business lifetime.
It wasn’t just the drop in business: retailers have seen that before. But it was the suddenness in which it occurred, as if shoppers had decided en mass to stop consuming at a specific time on a specific date, generally conceded to be in October or November.

By Mike Duff
Consumer electronics retailers are battling it out in a market thrown wide open by the demise of Circuit City.
Both national and regional retailers have seen an opportunity in the closing of the country’s second-largest consumer electronics retailer.
The regional retailers are making some of the most noise, despite the economy. For instance, last month hhgregg detailed an accelerated growth plan that now calls for the opening of 20 to 22 stores during the current fiscal year, up from a previous goal of 16 to 18.

By Barbara Thau
MoMA Design Store has rolled out a new spring/summer collection that takes a cue from nature, strikes a nostalgic chord and speaks to the need to economize in these recessionary times, according to Bonnie Mackay, director of merchandising, creative and marketing.
Among the museum merchant’s 125 new offerings are pieces from boldface-named designers Tord Boontje and Sandy Chilewich, as well as a number of exclusive items.

By Barbara Thau
Who says there are no second acts? Tell that to the defunct retailers staging comebacks as wholesale brands.
The Sharper Image and Bombay furniture, both of which liquidated in 2008, will be reborn as home goods brands this year.
Portico, the upscale home furnishings chain that shuttered the last of its 13 stores in 2007, will reincarnate this year as a green home brand with a tony twist.

By Barbara Thau
Classic with an edge, cool, multicultural: These terms capture the style essence of President-elect Barack Obama and his family. The Obamas are poised to inform the home design tastes of the American public, said influential interior designers and taste-makers.
Not since the Kennedy era has a presidential family so captured the imagination of a nation. The Obama family’s youth, good looks and seemingly innate sense of style—with a populist, accessible twist—are bound to have a ripple effect, designers said.

HFN Staff Report
International trade show attendees have a little secret: Their business travel can be quite glamorous. While it’s, “Oh, another trade show,” to their bosses and associates, to friends it’s more like, “Can you believe I’m going to Milan, Paris and Bangkok and getting paid for it?” This edition of the International Trade Show Preview for the first half of the year is packed with tons of overseas shows with something for even the pickiest home furnishings buyer/jet-setting globe hopper.

By Barbara Thau
Retailers are tapping unlikely partners to spice up their stores: other retailers.
Lord & Taylor plans to add Fortunoff-branded home shops to the department store chain next year, J.C. Penney is rolling out more Sephora beauty shops to its stores and Macy’s has joined forces with FAO Schwarz to launch in-store toy shops.
The strategy is a way for one retailer to tap another’s core competency, said Charlie Chinni, chairman and chief executive officer of Fortunoff.

By Barbara Thau
Forget the must-have kitchen appliance or dishes with the hot design motif. Saving shoppers money is the big merchandising trend in home products this season.
Up and down the retail food chain, merchants are wrapping their gift-giving assortments around promotional themes in a bid to be the destination for value-oriented home fare in a weak economy and what promises to be one of the toughest holiday seasons at retail.
They are also pushing products designed to save shoppers money, such as energy-saving home goods, buyers said.

By Andrea Lillo
For Design Within Reach, design is as important to its customer as it is to the company.
“If you are that type of customer, then you have trouble finding a stapler,” said Ray Brunner, founder. “You have an aesthetic that is important to you.”
For nine years, Design Within Reach has been delivering furniture to that select group, and now for those who are looking for that particular stapler, or cookware, or mailbox, the company has opened its newest store format, Tools For Living.

Political pundits have declared this year’s presidential election as one of the most, if not the most, important of our lifetimes.
The home furnishings retail community is certainly not spared from the election’s significance. Whoever emerges the victor will have a radically different effect on the business community.
Senators Barack Obama and John McCain offer contrasting philosophical and strategic views on a number of the hot-button issues that will affect both retailers and suppliers: from trade to taxes to stimulating the economy.

By Barbara Thau
Macy’s is celebrating 150 years in business, but some of the boldest changes have been made in the past five under the stewardship of Terry Lundgren, president, chairman and chief executive officer of the $26.3 billion chain.
Since he was named CEO in 2003, Lundgren orchestrated the acquisition of longtime archrival May department stores, doubling the size of the business.
He rebranded the retailer’s myriad divisions, such as Burdines, Rich’s-Lazarus-Goldsmith’s and Bon Marche, to the Macy’s nameplate, creating a national chain.

Shuffling the Dates
In what amounts to a direct conflict with the High Point Market, World Market Center Las Vegas is shifting to a fall and winter schedule for its market weeks in 2009, instead of the summer and winter rotation it has had since its start in 2005.
The winter 2009 dates, Feb. 9 to 13, had previously been announced, but the big news is the second show, which will now be held Sept. 14 to 17, instead of the last week of July. Starting next fall, Vegas shows will be reduced by one day to a four-day schedule as well.

By Barbara Thau
What’s in a name?
The answer is not so clear-cut when it comes to the sales-generating power of a retail or supplier home brand in tough economic times.
While lower-priced brands gain appeal during an economic downturn, some brands are largely immune to the macro climate due to their sheer equity, branding experts told HFN.

By Andrea Lillo
WHITE PLAINS, N.Y.–Industry executives embraced the news that the Gourmet Housewares Show will return to its birthplace of San Francisco in 2009 after four years away.
That wasn’t the only change for the show as it will jump ahead several months from May to August, to run concurrently with the San Francisco International Gift Fair, both of which are run by GLM. The new timing provides extra breathing room between the Gourmet Housewares Show and the International Home & Housewares Show, which moved to March from January several years ago.

By Barbara Thau
NEW YORK–The struggling economy has retailers in retrenchment mode.
Faced with a perfect storm of negatives—the recession, soaring gas prices and the housing market malaise—retailer chains ranging from Home Depot to Ethan Allen are closing stores and tempering expansion plans.
The pull-back is one facet of the efforts of merchants, including J.C. Penney, Kohl’s and Dillard’s, to run as lean and mean as possible by cutting capital expenditures and keeping inventory levels low.

Olympics Not a Big Concern
Most home furnishings vendors expect only minor hiccups with Chinese production during the Olympics, to be held in Beijing, Aug. 8 to 24.
Despite rumors of factory shutdowns to cut down on pollution and conserve energy, vendors pointed out that most of the home furnishings factories are far south of Beijing and should not be affected.
“All of our factories are far enough away from the Olympic sites that we are not concerned about a mandatory shutdown during the games,” said Rick Seidman, president and chief executive officer of Quoizel.

NEW YORK–What does the future hold for Sharper Image?
Will it be a retailer again or will it just be a brand?
Sharper Image was purchased by a joint-venture group consisting of Hilco Consumer Capital, Gordon Brothers Brands and Bluestar Alliance in early June. The three firms paid $49 million for the retailer, which had been in Chapter 11 bankruptcy since February.

HFN Staff Report
NEW YORK–Captive brands—well-known licensed brands that are exclusive to specific retailers—are the latest chapter in a long history of licensed products in home furnishings.
As is often the case with history, the angle of the current licensing story depends on who’s telling it.

By Barbara Thau
NEW YORK–Michael Gries, the interim chief executive officer and chief restructuring officer of bankrupt Linens ’n Things, is no merchant.
He’s a restructuring executive with an accounting background, whose specialty is examining the operations of troubled companies to hash out a viable financial plan, sources said.
Conway, Del Genio Gries & Co., the firm he co-founded, has been enlisted by companies ranging from The Sharper Image and Dan River to Kasper, the apparel manufacturer, to help restore their financial health.

By Barbara Thau
NEW YORK–These days, the question isn’t which retailers are going green, it’s which ones haven’t yet.
Merchants up and down the retail food chain are not only peppering their mix with eco-friendly goods, but have rolled out full-fledged product lines and special marketing hooks to designate environmentally sound fare.

By Nancy Meyer
NEW YORK–The home furnishings industry is reducing its carbon footprint and going green in creative ways.
As the collective consciousness raises about the impact businesses, products and individuals have on the environment, consumers are choosing more green products than ever before. The surge in demand for eco-friendly goods has sent ripple effects throughout the home.

By Barbara Thau
NEW YORK–Joe Lagani, the former publisher of the iconic-but-now-defunct House & Garden magazine, had grown tired of the limitations of magazines in an increasingly Web-centric media world.
That’s why joining forces with GlamLiving, which bills itself as a new “vertical network” for home, design, food and travel for “women who live as stylishly as they look,” was such a juicy proposition for him.

NEW YORK–To celebrate Earth Day today, a number of retailers and manufacturers have incorporated earth-friendly efforts both big and small to signal their dedication to the environment and help educate consumers on making eco-friendly decisions.
Macy’s has a number of events for the week, including the launch of its Turn Over a New Leaf campaign. The program is part of a collaboration with the
National Park Foundation to raise awareness and funds for parks across the country. At Macy’s stores and online, consumers will be able to find

By Barbara Thau
WILLIAMSBURG, Va.–Williamsburg is spreading its home licensing wings.
This year marks the biggest launch of licensed product to date for the brand inspired by the lifestyle, goods and architecture of 18th-century Colonial Williamsburg, Va.

By Barbara Thau
NEW YORK–It turns out the luxury sector is not immune to the economic downturn after all—nor are luxury home goods at retail.
After outperforming much of the retail sector in recent years, sales have been softening at upscale merchants such as Neiman Marcus and Tiffany.
At the same time, the housing slump and recessionary climate is conspiring to dampen consumer spending on home goods by affluent consumers—particularly the “single-digit millionaires.”

By Barbara Thau
NEW YORK–Home furnishings revenues will trail already lukewarm retail sales growth of 3.5 percent in 2008, Rosalind Welles, chief economist for The National Retail Federation, said during a press reception at NRF’s 97th Annual Convention & Expo here.
Retail industry sales will increase 3.5 percent from last year, down from 4 percent in 2007, and “unfortunately, home [goods] will be the hardest-hit area. If consumers are not buying homes and not selling existing homes, [they’re buying] less in the way of home furnishings,” Welles said.