A Classic Home vignette
Partnering with designers can help furniture dealers grow
By Janet Weyandt, YSN
Independent furniture retail is a tricky business. There are countless challenges, but one way to get more out of it is to partner with designers to grow the customer base.
During a standing-room only session during Convention 2024, Matt Sorensen, senior VP of sales for BrandSource vendor partner Classic Home, talked about the strategies and benefits of working with designers.
“2024 has been a tough year,” he said. “The beauty of working with designers — and the clientele they’re working with — is the economy doesn’t affect them. These clients have money.”
Ready and Able
That means that most of the time, designers aren’t looking to pinch pennies; their only priority is to give their clients everything they want.
Appliance dealers have a little bit of an edge, Sorensen said, because everybody needs appliances. Duress purchases guarantee sales in good times and bad. Furniture dealers don’t ordinarily have that security, but designers have security of another kind.
“The design business is almost recession proof,” Sorensen said. “These are the clients that literally have an open checkbook.”
Filling a Gap
What’s more, furniture dealers are uniquely suited to offer designers a mutually beneficial arrangement, he said, as many designers work out of their homes, with no dedicated warehouse space and no way to provide delivery services. Independent furniture retailers, on the other hand, have all of that.
“That’s where you guys come into play,” Sorensen said. “If you start working with designers, you can bring product into your warehouse. And delivery — usually there’s nobody to deliver their product. There’s so much opportunity with the design business.”
Classic Home, a mid- to upper-tier whole-home designer brand, is getting more and more into white-glove delivery services, which affluent buyers want and solo practitioner designers can’t offer. At the Las Vegas Market in July, Sorensen said, the company saw more than 4,000 dealers over four days, many of whom were designers.
Related: Classic Home Pairs with BrandSource Financial
Responding to questions from the audience, Sorensen said there are lots of ways to find designers to partner with, one of which is to talk to home builders and ask them who they’re working with.
Another way is by following designers on social media to get a feel for who they are and what they’re doing. Sorensen also suggested taking part in community events and local organizations, or, in other words, good old-fashioned networking.
Bed Time
Another way in is mattresses, Sorensen said.
“Most designers don’t have accounts with mattress stores, so they’ll send (clients) to a mattress store,” he said. “Opening it up with you guys gives them the ability to sell the whole home. There’s a lot of opportunity for you guys to partner up with those designers.”
Financial arrangements are flexible, too, he said. It’s good to start out a new partnership by nailing down how a designer wants to be paid.
“A lot of stores say, ‘Whatever you sell, I’ll pay you a percentage and give you a 1099,’” Sorensen said. “Most of them work off a commission.”
What’s in it for the designer? Sorensen said favorable pricing for furniture stores makes their lives easier.
The Price is Right
“We have a designer price,” he said. “If you walk in and have a brick-and-mortar store [that you work with], you have a lot lower price. You’re going to immediately get a better deal. That’s a way to attract the designer too. You have a lot more buying power than a designer.”
Being the store that provides what high-end clients want from their designers is a winning proposition for everybody.
“If you’re looking for wins in 2024 and beyond, you’ve got to reinvent yourself,” Sorensen said. “I would say 90% of the customers working with designers don’t need to touch and feel — they hand the designer their credit card. There’s so much opportunity with the design business.”
YSN publisher AVB BrandSource is the nation’s largest merchandising and marketing co-op for independent appliance, mattress, furniture and CE dealers.
