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American Furniture Finds Home In Mansions Abroad

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By JULIE SCELFO, The New York Times

Published: October 28, 2007

HIGH POINT, N.C. - Rich Americans build backyard home theaters. British millionaires join exclusive car clubs. But the newly affluent in China, Russia, India and the United Arab Emirates have embraced a surprising status symbol: American furniture.

Although most manufacturers faced gloomy sales forecasts at this month's High Point Market - the largest furniture industry trade show in the world, with 85,000 attendees and 12 million square feet of show space - purveyors of high-end furniture were concentrating on one of the industry's few bright spots, the growing overseas market for American luxury furnishings.

According to people within and outside the industry, rich consumers in countries new to high-end consumer culture now see furniture from the United States as desirable as porcelain from France and sports cars from Italy.

The American industry's relatively new embrace of of-the-moment styling, combined with brand-name designers and a longstanding tradition of fine craftsmanship, has helped cultivate an image that speaks to foreign consumers' desire for the best of everything. And they are spending accordingly, on dining chairs backed with rare ebony, hand-upholstered settees and dining sets that comfortably seat 20.

'These people have shopped the world, and what they want are products that are well designed and crafted beyond ordinary standards,' said Steve Nobel, chairman of the Luxury Home Alliance, a group that promotes American and international luxury goods and services for the home.

But that's not all they want, said Jerry Epperson, who analyzes the American furniture market for Mann, Armistead & Epperson in Richmond, Va. They also want products that showcase their new status, which America's large-scale upholstered and wood furniture is uniquely suited to do.

'I've been to Japan, China, India, all these places, and one of the things they brag about is that they have American furniture,' he said, 'the implication being that they have a home big enough that they can even use American furniture.'

Radha Chadha, a branding consultant in Hong Kong and co-author of 'The Cult of the Luxury Brand: Inside Asia's Love Affair With Luxury,' said that American furniture is instantly recognizable to many Asians and therefore an effective status symbol. 'Whereas other luxury brand products, like Louis Vuitton bags, are used by Asian consumers from all walks of life,' she added, 'only people at the very top end can afford luxury American furniture.'

There is no small irony in these developments for the struggling American furniture industry. Despite efforts to keep manufacturing jobs in North Carolina, where the industry has been based for more than 100 years, over the past decade most companies moved the bulk of their wood furniture manufacturing overseas, succumbing to the same pressures of globalization as other American industries.

Now, most 'American' furniture sold by venerable companies such as Thomasville, Broyhill and Hooker Furniture actually comes from places such as China, Vietnam and the Philippines.

And even as this shift has helped keep prices competitive in the lower and middle ranges of the market, American spending on furniture has declined more sharply this year than at any time since 1982, Epperson said.

The top range has not been spared: 11 days before the High Point Market began Oct. 1, Henredon, an American company that was founded in Morganton, N.C., in 1945 and that produces lines by Ralph Lauren and Barbara Barry as well as its own upscale collection, announced plans to close a large factory there, eliminating more than 500 jobs.

Henredon plans to open a new, smaller factory in North Carolina for custom work and expects to hire more than 100 people, but the mass assembly of wood furniture will be transferred to the Philippines.

Meanwhile, though, Henredon's sales abroad have been increasing steadily, said David Parker, its vice president for international sales. Although Henredon's parent company, Furniture Brands International, will not release revenue figures for its divisions (its second-quarter sales in 2007 fell 10.99 percent from last year), company President Tom Tilley said that overseas sales account for 10 percent of Henredon's income, double what it was in 2004.

'It's still a relatively small percentage, but it does offer a tremendous balance to a soft economy in the U.S.,' he said. At the fall market, buyers from 24 countries visited the Henredon showroom, and the first retailers from Ukraine, Indonesia, India, France and Armenia made purchases.

At Century Furniture, which still makes 90 percent of its products in Hickory, N.C., international sales make up about 10 percent of the company's estimated $180 million revenue, more than twice what it was five years ago, said Edward M. Tashjian, Century's vice president for marketing.

It has found two of its biggest and fastest growing markets in the United Arab Emirates and Japan, and it is developing a following in China, the United States' largest provider of furniture imports and the source of $5 billion worth of furnishings sold by American retailers last year.

To be sure, a big reason for the boom in foreign sales is the languishing dollar, which has made expensive American furnishings affordable for many with bank accounts measured in euros or rupees.

Even countries famous for their furniture, such as Norway and Italy, are snapping up American pieces: exports of wood furniture from North Carolina to Norway between January and July were up about 500 percent over the same period last year, according to the North Carolina Department of Commerce's International Trade Division; the state's exports to Italy were up nearly 700 percent.

But the largest shift was among upholstered pieces sent to China, which increased by more than 4,000 percent between the first half of 2006 and the same period in 2007.

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