Tuesday, April 28, 2009
HIGH POINT, N.C. — Despite a severe global recession and the dazzle of competing convention cities such as Las Vegas and Milan, thousands of furniture buyers and sellers from around the world arrived this week in this midsized city that twice a year bulges with the quest for commerce.
The High Point Market is celebrating its 100th anniversary in a city more than an hour from major airports and where many residents move out of their homes to help make space for about 76,000 buyers, sellers and observers that swell the population of about 100,000.
That the industry continues gathering here — the Detroit of the home furniture industry — after a century is part habit, part history and a whole lot of dollars and cents.
“It’s not convenient,” said Bill Colegrove, chief executive of Phoenix-based Aspenhome. But “it’s a well-worn sidewalk. [Industry representatives] love to do what we always do. But there is a depth of knowledge that this place has that you can’t uproot and take somewhere else.”
His company has invested $1.5 million in showrooms in both High Point and at the newer, rival furniture show in Las Vegas, he said.
The High Point Market began in 1909, about 20 years after the first factories started up to take advantage of the ready supply of cheap local lumber and good railroad access around places with names that would become well-known brands — High Point, Thomasville and Hickory. By 1925, North Carolina produced more wooden furniture than any other state, said Robert Lacy, an economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond, Va.
While much of the production of wooden items has moved to Asia in the past decade, many leading brands such as Broyhill and Bernhardt, both now subsidiaries of industry giant Furniture Brands International, as well as hundreds of smaller companies retain manufacturing and management operations in central North Carolina. When Swedish furniture retailer IKEA decided last year to open its first U.S. manufacturing plant, it chose Danville, Va., about 50 miles north of High Point.
In addition to its manufacturing base, central North Carolina has developed a local array of specialized skills including furniture design, advertising, photography, marketing, financing and transportation, said Andrew Brod, an economist at University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Major trade associations and trade journals are based around High Point. The region thus represents much of the industry’s intellectual capital.
Brod estimated the High Point Market was responsible for more than 10,000 area jobs as designers, carpenters and marketers spend months preparing showrooms and sales strategies ahead of each market.
While major trade exhibitions have taken place in urban centers such as New York and San Francisco, and since 2005 in Las Vegas, High Point offers labor costs and showroom space far cheaper than big cities.
Showing off the product generates on-the-spot sales for producers, said Rob Sligh, CEO of Sligh Furniture Co. in Holland, Mich. The company generates up to a total of 15 percent of its annual orders at the two major furniture trade shows in High Point, and at two others each year in Las Vegas, Sligh said.