High Point Market still going strong

HIGH POINT, N.C. — Despite a severe global recession and the dazzle of competing convention cities like Las Vegas and Milan, thousands of furniture buyers and sellers from around the world arrived this week in this mid-sized 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 like New York and San Francisco, and since 2005 in Las Vegas, High Point offers labor costs and showroom space far cheaper than big cities.

"Furniture takes a great deal of space to display," Michael Dugan, a former CEO of Henredon Furniture Industries who now chairs the business school at Lenoir-Rhyne University in the nearby furniture hub of Hickory.

With perhaps dozens of dining room or bedroom sets to display to buyers, Dugan said he signed Henredon to 80,0000 square feet of display space in High Point, far more than he could afford at big-city trade shows. And buyers really do want to see what they're buying to stock retail stores, he said.

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.

"It's not a show. It's a market," he said. "We want to write orders to the greatest extent possible right there on the spot. We want to be where the dealers are."

Competition to be the top furniture trade show increased after a competing Las Vegas event opened in 2005. Tourism dropped after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and Las Vegas leaders worried that Celine Dion and Cirque du Soleil wouldn't be enough to fill 130,000 hotel rooms. They sought more convention-goers. The city agreed to use higher property taxes on what used to be empty land to reimburse $129 million to developers who built the World Market Center. The complex's operators would not specify how many attended the February furniture market, saying that the average since the show began have been about 50,000, spokesman Andrew Maiden said.

North Carolina politicians responded by nearly doubling the funding over the next three years for the High Point show. State and local governments channeled $6.65 million to the High Point International Home Furnishings Market Authority last year for marketing, local transportation and entertaining visitors with acts like '80s rockers Cheap Trick and '70s disco shakers KC & The Sunshine Band.

But with the industry struggling against cratering sales, furniture insiders are willing to forego pizazz in favor of bottom-line calculations, Dugan said.

"This is a working market," Brod added. "People come to High Point to work and then they leave."