Designers make room for a new generation of furniture buyers
By Connie Dufner
The Dallas Morning News
Scoot over, baby boomers. The Gen-Xers are bumping you off the sofa.
For five decades, boomers’ tastes and needs have set the pace for the furniture industry — indeed most industries. From first-apartment days — cinder blocks and beaded curtains made a palace — to cavernous family rooms, downsizing and second homes, retailers and manufacturers have granted your every wish.
But the folks right behind you don’t want your minimalism, your formality, your huge furniture. With low home mortgage interest rates and shopping options that don’t necessarily include traditional furniture stores, they are growing up — and out of the boomers’ shadow, thank you very much.
They shop at “lifestyle stores” such as Pottery Barn, Pier 1 Imports, Crate & Barrel and Restoration Hardware.
They’ve come of age with Martha Stewart and HGTV. They’ve stayed at boutique hotels. They’ve had working moms and diverse workplace environments.
“Their home-fashion sensitivity is really high,” said Phil Haney, executive vice president, marketing and sales, for Stanley Furniture.
The youthful push was very evident at the recent International Home Furnishings Market. Expect to see furniture from the fall market in stores by early spring.
It’s not that the furniture industry is overtly going after younger consumers. Really, what could be more reliable a strategy than targeting homebuyers who are starting families and entering their peak-earning years when furniture needs change rapidly? But this focus may come as a shock to a generation that sees itself as perpetually young to realize that it’s not all about them anymore.
About half of all furniture is purchased by people ages 25 to 44, said Haney. That figure includes Gen-Yers born after 1976.
“Have we spent half our time targeting the younger market?” he asked during a presentation titled “Not Your Mama’s Sofa.” Evidently not, until now.
But Stanley and other major manufacturers are addressing that question with collections geared toward younger consumers.
Urban transitional: The Moondance Collection from Stanley was presented in a showroom designed to look like a New York high-rise apartment building, complete with white-gloved doorman and nearby corner newsstands. The blond mahogany furniture is geared toward smaller spaces and styled for entertaining.
New romantic: Hooker Furniture poured on the sentiment with its 75-piece Intimate Home collection geared toward “first nesters.”
“The Gen-X woman in her late 20s and early 30s is buying a home, starting a family. There’s a lust for beautiful things, and they want to have them now,” said Nancy Lindemeyer. She is Victoria magazine’s founding editor and collaborator with Hooker on its collection.
Gen-Xers “come from nice homes and want to live in nice homes,” Lindemeyer said. “They want the furniture they buy to work with what they may be inheriting.”
Inheriting? Tough for a boomer to hear, but with the earliest baby boomers (born between 1946 and 1964) old enough to parent Gen-Xers (1965 to 1976), it’s not too farfetched.
Cottage aspirational: Higher-end Century Furniture has developed a line of “less expensive, smaller-scale” furniture geared toward women ages 25 to 34 with household incomes around $75,000. (In the high-end furniture category, “expensive” is relative. Think C-class Mercedes or 3-series BMW.)
The English-inspired “casually traditional” collection includes accents such as woven cane and marble, distressed wood, tufted upholstery and design elements such as fluted pilasters and reeded legs.
As Century vice president Ed Tashjian describes it, the furniture is designed for women who dream about leisurely afternoon tea but who, in reality, are scrambling to make it to carpool on time.
“She’s a young woman, aspirational, design conscious and upwardly ambitious. She knows what she wants. She doesn’t want to buy Ikea and throw it away.”
And when it’s time to graduate to Century’s pricier lines, the starter furniture can go in a second bedroom.
Economics, as well as demographics, contributed to the timing of the collection, Tashjian said.
Market forces of overcapacity and deflated wood costs have driven prices down, allowing the company to provide a high-quality line at entry-level budgets.
Retro hip: Todd Oldham insists that his furniture collection for La-Z-Boy isn’t young-oriented as much as it is “young-feeling” — designed to appeal to people who are perhaps nostalgic for their ’60s living rooms, as well as those just starting out. His collection was introduced in fall of 2003 but significantly expanded this market.
The furniture, informed by ’60s-inspired fabrics, natural woods and streamlined shapes, is “comfortable, functional and fits through a doorway,” he said. “It’s great to see 92-year-olds and 18-year-olds simultaneously buying the same piece of furniture.” Even with younger-focused collections, furniture companies are still hoping for crossover appeal among generations. For many consumers, the beginner or “entry price point” collections are all they may ever be able to afford. So the furniture needs to connect on multiple levels.
Plenty of collections were introduced to furnish big new homes, vacation homes, child-free homes and empty-nester condos.
After all, the Gen-Xers need to find a place to prop their feet when the echo boomers crowd them off the sofa.
