UPDATE: Finger leaves furniture business
Group acquires Houston retailer's Ashley stores
Clint Engel -- Furniture Today, March 17, 2009
HOUSTON — Longtime Houston retailer Finger Furniture is out of the furniture business.
The owners of seven Ashley Furniture HomeStores in Austin and San Antonio, Texas, and in the Seattle area, created Houston Furniture Partners and acquired the assets of Finger's six-unit HomeStore business Saturday, said Gary Seals, president and CEO of the investment group, which based in New Braunfels, Texas.
He wouldn't disclose the financial terms, but confirmed that all the Houston HomeStores employees were hired and "we're taking care of the customers." Before the deal, there had been a slowdown in deliveries to customers in the market but "we're unclogging the backlog," Seals said.
Finger Furniture CEO Rodney Finger couldn't be reached for comment. The Houston Chronicle reported he said in a statement that he "plans to turn his attention to other possibilities for his business."
Seals and his business partners - Chris Rhett and David Jarvie - operate two HomeStores in Austin and three in San Antonio under the Hill Country Furniture Partners umbrella. They also have two in the Seattle market under another operating company.
Seals and Rhett have been HomeStore licensees since opening their first showroom in north Austin in 2002. Jarvie joined later.
Seals said the company's business hasn't been immune to the economic slump, noting that sales were down about 10% last year. But he added that the operators made the necessary adjustments to remain profitable even in the downturn.
He projected that annual sales, including those from the Houston acquisition and another HomeStore that the partners will open in May in McAllen, Texas, should exceed $150 million this year. Sales for their stores in 2008 were about half that, he said.
"Logistically it makes sense for these guys to go on and buy the Houston operations," said Todd Wanek, CEO of Ashley Furniture. "They're profitable. They run their business quite well, so we thought it would be an excellent fit."
Wanek called Seals and his partners "hands-on managers and very aggressive."
He wouldn't comment on what led to the ownership change, only that he holds Rodney Finger in high regard. "They had a business (operating) for 82 years and we had an excellent relationship with them," said Wanek.
A longtime Top 100 company with estimated 2007 sales of $255 million, Finger is exiting the furniture business just two years after it had embarked on an ambitious expansion plan. In 2007, the company moved into a high-tech 400,000-square-foot distribution center and headquarters in Sugar Land, Texas, and opened the first of what was to be eight to 12 HomeStores.
Later that year it opened a 93,000-square-foot Finger Furniture store in the Willowbrook area of Northwest Houston and said it planned another large store by the middle of this year.
But those plans quickly soured. In August 2008, after Finger had already shut down some of its older stores, the company announced that it would liquidate the remaining Finger stores and convert them to HomeStores.
"The big box format Fingers has relied on for so long is not working well for our customers today," Finger said then, adding that it had become increasingly difficult to get consumers to drive long distances to shop.
The six Houston-area HomeStores are in Conroe, Katy, Pearland, Pasadena, Sugar Land and Humble, Texas. Seals said that Houston Furniture Partners is leasing about half the space in Finger's former Sugar Land distribution center and will service the stores from there for now. He said the company is still evaluating long-term plans.
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Houston's Finger sells stores
Mar 23, 2009
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