Furniture mfrs. find success at CES with entertainment pieces
By Tom Edmonds -- Furniture Today, January 25, 2004
Las Vegas — Las Vegas– Amid all the high-tech toys and gee-whiz gadgets, a small handful of furniture manufacturers enjoyed a productive Consumer Electronics Show.
Looking to establish or reinforce relationships with the electronics retailers and home-theater specialists that sell furniture with their big screens and surround-sound systems, furniture exhibitors included ready-to-assemble specialists such as Bush and O'Sullivan, as well as Orman Grubb and Encore, a division of APA Marketing.
The show's attendance was through the roof, setting a new record of 129,800, according to organizers, and as a result, the furniture there got more exposure.
"This was the best CES I've ever attended," said Rich Serlin, who has been exhibiting there for a dozen years. More than 400 people shopped the Encore showroom, said Serlin, vice president for sales and marketing.
A few furniture majors that also sell electronics, such as the Berkshire Hathaway units R.C. Willey out of Salt Lake City and Nebraska Furniture Mart from Omaha, were browsing around, but exhibitors said electronics stores represented the vast majority of the CES traffic.
With the rapid advancement of electronics and computing technology combined with recent improvements in retail sales, the show was full of electric energy, Serlin said. And the major focus continued to be the living room rather than the home office. In fact, two keynote speakers from the computer business, Bill Gates from Microsoft and Hewlett-Packard's Carly Fiorina, talked about their company's plans to make plays for living room or entertainment technologies.
"It was all really a great affirmation of what we've been hearing on the electronics front," he said. The total buzz was the rear-projection tabletop concept (in liquid crystal display or direct light projection). Those are the technologies that the television manufacturers can't make fast enough."
If CES is any indication, it looks like television and other forms of entertainment technology will continue to drive the entertainment category in furniture.
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