RTG to enter two cities
San Antonio to open in early '04, Birmingham by midyear
By Clint Engel -- Furniture Today, August 4, 2003
Seffner, Fla. — Rooms To Go will open stores in Birmingham, Ala., and San Antonio next year, part of a plan to enter attractive new territories that easily can be served by existing distribution operations.
Separately, the 95-store Top 100 giant disclosed the name of its planned bedding specialty shops — Rooms To Go Beds — and said the first stores will open in Florida in the fourth quarter of this year.
In San Antonio, Rooms To Go will open it first store by early next year. The Birmingham store should open by midyear, said Jeff Seaman, president of the nation's largest home furnishings retailer with sales of $1.3 billion last year.
Both will be about 40,000 square feet, including attached 10,000-square-foot Rooms To Go Kids specialty stores. The San Antonio store will be served from metro Dallas, where the retailer is building an 850,000-square-foot distribution center in Grand Prairie. When it's ready in mid-2004, that facility will replace an existing 550,000-square-foot facility. Birmingham will be served by the company's 750,000-square-foot complex in Suwanee, Ga.
A big part of the reason for the expansion is that both San Antonio and Birmingham are "good markets that we can hit from our distribution," Seaman said.
"We're looking for a few more cities that we can reach economically," he added.
He declined to identify other possible locations but said Rooms To Go could open a net six to eight new stores next year, and four of them — including the San Antonio and Birmingham stores — would likely be in new markets. The company currently has stores throughout Florida as well as in Atlanta, Macon, and Savannah, Ga.; Charlotte, Durham, Greensboro, and Raleigh, N.C.; Greenville and Charleston, S.C.; and Dallas and Austin, Texas.
Seaman said he's not sure yet how many stores the Birmingham and San Antonio markets can support, but thinks it's probably more than one each.
With Room To Go Beds, the company expects to open the first two or three stores in the fourth quarter with the very first probably in the Palm Beach, Fla., area.
Rooms To Go announced the bedding specialty concept in 2001 but has provided few details, except to say that the stores will be in the 4,000- to 5,000-square-foot range and will be in existing Rooms To Go markets, but at a fair distance from existing stores.
He had said the stores would offer a new twist on the bedding specialty concept and if it works, could help Rooms To Go more than double its bedding business, which Seaman said exceeded $125 million last year. Suppliers to the specialty stores are expected to be Room To Go's regulars in bedding, currently Sealy, Simmons and Springwall — the latter providing a private-label line to the retailer.
All of the initial stores will be located in Florida markets, he said. A few more are expected to open in the first quarter of next year for a total of at least a half dozen that will be used to fully test the concept, he said.
Also, in Greensboro, N.C., where the company opened a full-line store last summer on Wendover Avenue, a 10,000-square-foot Room To Go Kids is being built across the street as part of a shopping center. That store will likely open during the fourth quarter of this year.
The company is opening new Rooms To Go stores in certain Florida markets this year, too, but Seaman said all are relocations, so the total store count this year will likely increase by only three or four, including the new bedding stores.
