WMC breaks ground on 'first-class' facility
By Clint Engel -- Furniture Today, April 1, 2003
Las Vegas — Organizers of the World Market Center here broke ground late last month with the promise of "first-class everything"— as one future tenant put it — and praise from the retailers and manufacturers attending the ceremony.
"There's no 'if' about the Las Vegas market," said Don Mecke, Standard Furniture senior vice president of sales and marketing and World Market Center advisory board member.
"This market is a reality and it's going to be really exciting. Everything they've got is first class. Everyone they have on this project is among the best, if not the best, in their field," Mecke said. He said this gives tenants assurance the project with be completed and completed right.
The first Las Vegas furniture markets have been scheduled for Tuesday through Friday, Jan. 18–21 and July 19–22 of 2005. Each market would overlap the San Francisco market by one day, on Friday.
About 200 industry leaders and other guests attended a reception at the Venetian Luxury Hotel on the Las Vegas strip and the ground-breaking at the 57-acre site near downtown, where construction of the first-phase 1.3 million-square-foot building will begin this summer. To mark the occasion in Las Vegas-glitz fashion, WMC officials, tenants and other leaders took turns shoveling gold-painted gravel.
To date, the names of 213 of about 250 companies leasing permanent showroom space have been released, including majors Lane, Broyhill, Klaussner, Leggett & Platt's Fashion Bed Group, Simmons and Serta.
The permanent space for the first phase is sold out, but WMC also will lease 300,000 square feet of temporary space in huge tents in a Trade Pavilion on site. WMC General Manager Dave Palmer said demand for that space also is expected to outstrip capacity.
"There's a rush now. Everybody's wanting to jump on before they miss the train," said Bob O'Neill, managing director of Southern Textiles and a WMC board member. "I think it's great. It ensures a successful second and third building."
Work on WMC's second building, also 1.3 million square feet, is now expected to begin in summer 2004, to be followed a year later by a third building roughly the same size. Ultimately, according to the developers' plans, the WMC will cost $1 billion and will grow to about 7.5 million square feet, including a convention center for temporary exhibits.
The day before the ground-breaking, WMC advisory board members met architects and other project supporters and worked through details, including the first market dates. O'Neill said he has been impressed that WMC co-managing partners Shawn Samson and Jack Kashani and the other market organizers are listening carefully to their tenants.
"They approached the board of advisors. They asked us what's wrong with other markets and they're acting on it," he said.
For example, after the first board meeting last year, the WMC added docks to the plan for the first building after tenants told them about the pinch they feel in receiving product at other furniture markets.
O'Neill said he also likes the WMC's plan to bring in name-brand restaurants to serve food and other refreshments during markets on the premises, expecting this will be an improvement over other markets.
"They're not coming in with preconceived ideas," he said. "If we can get everybody out here and give them a great experience, they'll come back. That's the name of the game."
Keith Feuerhaken, another advisory board member and Flexsteel's vice president of sales for home furnishings, said, "It's very exciting to be a part of this on the ground floor."
And while San Francisco Mart President Michael Gennet recently criticized WMC's overlapping market dates as shortsighted and a disservice to buyers and particularly tenants who maintain showrooms in both locations, it was WMC's advisory board members who decided on the dates. Nearly all of them are tenants in San Francisco as well as Las Vegas.
Feuerhaken, whose company plans to show at both markets, said the board was sensitive to San Francisco, but that retailer feedback led to the first market dates.
"It really was determined by retailers' desire that it not be a weekend market," he said. "The weekends get expensive here. And retailers who gave us input didn't want to be away from their stores on the weekend."
Between the permanent and temporary tenants, the World Market Center expects to bring in more than 500 companies to Nevada through the first-phase building, said the WMC's Samson. He said tenants in the first phase will include eight companies that are among the industry's Top 25 furniture producers, seven of which have been identified.
One of the latest to be named is Leggett & Platt's Fashion Bed Group, which has signed a lease for 6,700 square feet on the ninth floor of the 10-level WMC for a product offering that initially will include adult and juvenile beds, futons, daybeds and bedding support products.
"We see the WMC as ideally situated to service our many customers in the western United States as well as many buyers and dealers elsewhere in the U.S. who will find the Las Vegas market appealing and important," said Ron Ainsworth, Fashion Bed Group president.
While L&P continues to support San Francisco, where it has a showroom about the same size and has recently renewed its lease, it is looking for big things from Las Vegas. Ainsworth, who is on the WMC advisory board, said the market will have immediate importance to Western retailers, "as well as the potential to become a significant factor in the marketing process of home furnishings on a national, and perhaps international level."
Sharron Bradley, executive director of the Western Home Furnishings Assn., also sees broad potential in the new market. Her organization, which has 1,022 retail members representing 2,700 stores in 10 Western states, plans to have a space in the WMC while it maintains its resource center in Mart 2 of the San Francisco Mart.
"I'm excited about this," she said. "It makes a huge difference for our industry to be seen in whole different light"
She said the project could change people's view of the industry from one that is stuck in the past to one that is innovative and is looking for better ways of doing things. That's what's needed to attract a new generation of talent, she said.
"It creates an awakening for people who haven't really seen our industry," she said. "It could spark interest. It's something new and different that could help us in all areas of the country."
