Sofa Express opens S.C. distribution center
By Clint Engel -- Furniture Today, November 11, 2002
Laurens, S.C. — Sofa Express has opened a 65,000-square-foot distribution center here, part of a move to develop better in-stock capabilities for its Sofa Connection and Carolina Sofa stores in the Carolinas.
The 46-store retailer, now owned by Klaussner Furniture Inds. through an affiliate, will invest about $9.8 million in the facility over the next five years. It has hired 25 people, but expects to employ more than 250 at the center as it ramps up the operation.
Klaussner acquired Groveport, Ill.-based Sofa Express and Madison, Tenn.-based Sofa Connection in September, saying it plans to grow the sofa specialty chains, which eventually will adopt the Sofa Express name.
The distribution facility, near the intersection of Interstate 385 and U.S. 221 on the outskirts of Laurens, was a Grand Home Furnishings warehouse, vacated when Grand left the South Carolina market in 2000. It will serve six Sofa Connection and Carolina Sofa stores — one each in Greenville, S.C., and Asheville, N.C., and four in Charlotte, N.C. — plus a Spartanburg, S.C., store set to open early next year, said Ken Paul, Sofa Express president.
A press release from South Carolina's Commerce Department tied the distribution center employment projections to Sofa Express's "major retail expansion plans," but Paul said the move is related more to the retailer's efforts to back up existing stores with inventory.
Outside of the Spartanburg store, a former Heilig-Meyers, there are no definitive expansion plans for the area, he said.
Paul said the center will be able to support more than seven stores, but that it is too soon to estimate how many more and when.
Sofa Express operates stores in Ohio, Indiana and northern Kentucky under the Sofa Express name, and in Nashville, Tenn., the Carolinas, Florida and Las Vegas under the Sofa Connection and Carolina Sofa names. A Carolina Sofa store in Raleigh, N.C., is not related.
At the time of its acquisition, Klaussner said the combined chains would have more than 50 stores at year's end with annual sales of about $200 million.
