Raymour & Flanigan eyes metro NY area
Clint Engel -- Furniture Today, August 10, 2004
LIVERPOOL, N.Y. -- Raymour & Flanigan plans to enter the metro New York market by early next year, eyeing Huffman Koos locations, among others, in an aggressive growth push that could propel the Northeastern retailer to the $1 billion sales mark within four years.
The 53-store Top 100 company has been operating on the fringes of greater New York for five or six years and will expand on that with openings in Lawrenceville, N.J., and Brookfield, Conn., this year and then Middletown, N.Y., early next year, said Neil Goldberg, president and chief executive officer.
But that’s “just the start of our plan to become a leader in this lucrative region,” Goldberg said. Raymour is seeking other locations in northern and central New Jersey, in Rockland and Westchester counties and Long Island in New York, in Connecticut’s Fairfield County, and other sites in the metro area.
Raymour could “someday enter the five boroughs of New York,” he said.
A timeline is not definitive, but Goldberg said greater New York is the market Raymour will be concentrating its expansion efforts on over the next five to seven years. He anticipates having 20 to 25 stores open there over that period and hopes to open some by the first of next year.
While Raymour’s management has been talking about this move for more than a year, Goldberg indicated that the recent collapse of competitor Breuners Home Furnishings Corp. played into its decision to move ahead.
Lancaster, Pa.-based BHFC filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in July and plans to liquidate all stores, including its 17 Good’s furniture stores in Pennsylvania, Delaware and New Jersey and 20 Huffman Koos stores in New York, New Jersey and Connecticut.
“To some degree the timing was predicated on accomplishing the critical mass of stores we wanted to have in the Philadelphia market,” which Raymour entered in 1997 with the acquisition of the former Furniture Unlimited, Goldberg said. “But the BHFC situation brought real estate opportunities to the forefront.”
Raymour is evaluating the leases of all Good’s and Huffman Koos locations, he said, but added that it’s too early to say whether any would work in its business plan. It’s studying other real estate options, too.
Raymour & Flanigan, a fast-growing, privately held midpriced furniture store chain, ended last year with 52 stores and a 17.2% increase in furniture bedding and accessories sales, to $462.9 million. This year, Goldberg expects the chain to do about $550 million, then reach $1 billion in three to four years.
A lot of that later growth should come from greater New York, a market Goldberg estimated as three to four times larger than the Philadelphia home furnishings market, where the retailer is doing more than $200 million a year, he said.
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Raymour eyes Big Apple
Aug 29, 2004
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